Is Zen a kind of Buddhism?

The more accurate question would be something like, “Is the name Zen part of the various traditions, beliefs, cultural values, and religious doctrines collectively referred to as ‘Buddhism’ however varied and reinvented over the last two thousand years?” to which the answer would be “not willingly”. While modern academics in Religion and Anthropology continue to struggle to fit “Buddhism” into a Western system of categorization, the name “Zen” has long been its own category.

It is precisely the uniqueness of the name Zen that makes it so ripe for marketing. Zen is now used to sell everything from perfume to vacations to evangelical religions to interior design, it exemplifies luxury and affordability, it represents both psychological sophistication and spiritual simplicity. This is deeply ironic given that the people who made the name famous were themselves ferociously intolerant on a grand, almost farcical scale. Reconciling the progenitors of Zen with modern usage is impossible, which makes the question “Is Zen a kind of Buddhism” meaningless outside the context of history.

The name Zen originally referred to a more or less continuous tradition in China from roughly 550 CE to 1350 CE. An Indian monk named Bodhidharma arrived in China around 550 CE, roughly a hundred years after Kumārajīva had provided China with a hitherto unseen flood of translations of Indian texts. Bodhidharma fell like a bomb on the popular culture of that time, famously rejecting not only the concept of merit, but even the fundamental concept of knowledge guiding one to virtue. The Chinese Emperor of the time is said to have asked, “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths” and Bodhidharma said, “Emptiness, with nothing holy therein”.

While Chinese records about Zen are difficult to authenticate for most of its early history in China, by 800 CE record keeping became almost an obsession in Zen subculture. This corresponded with an explosion in Zen teachers who were themselves students of Mazu, a particularly influential Zen Master who taught “mind is Buddha”. The volume of records provides us with an intimate portrait of their conversations as well as their perspectives on their own history and record keeping. Fragments of conversations that took place in public debate, day-to-day life, as well as formal lectures, all illustrating the “transmission outside of teachings” that Zen is famous for. While there is debate among historians and academics (not to mention Zen Masters of the time) about the accuracy of these records, the consistency of these records in their astonishing volume cemented Zen as a unique tradition apart from both religious and philosophical forms of Buddhism. R.H. Blyth traces the arc from sutras to Cases to Verses on Cases to Commentary on Verses and Case in a four volume series called “Zen and Zen Classics”.

These records of conversations, commonly called “koans” or Cases, formed the basis of a new tradition which focused on them, rather than on sutras. This new tradition coincided with the end of Zen’s nominal association with the sutras. Zen had originally been known as “the Lanka School” because of Bodhidharma’s association with the Lankavatra Sutra, and Huineng, the Sixth (and last) Patriarch of Zen, wrote a commentary on the Diamond Sutra before announcing a Patriarchal line was no longer necessary. In the two generations between Huineng and Mazu there are few records, after Mazu there is often a book of records per Master.

While Cases do not establish a doctrine for Zen, it is these Cases and the instructions, lectures, and commentaries which later generations of Zen Masters produced about them, that have been the focal point of disputes about what Zen was, and is, and would be, disputes that crisscross the world and reverberate down the generations for the last thousand or so years. Zen Master Dongshan (807–869), a Soto Master, once remarked that, “if you would experience that which transcends even the Buddha, you must first be capable of a bit of conversation”. What this conversation concludes Dongshan does not say, although he is also famous for another Case in which he says he only agrees with half of what his teacher said, because to agree with more would be disrespectful.

It is from these records that we are able to identify both the disconnect between Zen and and it’s host, Chinese culture, which was full of Mahayana Buddhisms, Taoism, and Confucianism. Within Zen records we find accounts of disputes between “sutra teachers” and Zen Masters, including discussions of the Buddhist lynching of the Second Zen Patriarch. These disputes are not doctrinal, not arguments about mere interpretation of sutras and core values; it is clear that these disputes go back to Bodhidharma’s (alleged) first interview with the Chinese (Buddhist) Emperor. The consistency of Zen teachings across Zen’s 800 years in China were all entirely incompatible with the religions and philosophies of their times; Zen Masters said no practices, no doctrines, no inherent flaws or incompleteness and thus no need for redemption or purification of any kind.

As Zen grew more popular in China, interest in Zen grew in other parts of Asia and Zen’s marketing potential became increasingly obvious. Various people, often with a dubious connection to Zen culture, went to places like Japan and Korea, with varying degrees of fame. With a flood of people claiming to represent Zen there was still a fundamental problem: the mountain of historical records produced by Zen culture in China prior to 1350. In various places these texts were preserved and copied and/or banned and suppressed, often in alternating generations. In one notable example, a secret textual tradition began within a supposed Zen community in Japan, where their own sacred texts were kept secret to avoid comparison with the Zen textual record (Hoffman, Sound of One Hand).

The name “Zen” entered the English lexicon via a Japanese professor and monk named D.T. Suzuki. In Japan, the lineage of Bodhidharma was called “Zen”, the romanization that Japan more quickly adapted to than the Chinese “Chan”. Suzuki began translating Chinese records and publishing his scholarship on those records in the 1920’s gaining popularity especially in the 1950’s and 60’s. D.T. Suzuki’s primary focus was Zen through the lens of Zen’s own Chinese historical records. Suzuki inspired many to take up the translation of Chinese textual records and Zen instruction into English, mostly notably by R.H. Blyth and Thomas Cleary. This again reinvigorated the conflicts between Zen and doctrinal systems of Buddhist thought and would lead to Japan’s Critical [Dogen] Buddhism movement a generation later (Swanson, Pruning the Bodhi Tree), which questioned Zen’s relationship to traditional Buddhist beliefs, particularly inherent/original enlightenment, a Zen cornerstone.

A particular version of Dogen’s Japanese Buddhism began to spread throughout the West in the 1960’s and 70’s based the practice of “Zazen”, a form of religious meditation first found in Dogen’s FukanZazenGi, written in Japan around 1200 (Bielefeldt, Dogen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation). Dogen’s religion had long marketed itself as Zen in Japan, and their struggles with the textual history of Zen were mirrored in the religion’s inability to produce the sort of revolutionary figures and shocking dialogues that are the hallmark of Zen in it’s 800 years of Chinese records.

As Dogen’s religion, reinvented for a Western audience, gained popularity in the West, the writings of D.T. Suzuki, Blyth, and Alan Watts breathed life into the doctrinal incompatibilities between Zen and Buddhism but now for Westerners, with particular attention to how Zazen religious meditation was antithetical to the “no doctrine, no practice” message in Chinese Zen records. American scholars who studied Dogen in Japanese Universities began to cast doubt and ultimately dismissed the accuracy and authenticity of Chinese Zen records in an attempt to explain away doctrinal disputes. A generation later scholars in both American and Europe would go over the ground again, raising new questions about the sources, authenticity, and reliability of Dogen’s own writing. The nature of Zen, and the questions raised by Zen during its 800 years in China, will not, it seems, be quickly resolved.