1. Zen Religion Definition
2. Zen Belief
3. Zen Religion
4. What Is Zen

Zen Buddhism is one of the most spread religions in the world as millions of people follow its principles and norms. The uniqueness of Zen is in rejecting the importance of doctrines and emphasizing the role of the spiritual growth of the person through the practice of meditation. Zen is the Japanese name for a Buddhist tradition practiced by millions of people across the world. Historically, Zen practice originated in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, and later came to in the West. Zen takes many forms, as each culture that embraced it did so with their own emphases and tastes. What is the Zen Philosophy? While a lot of people consider Buddhism to be a religion, most practitioners will tell you it is more ‘a way of life’ or a life philosophy. Buddha himself has always said he was not a god but just a human like all other people.

Zen is not a religion. This is a position I have continuously maintained. To say that Zen is not a religion is to say that the Buddha-Way [butsudo] is not a religion. However, religious concepts invariably are entwined with words such as Zen or the Buddha-Way. Most people have no problem with the statement that Zen is not a religion, but I think that there are many who have some trouble with the statement that the Buddha-Way is not a religion. Why is Zen not a religion? Why is the Buddha-Way not a religion? In clarifying these questions at the same time I would like to consider the question of why religious concepts are entwined with the terms Zen and Buddha-Way.

To introduce this discussion we must begin from the question of what is a religion. But it is said that the definitions of religion number as many as there are experts in that field. Here, for my purposes, I will use the definition given in the Kojien^[1] which seems to be representative. According to the Kojien: “Religion means activities and faith in a god or some kind of sacred being, which is differentiated from other worldly beings. And it also refers to those related structures.” In other words fundamental to establishing religion is to recognize a being that transcends the power of nature and of human beings. And from that one can say that religion involves faith in that transcendent being and activities based on that faith.

But then what is Zen? As I am always saying, Zen is experientially finding one’s true self and the effort to personalize that true self which was found. Put very simply, Zen is the pursuit and clarification of one’s true self. It is no exaggeration to say that that is Zen in its entirety. The object of Zen is, in the final analysis, the self and nothing else except the self. It should be clear then that religion, which begins from recognition of a transcendent being that transcends the self, and Zen are totally different entities.

Zen Religion Definition

Numerically, there are about 9.6 million Zen Buddhists in Japan today, and numerous Zen groups have developed in North America and Europe within the last century. It is a religion that is becoming more visible in the West. Zen Buddhism in China. Zen began in China (where it. An introduction to Zen, a form of Buddhism that emphasizes seeking one's own Buddha nature through meditation.

But what of the Buddha-Way? As I wrote in the previous issue, Buddha and the Buddha-Way are ways of naming the true self which has been discovered. The true self that has been found is really one with all that is. The self and the whole universe are originally one being. Cscdaruma fields saddlery. In order to differentiate this true self that has been found from the one before, the words Buddha and Buddha-Way are used. By all means I want each of you not to forget that Buddha is another name for you yourself.

• Historical development

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Zen, Chinese Chan, Korean Sŏn, also spelled Seon, Vietnamese Thien, important school of East Asian Buddhism that constitutes the mainstream monastic form of Mahayana Buddhism in China, Korea, and Vietnam and accounts for approximately 20 percent of the Buddhist temples in Japan. The word derives from the Sanskritdhyana, meaning “meditation.” Central to Zen teaching is the belief that awakening can be achieved by anyone but requires instruction in the proper forms of spiritual cultivation by a master. In modern times, Zen has been identified especially with the secular arts of medieval Japan (such as the tea ceremony, ink painting, and gardening) and with any spontaneous expression of artistic or spiritual vitality regardless of context. In popular usage, the modern non-Buddhist connotations of the word Zen have become so prominent that in many cases the term is used as a label for phenomena that lack any relationship to Zen or are even antithetical to its teachings and practices.

