What Is Zen Buddhism?

Zen is the form of Buddhism most Westerners have heard of, often without knowing that it is Buddhism at all. The word turns up in advertising and self-help books, usually meaning little more than calm. Behind it stands a real religious tradition with monasteries, scriptures, ordained teachers and a clear account of what a human being is and what liberation means.

Christians meet Zen in two ways. Some are drawn to its sitting meditation and its plain, disciplined style. Others are told that Zen is a technique without beliefs, which any Christian can use. This article describes Zen as its own teachers and scholars describe it, separates its history from its legends, and then gives the Orthodox Christian answer to its teaching and to the question of borrowing its methods.

In brief

Zen (Chinese Chan, from the Sanskrit dhyana, "meditation") is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that took shape in China between the sixth and eighth centuries and reached Japan in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its founding stories, Bodhidharma's arrival from India and Huineng's poem contest, are largely later legend. In Japan two schools survive: Rinzai, which trains students with koans toward a breakthrough called kensho, "seeing one's nature," and Soto, founded by Dogen, which teaches "just sitting." Both hold that every being already possesses a pure buddha-nature hidden by deluded thought. D. T. Suzuki presented Zen to the West as an experience beyond religion, a modern reinterpretation. The Orthodox Church honors the seriousness of Zen practitioners but judges its teaching false: the human person is not an illusion to see through but a creature made in the image of a personal God, and salvation is not the discovery of one's own nature but union with the living God through Jesus Christ, by grace, in His Church. For that reason Christians should not take up Zen meditation as a spiritual discipline.

Thesis: Zen is a serious and disciplined path whose goal, awakening to an inner buddha-nature with no Creator and no Savior, is not the goal Christ gives, so its methods cannot simply be borrowed by those who pray to Him.

Where Zen came from

Bodhidharma: the story and the history

The tradition tells its origin in a few well-loved scenes. The official site of Japan's Rinzai and Obaku Zen schools describes Zen as "the school of Mahayana Buddhism that places particular emphasis on meditation as the central practice leading to enlightenment," brought to China by the Indian monk Bodhidharma, honored as the twenty-eighth patriarch in India and the first in China. It tells how he answered the emperor Wu with "Vast emptiness, nothing holy," then sat facing a wall for nine years, and it attributes to him the verse that sums up Zen's self-understanding:¹

A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not relying on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the human mind,
Seeing one's true nature and attaining Buddhahood.

Historians read the sources differently. Jeffrey Broughton, writing in Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Buddhism, notes that Bodhidharma is pictured as a bearded Indian who sat for nine years and accepted a disciple who cut off his own arm, and adds: "Modern scholars have come to doubt many of the elements in this legendary picture." The earliest sources, a sixth-century biography by the monk Tanlin and a seventh-century entry by the monk Daoxuan (596-667), present a meditation teacher in north China whose teaching was then reworked by the first Chan histories of the eighth century.² The four-line verse is a later summary of the school's claims, not a saying recorded in the early sources.

{{moderate: A meditation teacher named Bodhidharma probably taught in north China in the fifth or sixth century, but most of the familiar story is later legend.}}

Huineng and the Platform Sutra

The best-known Chan scripture is the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. In it the fifth patriarch, Hongren, asks his monks for verses showing their understanding. The learned senior monk Shenxiu writes on a wall at night: "The body is the bodhi tree; / The mind is like a bright mirror's stand," and urges constant polishing so that no dust collects. Huineng, an illiterate laborer from the south who hulled rice for the monastery, answers: "Bodhi is fundamentally without any tree; / The bright mirror is also not a stand," and continues, "Fundamentally there is not a single thing." Hongren secretly passes the robe and bowl of succession to him.³

The story makes the school's point: awakening is sudden, and there is no mind to polish. As history it fails. The translator John McRae, a leading historian of Chan, writes that "The historical Huineng (638-713), for example, is almost totally unknown," and that "Huineng and Shenxiu were not at Huangmei at the same time, so they could not have participated in a versification contest with each other." The earliest surviving version of the text was written around 780 and survived in the Dunhuang cave library.⁴ John Jorgensen explains why it was written: around 730 the monk Shenhui (684-758) campaigned for his teacher Huineng's "Southern" lineage against rivals he accused of teaching gradual enlightenment, and his line later became the backbone of the tradition.⁵

{{strong: The Platform Sutra's poem contest is a later literary creation; the historical Huineng is almost unknown, and the earliest surviving version of the text dates from about 780.}}

This is the standard view of modern scholars of Buddhism, many of them sympathetic to Zen. It matters because Zen claims an unbroken transmission of awakening from the Buddha through these patriarchs; the record shows a lineage assembled after the fact.

