Zen · Skt: dhyāna; Chinese: chán

Zen is the Japanese name for the Chinese Chan school. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls Chan “an indigenous form of Chinese Buddhism that developed beginning in the sixth century CE and subsequently spread to the rest of East Asia (Japanese: Zen; Korean: Sôn; Vietnamese; Thiền)”, the family traced on our page on Chan, Seon and Thien. The name is a transliteration twice over: the Chinese graph chan “transliterates the Sanskrit dhyāna or ‘meditation’”, and the Japanese word is “derived from a transliteration of the Chinese word Chán”. Meditation is in the name.

What Zen aims at is put broadly: “Zen, like the other forms of Buddhism, aims at the perfection or realization of personhood.” The Rinzai school sums up its own self-cultivation in four mottoes, the last of them “seeing into [one’s] nature to become a buddha”. The core practice is the “sitting meditation called ‘za-zen’”, which our guide to zazen describes.

Method differs by school, and the difference is worth naming rather than blurring. In Rinzai “the kōan method is devised to assist the practitioner to become a ‘Zen person’ who fully embodies both wisdom and compassion”, the koan itself being “formulated like a riddle or puzzle”. The Sōtō school, “of which Dōgen (1200–1253) is the founder, does not rely on an elaborate kōan system to learn to become a Zen person, but instead follows a method called ‘just sitting’ (shikan taza)”. Both sit; they differ in what they do while sitting.

The phrase “like the other forms of Buddhism” is worth holding on to. Zen names a school within Buddhism, not a separate religion and not a style of interior design.