Origins and nature

Compiled by the Chinese Buddhist monk Daoyun in 1004, Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (Chingde chongdeng lu) offers an authoritative introduction to the origins and nature of Zen Buddhism. The work describes the Zen school as consisting of the authentic Buddhism practiced by monks and nuns who belong to a large religious family with five main branches, each branch of which demonstrates its legitimacy by performing Confucian-style ancestor rites for its spiritual ancestors or patriarchs. The genealogical tree of this spiritual lineage begins with the seven buddhas, consisting of six mythological Buddhas of previous eons as well as Siddhartha Gautama, or Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha of the current age. The spiritual awakening and wisdom realized by these buddhas then was transmitted from master to disciple across 28 generations of semi-historical or mythological Buddhist teachers in India, concluding with Bodhidharma, the monk who supposedly introduced true Buddhism to China in the 5th century. This true Buddhism held that its practitioners could achieve a sudden awakening to spiritual truth, which they could not accomplish by a mere reading of Buddhist scriptures. As Bodhidharma asserted in a verse attributed to him,

A special transmission outside the scriptures, not relying on words or letters; pointing directly to the human mind, seeing true nature is becoming a Buddha.

From the time of Bodhidharma to the present, each generation of the Zen lineage claimed to have attained the same spiritual awakening as its predecessors, thereby preserving the Buddha’s “lamp of wisdom.” This genealogical ethos confers religious authority on present-day Zen teachers as the legitimate heirs and living representatives of all previous Buddhas and patriarchs. It also provides the context of belief for various Zen rituals, such as funeral services performed by Zen priests and ancestral memorial rites for the families of laypeople who patronize the temples.

The Zen ethos that people in each new generation can and must attain spiritual awakening does not imply any rejection of the usual forms of Buddhist spiritual cultivation, such as the study of scriptures, the performance of good deeds, and the practice of rites and ceremonies, image worship, and ritualized forms of meditation. Zen teachers typically assert rather that all of these practices must be performed correctly as authentic expressions of awakening, as exemplified by previous generations of Zen teachers. For this reason, the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp attributes the development of the standard format and liturgy of the Chinese Buddhist monastic institution to early Zen patriarchs, even though there is no historical evidence to support this claim. Beginning at the time of the Song dynasty (960–1279), Chinese monks composed strict regulations to govern behaviour at all publicly recognized Buddhist monasteries. Known as “rules of purity” (Chinese: qinggui; Japanese: shingi), these rules were frequently seen as unique expressions of Chinese Zen. In fact, however, the monks largely codified traditional Buddhist priestly norms of behaviour, and, at least in China, the rules were applied to residents of all authorized monasteries, whether affiliated with the Zen school or not.

Zen monks and nuns typically study Buddhist scriptures, Chinese classics, poetics, and Zen literature. Special emphasis traditionally has been placed on the study of “public cases” (Chinese: gongan; Japanese: kōan), or accounts of episodes in which Zen patriarchs reportedly attained awakening or expressed their awakening in novel and iconoclastic ways, using enigmatic language or gestures. Included in the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp and in other hagiographic compendia, the public cases are likened to legal precedents that are designed to guide the followers of Zen.

Zen Belief

Historical development

China

Although Zen Buddhism in China is traditionally dated to the 5th century, it actually first came to prominence in the early 8th century, when Wuhou (625–705), who seized power from the ruling Tangdynasty (618–907) to become empress of the short-lived Zhou dynasty (690–705), patronized Zen teachers as her court priests. After Empress Wuhou died and the Tang dynasty was restored to power, rival sects of Zen appeared whose members claimed to be more legitimate and more orthodox than the Zen teachers who had been associated with the discredited empress. These sectarian rivalries continued until the Song dynasty, when a more inclusive form of Zen became associated with almost all of the official state-sponsored Buddhist monasteries. As the official form of Chinese Buddhism, the Song dynasty version of Zen subsequently spread to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

During the reign of the Song, Zen mythology, Zen literature, and Zen forms of Buddhist spiritual cultivation underwent important growth. Since that time, Zen teachings have skillfully combined the seemingly opposing elements of mythology and history, iconoclasm and pious worship, freedom and strict monastic discipline, and sudden awakening (Sanskrit: bodhi; Chinese: wu; Japanese: satori) and long master-disciple apprenticeships.