Zen in Japan: Rinzai and Soto

Rinzai and the koan

Rinzai descends from the Chinese master Linji (died 866) and was brought to Japan by Myoan Eisai (1141-1215). Its training centers on the koan, a short story or question from the old masters. Morten Schlütter calls the koan "the most distinctive feature of Chan Buddhism." The most famous is Zhaozhou's dog: a monk asked, "Does a dog have the buddha-nature or not?" and Zhaozhou answered "It doesn't" (wu, in Japanese mu), which seems to contradict the Zen teaching that every being has the buddha-nature.⁶ The student fixes his attention on the word until, the school teaches, a "ball of doubt" bursts into insight. Shigenori Nagatomo's entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the koan as "designed in such a way that intellectual reasoning alone cannot solve it," and says that Rinzai stresses "moments of breakthrough and insight" (kensho).⁷ The eighteenth-century reformer Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1768) organized the koans into a graded curriculum that students pass in private interviews with a master.⁶

Dogen and Soto

Soto traces itself to Dogen (1200-1253), a Japanese monk who went to China in 1223, received transmission in the Caodong line, returned in 1227 and later founded the monastery of Eiheiji.⁸ Dogen taught shikantaza, "just sitting." For him sitting is not a technique for getting enlightenment later; practice and realization are one. His short manual, the Fukanzazengi, opens: "The way is originally perfect and all-pervading," and tells the student to "learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will manifest."⁹

The two schools differ in method, but, as Nagatomo notes, both center on seated meditation (zazen) and on the same goal.⁷

What Zen teaches about the self and the goal

Zen rests on two Mahayana ideas the site has treated elsewhere: emptiness (see What Is Śūnyatā?) and the teaching that there is no lasting self (see If Buddhism Teaches "No Self," What Gets Reborn?). To these it adds a third: buddha-nature is already present in everyone.

The Rinzai schools put it plainly: "The Buddha Mind is none other than our own pure, original mind that is always present, and merely hidden by deluded thought." Their goal is the self-realization of what Linji called the "true man without rank."¹ The Platform Sutra calls the goal "seeing the nature and achieving buddhahood," and tells its hearers, "Do not seek outside of yourselves."³ Liberation, in other words, is not given by anyone. It is uncovered.

Zen temples venerate buddhas and bodhisattvas and perform rites for the dead, but Zen teaches no Creator, no personal God who speaks and loves, and no Savior. There it parts from the Christian faith most sharply.

How Zen came to the West

The Japanese lay scholar D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) did more than anyone to bring Zen to Europe and America. Robert Sharf, in the Encyclopedia of Religion, calls him "the single most important figure in the popularization of Zen in the twentieth century." Suzuki taught that Zen is a pure experience at the root of all religions. In An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934) he wrote: "Zen has no God to worship, no ceremonial rites to observe, no future abode to which the dead are destined, and, last of all, Zen has no soul whose welfare is to be looked after by somebody else."¹⁰

Sharf calls this "a rather peculiar way to characterize a tradition that placed tremendous emphasis on monastic ritual and liturgy, on funerary rites for the welfare of the deceased," and notes that Suzuki's universal-experience thesis is "considered by many modern scholars and Zen masters alike as an oversimplification." Sharf also records that in the 1930s and 1940s Suzuki tied Zen to Japanese spiritual superiority and the warrior ethos, and that "The Zen establishment was, on the whole, an enthusiastic supporter of Japanese colonial expansion."¹⁰ Suzuki later said he had opposed the war, and private letters support him. The point is not to blame a tradition but to show that the "religion-free" Zen many Westerners received was itself a modern interpretation.

{{strong: D. T. Suzuki's picture of Zen as a pure experience free of religion is a modern reinterpretation that many historians of Zen regard as an oversimplification.}}

The Orthodox answer

What Zen sees truly

Christians should say honestly what is admirable here. Zen takes the ego's restless self-importance seriously and asks for discipline, attention and simplicity. The Orthodox ascetic tradition knows the same struggle against wandering thoughts and the false self built by pride.

But the Church judges a path by where it leads, and here the Orthodox verdict is clear: the teaching of Zen about God, the self and salvation is false.

No-self and the person made in God's image

Zen teaches that the self we cling to is a construction to be seen through, so that "Fundamentally there is not a single thing." The Church teaches that "God created man in His own image" (Genesis 1:27). The human person is not a cluster of passing events but someone called by name, loved by God and destined for eternal life in body and soul (see What Is a Human Being?). Christianity also asks for the death of the self, but in a different sense. St Paul writes: "it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20).¹¹ What dies is the self-will of the fallen ego; the person is not dissolved but healed and filled with Christ, who promised that "whoever loses his life for My sake will find it" (Matthew 16:25).

