The Chan Movement in Tang China

The Chan movement began in China around the sixth century. Chan is Chinese for the Sanskrit word dhyana, meaning "meditation," and is better known by the Japanese pronunciation zen. Chan acted as a kind of postgraduate movement in Chinese Buddhism, functioning to help all the accomplished scholarly monks from the various doctrinal schools free themselves from attachments to specific descriptions of the truth. Chan above all emphasized actual personal experience of the dharma, and of bodhisattva awareness and activity, in one's own life. In this tradition, such experience is usually entered into through sitting meditation practice, mindful attention to practice of everyday activities, and checking one's practice and understand with awakened teachers and their traditions.

While being greatly influenced by each one of the teachings and sutras of Mahayana Buddhism already mentioned, Chan developed its own voluminous body of literature, largely built on the dialogues and encounters of the great masters of the "golden age" of Chan in the Tang dynasty of China of the eighth and ninth centuries, with subsequent commentaries.

These Chan masters developed their styles of teaching based on everyday life and activities, and down-to-earth, often rough expression, more than on the lofty philosophy of Indian cosmology. Much of their humorous and paradoxical manner derives from native Chinese Taoism, although their teachings clearly are expressions of the traditional Mahayana texts, with which the masters were fully conversant. The extensive literature of teaching stories with commentaries, called koans ("public cases"; in Chinese, gongan), has been used in training in all branches of Zen; sometimes the koans have been used in more schematized meditation programs, and sometimes informally as study tools. The koans are filled with references to the sutras, and many of the stories also directly concern the bodhisattva figures, or refer to them, and constitute a significant piece of the archetypal lore.

Along with encouraging personal realization of awakening, the Chan movement in Tang China emphasized everyday activity and work practice, ideally aimed at developing self-sufficiency for the communities that gathered around various masters, often in the remote mountains. The more established doctrinal schools, based on individual sutras and dependent on impressive, large edifices, were all substantially weakened by a massive though short-lived persecution of all Buddhism by the Chinese emperor in 845. In the aftermath of the destruction of the many temples, images, and sutras, and enforced laicization of many monks and nuns, the Chan and Pure Land movements emerged as the dominant remnant of Mahayana Buddhism, and Chan/Zen eventually became prominent and culturally influential in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Teachers from the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese Zen traditions are all currently active in the West.