What Is Zen Buddhism? Sitting, Koans and the Point of Not Explaining
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Zen is the branch of Buddhism that is suspicious of branches, doctrines and explanations, including its own. Its central practice is sitting still and paying attention, and its teachers are famous for responding to earnest questions about enlightenment with a shout, a slap or a remark about the weather. That reputation for paradox is real, but it sits on top of a definite history, a disciplined training and a claim about the mind that can be stated plainly.
From India to China to Japan
The word Zen is Japanese, from the Chinese Chan, from the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning meditation. Tradition traces the school to an Indian monk, Bodhidharma, who is said to have arrived in China around 500 CE and spent nine years facing a wall in meditation. The historical record is thinner than the legend, but by the eighth century Chan was a distinct movement in China, defined by a slogan attributed to Bodhidharma: a special transmission outside the scriptures, not relying on words, pointing directly to the mind, seeing one's nature and becoming Buddha.
The teaching passed from master to student in lineages rather than through texts, and it absorbed a good deal of Chinese Daoism along the way, including its fondness for nature, spontaneity and the sudden insight. Chan reached Japan in stages; the two schools that survive there were both founded by monks returning from China in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Eisai bringing Rinzai and Dogen founding Soto. Chan had already spread from China to Korea as Seon and to Vietnam as Thien, and Zen reached the West in the twentieth century.
Zazen: the practice at the centre
Whatever else a Zen centre does, it sits. Zazen means seated meditation: a stable cross-legged posture on a cushion, back straight, eyes lowered and half open, hands resting in the lap, attention on the breath or simply on whatever arises, for periods of thirty or forty minutes marked by a bell. Thoughts are not suppressed and not followed; they are noticed and allowed to pass. Walking meditation between sittings keeps the legs alive.
In the Soto school the sitting itself is the point. Dogen taught that zazen is not a technique for reaching enlightenment but the expression of it, and that practice and realisation are one thing, so a practitioner is told to just sit, without trying to achieve anything. In the Rinzai school sitting is combined with the koan, and the two schools have argued for centuries about which approach is the true one, which is itself a very Zen thing to argue about.
Koans: questions with no answer to look up
A koan is a short story or question from the record of the old masters, given by a teacher to a student to work on. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What was your original face before your parents were born? A monk asked Zhaozhou whether a dog has Buddha nature; Zhaozhou said Mu, which means no, or nothing. The student is not meant to solve the koan as a puzzle but to sit with it until the habit of grasping at an intellectual answer exhausts itself, and to present their understanding to the teacher in private interviews.
The koan is a tool for producing the experience the tradition calls kensho or satori: a direct seeing into the nature of mind that is not a belief and cannot be put into words, which is why the masters do not put it into words. The famous odd behaviour, the shout, the raised finger, the answer about the cypress tree in the garden, is the record of teachers refusing to hand over a concept when the student wanted an experience.
Monastery life and the arts
Zen training is not only sitting. A monastery day runs from before dawn to evening on a schedule of zazen, chanting, work and meals, and the work, sweeping, cooking, gardening, is treated as practice with the same seriousness as the cushion. A saying attributed to the Chinese master Baizhang holds that a day without work is a day without eating. The intensive retreats called sesshin run for a week with ten or more hours of sitting a day.
The same attention to the ordinary act shaped Japanese culture well beyond the monastery. The tea ceremony, raked-gravel gardens, ink painting, calligraphy, the martial arts and haiku all carry Zen's marks: simplicity, the single unrepeatable moment, and the refusal to separate doing from being. The rock garden at Ryoanji in Kyoto, fifteen stones in raked gravel that cannot all be seen from any one point, is the visual equivalent of a koan.
Zen in the West
The West met Zen mainly through the writings of D. T. Suzuki from the 1920s onward and through the Beat writers of the 1950s, who took from it an enthusiasm for spontaneity that Zen teachers found rather thin. Serious practice arrived with Japanese teachers who founded centres in California and elsewhere in the 1960s, and a Western Zen with its own lineages now exists. The current mindfulness movement borrows Zen's attention to the breath while dropping the Buddhism, which Zen practitioners regard with mixed feelings. What a practitioner actually does:
- •Sits in zazen daily, and for long stretches on retreat
- •Works on a koan, in Rinzai, or simply sits, in Soto
- •Meets the teacher privately to test their understanding
- •Treats ordinary work and meals as part of the practice
- •Chants and keeps the Buddhist precepts, which Zen never abandoned
The everyday word and the harder history
In everyday English, zen has come to mean calm, minimal or relaxed, and it is used to sell everything from candles to spa breaks. Practitioners tend to find this usage odd, because traditional Zen training is often physically demanding and uncomfortable: long hours of sitting with aching knees, early rising, strict schedules, and in some Rinzai settings a monitor who strikes the shoulders with a flat wooden stick to rouse a drowsy sitter, at the sitter's own request. The aim is not relaxation but alertness, and teachers often warn students against seeking a pleasant mental state for its own sake.
Zen's history also includes episodes its modern admirers rarely hear about. Its long association with the samurai class made it attractive to Japanese nationalists, and in the first half of the twentieth century several prominent Zen teachers and institutions supported the militarism of the Japanese state and its wars. This record was documented in detail by scholars in the 1990s, and several Zen organisations later issued formal apologies. The episode is now part of discussions within Zen itself about how a practice that aims to see beyond concepts can still be enlisted by the politics of its time.
The poem contest that divided a school
The best-known story in early Chan concerns a contest for succession. The Platform Sutra, presented as the teaching of Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, tells how the Fifth Patriarch, Hongren, asked his monks to write a verse showing their understanding. His senior disciple, Shenxiu, wrote that the body is the tree of awakening and the mind a bright mirror on a stand, to be wiped diligently so no dust collects. Huineng, an unlettered layman working in the monastery kitchens, had a reply written on the wall: awakening has no tree, the mirror has no stand, and since from the beginning there is not a single thing, where could dust collect?
In the story Hongren secretly passed his robe and bowl to Huineng, who fled south, and the two verses came to stand for two approaches: gradual cultivation, polishing the mind step by step, and sudden awakening to a nature that was never stained. Historians now read the tale as partisan. It was promoted in the eighth century by Huineng's follower Shenhui, who campaigned against the Northern school of Shenxiu's heirs, and the text grew over many later editions. The sudden school won, and every surviving line of Zen traces itself through Huineng, but the contest may say more about eighth-century rivalries than about two monks.
A garden you can never see all at once
The dry landscape garden at Ryoan-ji, a Zen temple in Kyoto, consists of raked white gravel and fifteen rocks set in groups, surrounded by a low earthen wall. It is usually dated to the late fifteenth century, though its exact origins and designer are uncertain. Visitors sit on the veranda and simply look.
It is often said that from any single viewpoint on the veranda one of the fifteen rocks is always hidden behind another, so the whole arrangement can never be seen at once. People have interpreted the garden as islands in the sea, a tigress crossing a river with her cubs, or as nothing in particular. Its refusal to explain itself fits the Zen preference for direct experience over fixed answers.
The takeaway
Zen is the Buddhist school built around meditation and direct insight rather than scripture, transmitted from teacher to student since medieval China and Japan. Its practice is zazen, its distinctive tool is the koan, and its odd manner of teaching is a refusal to substitute an explanation for an experience it holds cannot be explained.