What Is Zen Buddhism? Sitting, Koans and the Point of Not Explaining

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. Zen later spread to Korea as Seon and to Vietnam as Thien, and in the twentieth century to the West.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.