Zen Buddhism

Meditation had been practised in Japan since the Nara period, but Zen as an independent school came with Eisai (also read Yōsai, 1141–1215), a Tendai monk who made two journeys to China and returned in 1191 with a Rinzai lineage. He founded Shōfuku-ji in Hakata, regarded as the first Zen temple in Japan, and Kennin-ji in Kyoto, and wrote a treatise on the health benefits of tea. Opposition from Mount Hiei made him present Zen as compatible with Tendai and esoteric Buddhism.

Dōgen (1200–1253), after four years in China, rejected such compromises. He taught that sitting meditation is not a means to enlightenment but its very expression, withdrew to the mountains of Echizen and founded Eihei-ji in 1244. His writings, collected as the Shōbōgenzō, are among the most demanding works of Japanese philosophy. Chinese masters invited by the Hōjō regents, such as Lanxi Daolong at Kenchō-ji and Wuxue Zuyuan at Engaku-ji in Kamakura, completed the transplant of Song Chan.

Japanese Zen today consists of three schools that share monastic rules and meditation but differ in method and history. Each is divided into independent branches (ha) headed by a main temple.

At the heart of Zen stands zazen, seated meditation, usually in full or half lotus posture on a round cushion (zafu), eyes half open, attention on posture and breath. In Sōtō temples practitioners face the wall; in Rinzai temples they face the centre of the hall. Periods of sitting alternate with slow walking meditation (kinhin).

Rinzai practice adds the kōan, a paradoxical case from the lives of the Chinese masters – the best known is Zhaozhou's answer 'Mu' ('no') to the question whether a dog has Buddha-nature. The student presents an answer to the teacher in private interviews (sanzen), and the kōan cannot be solved by reasoning. In both schools manual work (samu), eating in ritual silence and the precise routine of the monastery are themselves regarded as practice.

Under the Ashikaga shogunate the leading Rinzai monasteries were organised into the Five Mountains (gozan) system, modelled on Song China, with separate rankings for Kyoto and Kamakura and Nanzen-ji placed above them all. Gozan monks were the shogunate's diplomats and secretaries, wrote Chinese poetry and printed books, and made their monasteries the channel for Chinese culture.

Outside this official system, the rinka temples – above all Daitoku-ji and Myōshin-ji – kept a stricter practice and gained patrons among merchants and later the warlords. The eccentric monk Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481) of Daitoku-ji became a legend for his poetry and defiance of convention. Musō Soseki (1275–1351), adviser to the first Ashikaga shogun, designed the gardens of Tenryū-ji and Saihō-ji and founded a lineage of garden-making monks.

Many arts regarded as quintessentially Japanese developed in or around Zen monasteries between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Dry landscape gardens (karesansui) of raked gravel and stones, such as those of Ryōan-ji and Daisen-in, served as objects of contemplation. Ink painting reached its height with the monk-painter Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506); calligraphy by Zen masters (bokuseki) became treasured for its directness. The way of tea, shaped by Murata Jukō and perfected by Sen no Rikyū, took its ideals of simplicity from Zen, and a Zen scroll hangs in the alcove of the tea room.

The aesthetics of restraint, asymmetry and imperfection associated with Zen – often summed up in words like wabi and yūgen – also informed Noh theatre, haiku and architecture. Scholars today caution that not every Japanese art is 'Zen', but the monasteries were the main conduit for the Chinese culture from which these arts grew.

Like all Buddhist schools, Zen lost state protection with the Meiji reforms and adopted married clergy. From the late nineteenth century Japanese thinkers presented Zen to the world: D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) published widely in English, and the philosopher Nishida Kitarō built a philosophy on Zen experience. After 1945 Japanese teachers founded Zen centres in North America and Europe, and 'Zen' became a byword for calm and minimalism.

Historians have since examined the less comfortable side of this story, including the support many Zen institutions and teachers gave to wartime nationalism, for which several branches later issued apologies. In Japan itself, most Zen temples today serve their parishioners with funerals and memorial rites like other schools, while a small number of training monasteries (sōdō) prepare priests and many temples offer public zazen sessions.