Emptiness and the God who is

At the burning bush God told Moses, in the Septuagint the Church reads, "I am THE BEING" (Exodus 3:14, Brenton).¹² Reality does not rest on emptiness but on a living, personal God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who freely created all things from nothing and holds them in being. God is beyond every concept, but He is Someone, not a void, and He has made Himself known in Jesus Christ. "This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent" (John 17:3).

Seeing one's nature, or being saved by Another

Zen's goal is to see one's own original nature. The Christian goal is union with God, called theosis (see What Is Theosis?). These are not two descriptions of one experience. In Zen the buddha-nature is already one's own. In Orthodoxy we are creatures who become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) only by grace, through the Son of God who became man. St Athanasius put it in one line: "For He was made man that we might be made God."¹³ We share God's life and glory, His energies, never His essence, and never by discovering that we were divine all along. That union is given in Baptism and the Eucharist and lived in repentance, prayer and the commandments, within the Church. "Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).

Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose), describing an American Zen monastery in the 1970s, judged Zen to be among the most sober of the Eastern movements he studied, and concluded: "Its tragedy is precisely that it has no Christ in it, and thus no salvation."¹⁴ That is the Orthodox answer in a sentence.

Should Christians borrow Zen meditation?

Zen centers and even some Christian retreat programs teach zazen as a neutral way to quiet the mind. The Orthodox answer is that Christians should not take up zazen or koan practice as a spiritual discipline.

The reason is not that sitting still or breathing slowly is sinful. The Orthodox Church has its own tradition of stillness, hesychasm, with physical aids to prayer. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware acknowledged "Striking parallels" between hesychast methods and those of Hindu yoga and Sufism, and answered with an image: "What matters is the picture, not the frame." In the Jesus Prayer, he wrote, "The essential point ... is not the act of repetition in itself, not how we sit or breathe, but to whom we speak"; the prayer is "an invocation specifically addressed to another person," Jesus Christ.¹⁵ Zen's sitting is a frame built around a different picture. Its whole purpose is to see through the self and find no Other there. To practice it as a spiritual exercise is to train the mind toward that goal.

The Church also knows the dangers of technique cut loose from guidance. Ware quotes St Ignatius Brianchaninov advising Orthodox Christians "not to try to establish this technique within them, if it does not reveal itself of its own accord," because many had harmed themselves trying.¹⁵ The Fathers warn against prelest, spiritual delusion. Professor Alexei Osipov of the Moscow Theological Academy describes it simply: "Prelest is that state in which a person sees himself as a saint."¹⁶ A path whose goal is to recognize oneself as already a buddha, confirmed by a master's certificate, has no defense against that danger, because it has no Lord to whom the soul must repent.

The Roman Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reached a similar judgment in 1989, naming Zen among "eastern methods" and warning that pleasant states produced by physical exercises are not grace: "To take such feelings for the authentic consolations of the Holy Spirit would be a totally erroneous way of conceiving the spiritual life."¹⁷

The Orthodox path is near at hand: the morning and evening prayers, the Psalms, the Jesus Prayer said slowly and attentively, fasting, confession and Communion, under the guidance of a priest or spiritual father (see the site's guide to prayer, fasting and the Jesus Prayer). The same reasoning applies to yoga, discussed in Should Christians Practice Yoga?

Objections and replies

"Zen is not a religion. It is a method anyone can use."

That is Suzuki's claim, and many scholars of Zen reject it. Zen has monasteries, ordination, scriptures, rites for the dead and a definite teaching about the self. A method that aims at "seeing one's true nature and attaining Buddhahood" carries that aim with it.

"Hesychasm is just Christian Zen."

The outward resemblance is real, and Ware admits it. The difference is the whole content. The hesychast calls on the name of Jesus Christ, confesses his sins and seeks the grace of the Holy Spirit within the sacramental life of the Church. The Zen student seeks to see that there is no self and no Other. The same posture can frame opposite acts.

"Enlightenment is beyond every religion."

The Irish Catholic priest William Johnston, author of Christian Zen, wrote (as quoted by Seraphim Rose): "I believe that there is a basic enlightenment which is neither Christian nor Buddhist nor anything else. It is just human."¹⁴ But a state of calm or unity that is "just human" is not the knowledge of God. Christ did not say that He shows the way; He said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). An experience that bypasses Him, however peaceful, is not the salvation He brings.

What we can say confidently

• The familiar stories of Bodhidharma and of Huineng's poem contest are largely later legend; the earliest surviving Platform Sutra dates from about 780.
• Rinzai trains with koans toward kensho; Soto, following Dogen (1200-1253), teaches "just sitting."
• Zen teaches that a pure buddha-nature is present in everyone and is uncovered, not received; it teaches no Creator and no Savior.
• D. T. Suzuki's presentation of Zen as a religion-free experience is a modern reinterpretation.
• The Orthodox Church teaches that man is a person created in God's image and saved by union with God through Christ, by grace; Zen's account of the self and of liberation is therefore false, and Christians should not adopt its meditation as a spiritual discipline.

