Zen Buddhism

History

Zen or Ch'an emerged in China shortly after the introduction of Buddhism in the early centuries of the common era. Clearly an adaptation of the imported religion to Chinese cultural values, it combines the basic Buddhist emphasis on monastic discipline and enlightenment with Daoist naturalism. The key figure is the half-legendary Bodhidharma (ca. 470–532), who is said to have brought the tradition from India to China. His teaching stressed that Zen is not something realized through the study of texts but by direct experience transmitted from teacher to student. That training may entail the harsh discipline of abuse and even blows, as well as long hours of zazen, but it can produce a personality as free as Bodhidharma himself, who was allegedly able to speak impertinently even to an emperor.

Ch'an was developed in China by celebrated teachers such as Hongren (601–674) and Shenziu (ca. 606–706), who emphasized sudden enlightenment and the use of enigmatic stories and questions, known in Japanese as koans, to bring it about. A significant event was the persecution of Buddhism by the Tang Dynasty in 845, after Confucian allegations that the foreign faith was parasitic. Many great monasteries were destroyed, and their monks returned to lay life, but Ch'an was largely spared because its centers were comparatively modest and out of the way and its monks supported themselves by the work of their own hands. The upshot was that monastic Buddhism in China, and the priesthood, became largely Ch'an, though popular religion favored Pure Land Buddism.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, Ch'an was introduced as Zen Buddhism in Japan. This was during Japan's Kamakura era (1185–1333), a time of much spiritual ferment. Eisai (1141–1215) went to China to bring back the Rinzai school of Zen, while Dogen (1200–1253) did the same for the Soto school. Rinzai, with a more dynamic view of Zen, emphasizes intense interaction between roshi and disciple, with much use of koans. Soto, conversely, presents a more quietist Zen, in which realization is attained moment by moment while doing zazen and daily work. Both schools attracted the support of the samurai or warrior class, dominant in the Kamakura period. Like the contemporary knights of Europe, they greatly valued self-discipline while aspiring to a higher culture. In Zen's monastic discipline and its spare but elegant art, many men preparing to face death on the field of battle found a spirituality that seemed right for them.

The subsequent Ashikaga or Muromachi period (1392–1568) was the golden age of Zen in Japan. Under lavish patronage by the shoguns of the Ashikaga house, Zen architecture, gardens, flower arrangement, the “tea ceremony,” and Noh plays, [Page 1401]with their decided Zen influence, all took form and flourished. So also, as one would expect in samurai culture, did martial arts such as kendo, the “way of the sword,” with their appropriation of Zen's indifference to life or death and its focus on the present moment, in which one must act spontaneously, without conscious deliberation. All these arts inculcated naturalness of medium and movement, harmony with nature, and apparent simplicity. At the same time, they actually came out of long and rigorous discipline, intended to prune away all that is not truly natural in self and expression.

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