During the Song dynasty the study of public cases became very sophisticated, as Zen monks arranged them into various categories, wrote verse commentaries on them, and advocated new techniques for meditating on their key words. Commentaries such as The Blue Cliff Record (c. 1125; Chinese: Biyan lu; Japanese Heikigan roku) and The Gateless Barrier (1229; Chinese: Wumen guan; Japanese: Mumon kan) remain basic textbooks for Zen students to the present day. The public-case literature validates the sense of liberation and freedom felt by those experiencing spiritual awakening while, at the same time, placing the expression of those impulses under the supervision of well-disciplined senior monks. For this reason, Zen texts frequently assert that genuine awakening cannot be acquired through individual study alone but must be realized through the guidance of an authentic Zen teacher.

Zen Religion

Japan

During Japan’s medieval period (roughly the 12th through 15th centuries), Zen monks played a major role in introducing the arts and literature of Song-dynasty China to Japanese leaders. The Five Mountain (Japanese: Gozan) Zen temples, which were sponsored by the Japanese imperial family and military rulers, housed many monks who had visited China and had mastered the latest trends of Chinese learning. Monks from these temples were selected to lead trade missions to China, to administer governmental estates, and to teach neo-Confucianism, a form of Confucianism developed under the Song dynasty that combined cultivation of the self with concerns for social ethics and metaphysics. In this way, wealthy Zen monasteries, especially those located in the Japanese capital city of Kyōto, became centres for the importation and dissemination of Chinese techniques of printing, painting, calligraphy, poetics, ceramics, and garden design—the so-called Zen arts, or (in China) Song-dynasty arts.

Apart from the elite Five Mountain institutions, Japanese Zen monks and nuns founded many monasteries and temples in the rural countryside. Unlike their urban counterparts, monks and nuns in rural Zen monasteries devoted more energy to religious matters than to Chinese arts and learning. Their daily lives focused on worship ceremonies, ritual periods of “sitting Zen” (Japanese: zazen) meditation, the study of public cases, and the performance of religious services for lower-status merchants, warriors, and peasants. Rural Zen monks helped to popularize many Buddhist rituals now common in Japan, such as prayer rites for worldly benefits, conferment of precept lineages on lay people, funerals, ancestral memorials, and exorcisms. After the political upheavals of the 15th and 16th centuries, when much of the city of Kyōto was destroyed in a widespread civil war, monks from rural Zen lineages came to dominate all Zen institutions in Japan, including the urban ones that formerly enjoyed Five Mountain status.

After the Tokugawa rulers of the Edo period (1603–1867) restored peace, Zen monasteries and all other religious institutions in Japan cooperated in the government’s efforts to regulate society. In this new political environment, Zen monks and other religious leaders taught a form of conventional morality (Japanese: tsūzoku dōtoku) that owed more to Confucian than to Buddhist traditions; indeed, Buddhist teachings were used to justify the strict social hierarchy enforced by the government. Many Confucian teachers in turn adapted Zen Buddhist meditation techniques to “quiet sitting” (Japanese: seiza), a Confucian contemplative practice. As a result of these developments, the social and religious distinctions between Zen practice and Confucianism became blurred.

When the Ming dynasty (1368–1661) in China began to collapse, many Chinese Zen monks sought refuge in Japan. Their arrival caused Japanese Zen monks to question whether their Japanese teachers or the new Chinese arrivals had more faithfully maintained the traditions of the ancient buddhas and patriarchs. The resultant search for authentic Zen roots prompted the development of sectarianism, not just between Japanese and Chinese Zen leaders but also within the existing Japanese Zen community. Eventually sectarian rivalry led to the emergence of three separate Japanese Zen lineages: Ōbaku (Chinese: Huanbo), Rinzai (Chinese: Linji), and Sōtō (Chinese: Caodong). Ignoring their similarities, each lineage exaggerated its distinctive features. Thus, both Rinzai and Sōtō emphasized their adherence to certain Song-dynasty practices, in contrast to the Ōbaku monasteries, which favoured Ming traditions, especially in such areas as ritual language, musical instruments, clothing, and temple architecture. People affiliated with Sōtō, by far the largest of the Japanese Zen lineages, stressed the accomplishments of their patriarch Dōgen (1200–53), whose chief work, Shōbōgenzō (1231–53; “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye”), is widely regarded as one of the great classics of Japanese Buddhism.

What Is Zen