What remains disputed

• How much, if anything, can be known about the historical Bodhidharma and his teaching.
• When and how the koan collections took shape, and how far they record real Tang-dynasty encounters.
• How the Platform Sutra grew from the short Dunhuang version into the much longer later editions, and what, if anything, in it goes back to Huineng; sources also differ on small dates, such as Hakuin's death (1768 or 1769).
• How far D. T. Suzuki personally supported Japanese militarism, given his later statements and private letters.

Conclusion

Zen asks a real question: who is the one who sits, thinks and suffers? Its answer is that there is finally no one, only an original nature to be uncovered. The Gospel answers differently. There is Someone at the root of all things, and there is someone sitting before Him: a person He made, whom He loves and whom He will not let dissolve.

The Orthodox Church does not ask Zen practitioners to abandon discipline, silence or attention. She asks them to turn these toward the One who said, "I have called you friends" (John 15:15). The stillness the Fathers sought is not emptiness but the presence of Christ, who trampled down death by death and gives His life to those who call on His name.

Notes

1. Joint Council for Japanese Rinzai and Obaku Zen, "What is Zen? Basic Stance," https://zen.rinnou.net/whats_zen/index.html.
2. Jeffrey Broughton, "Bodhidharma," in Encyclopedia of Buddhism, ed. Robert E. Buswell Jr. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004), via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/bodhidharma.
3. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, trans. John R. McRae, BDK English Tripitaka (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2000), section on the verses of Shenxiu and Huineng and the sermons on seated meditation and "seeing the nature," free PDF from BDK America, https://bdkamerica.org/product/the-platform-sutra-of-the-sixth-patriarch/.
4. McRae, "Translator's Introduction," in The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, xiv-xv (see note 3).
5. John Jorgensen, "Chan School," in Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004), via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/chan-school.
6. Morten Schlütter, "Kōan," in Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004), via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/koan.
7. Shigenori Nagatomo, "Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, section 2, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/.
8. Carl Bielefeldt, "Dōgen," in Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004), via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/dogen.
9. Eihei Dogen, Fukanzazengi, English translation as published by the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, "How to Meditate," https://szba.org/how-to-meditate.
10. Robert H. Sharf, "Suzuki, D. T.," in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005), via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/suzuki-d-t; the Suzuki quotation is from An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934), p. 14, as quoted by Sharf.
11. Genesis 1:27; Galatians 2:20; Matthew 16:25; John 17:3; 2 Peter 1:4; Acts 4:12; John 14:6; John 15:15 (NKJV), https://www.biblegateway.com/.
12. Exodus 3:14, trans. L. C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha (1851), https://ebible.org/eng-Brenton/EXO03.htm.
13. St Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 54, trans. Archibald Robertson, NPNF2 4, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2802.htm.
14. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, 5th ed. (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2004), ch. 5, section 4, "Zen Training in Northern California," and ch. 4, section 2, "'Christian Zen'" (quoting William Johnston, Christian Zen, p. 97), digitized at https://archive.org/details/orthodoxy-and-the-religion-of-the-future-1997-seraphim-rose.
15. Kallistos Ware, The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: SLG Press), section on breathing exercises (including the quotation from St Ignatius Brianchaninov), as reproduced at https://www.orthodoxprayer.org/Articles_files/Ware-7%20Breathing%20Exercises.html.
16. Alexei Osipov, "What Is Prelest?," OrthoChristian.com, https://orthochristian.com/114593.html.
17. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation (15 October 1989), section 28 and note 1, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19891015_meditazione-cristiana_en.html.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. Brenton, Lancelot C. L., trans. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: English. London: Samuel Bagster, 1851.
• Athanasius. On the Incarnation of the Word. Trans. Archibald Robertson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1892.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Rose, Seraphim. Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. 5th ed. Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2004.
• Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press.
• Osipov, Alexei. "What Is Prelest?" OrthoChristian.com.

Other scholarship and reference

• Bielefeldt, Carl. "Dōgen." In Encyclopedia of Buddhism, ed. Robert E. Buswell Jr. New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004.
• Broughton, Jeffrey. "Bodhidharma." In Encyclopedia of Buddhism, 2004.
• Jorgensen, John. "Chan School." In Encyclopedia of Buddhism, 2004.
• McRae, John R., trans. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2000.
• Nagatomo, Shigenori. "Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Schlütter, Morten. "Kōan." In Encyclopedia of Buddhism, 2004.
• Sharf, Robert H. "Suzuki, D. T." In Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005.
• Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation. Vatican, 1989.

Sources from the Zen tradition

• Dogen. Fukanzazengi. English translation published by the Soto Zen Buddhist Association.
• Joint Council for Japanese Rinzai and Obaku Zen. "What is Zen? Basic Stance." zen.rinnou.net.