What is Zen Buddhism?

Zen Buddhism is a mixture of Indian Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. It began in China, spread to Korea and Japan, and became very popular in the West from the mid 20th century.

The essence of Zen is attempting to understand the meaning of life directly, without being misled by logical thought or language.

Zen techniques are compatible with other faiths and are often used, for example, by Christians seeking a mystical understanding of their faith. BBC 2002

Zen is the Japanese name for a Buddhist tradition practiced by millions of people across the world. When Buddhism came to China from India some 2,000 years ago, it encountered Daoism and Confucianism, absorbing some elements of both while rejecting others. Chan is the tradition that emerged. In this context, Chan refers to the quality of mind cultivated through sitting meditation, known as zazen in Japanese, which many Zen Buddhists consider to be the tradition’s most important practice. 

Zen is as diverse as its practitioners, but common features include an emphasis on simplicity and the teachings of nonduality and nonconceptual understanding. Nonduality is sometimes described as “not one not two,” meaning that things are neither entirely unified nor are they entirely distinct from one another. Zen recognizes, for example, that the body and mind are interconnected: they are neither the same nor completely separate. Nonconceptual understanding refers to insight into “things as they are” that cannot be expressed in words.

Like all schools of Buddhism, Zen begins with an understanding that human beings suffer, and it offers a solution to this suffering through recognizing the interconnectedness of all beings and learning to live in a way that aligns with this truth.

What is Zen Buddhism? Tricycle magazine

What will all this effort do for you? Everything and nothing. You will become a Zen student, devoted to your ongoing practice, to kindness and peacefulness, and to the ongoing endless effort to understand the meaning of time, the meaning of your existence, the reason why you were born and will die. You will still have plenty of challenges in your life, you will still feel emotion, possibly more now than ever, but the emotion will be sweet, even if it is grief or sadness. Many things, good and bad, happen in a lifetime, but you won’t mind. You will see your life and your death as a gift, a possibility. This is the essential point of Zen Buddhism.

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Through the centuries, India, the first Buddhist country, gradually spawned hundreds of sects and sub-sects, and thousands of scriptures, and tens of thousands of commentaries on those scriptures. When Buddhism spread over Central Asian trade routes to China, all this material came at once. The Chinese had long cherished their own twin traditions of Confucianism and Taoism and were resistant to ideologies introduced by barbarians from beyond the borders of the “Middle Kingdom.”

Gradually, Indian and Central Asian Buddhism began to be reshaped by its encounter with Chinese culture. This reshaping eventually led to the creation of Zen, an entirely new school of Buddhism, which eventually became by far the most successful school of Buddhism in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam.

Zen Buddhism has had a long and varied history in several different Far Eastern cultures. Each culture has produced a tradition that is recognizable as Zen, but differs slightly from all the others. Vietnamese Zen is the one most influenced by the Theravada tradition. In China, Zen eventually became the only Buddhist school, inclusive of all the others, so contemporary Ch’an includes many faith-based Mahayana practices that existed initially in other Buddhist schools, ... Especially stylized, dramatic, and austere, Korean Zen includes prostration practice (repeated, energetic full-to-the-floor bows of veneration) and intensive chanting practice, and has a hermit tradition, something virtually unknown in Japanese Zen.

A Zen wave broke on North American shores in the middle of the twentieth century. It probably didn’t begin as a Zen wave at all, but rather as a reflex to the unprecedented violence the first part of the century had seen. In the early 1950’s, D.T. Suzuki, the great Japanese Zen scholar and practitioner, arrived at Columbia University in New York to teach about Zen.

What Is Zen Buddhism and How Do You Practice It? Norman Fischer, Lion's Roar