A short history of Zen

As with all other buddhist traditions, Zen begins with the historical person Siddharta Gotama, which later in life became known as Shakyamuni Buddha, or “the awakened one from the Shakya clan”. Gotama was born into a noble family in a small kingdom in present-day northern India, but right before he turned 30 he realized he was not content with the life he was living, and that he needed to seek a solution to the existential problems that were gnawing at him — what life and death is really about, what joy and sorrow stems from, and if there is a way to free oneself from the misery of existence. He shaved off his hair and beard and left the palace and his family, including a wife and a newborn son, setting out on foot as a “wanderer”, one of many others that in those days roamed around the countryside in that area in different forms of spiritual pursuit.

Through several years and in increasingly more extreme ways he tried as well as he could to rid himself of anxiety, doubt, and all bodily and mental needs, in order to disappear completely into a total peace. But no matter how much he tortured and starved himself, a sliver of discontentment always remained, and after a while he realized it had to be his very approach to the problem that there was something wrong with. He saw that the ascetic life and the self-torture in essence was no different than the endless pursuit of new thrills and pleasures that he knew from the palace, just inverted — and that the deep answer to the mystery of life that he sought was neither be found in the pursuit of the good nor in an avoidance of the bad. He decided to sit down in silent meditation to go beyond all his own ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, himself and the world around him, and from there he arrived at the deep insight into his own self-nature, what we call his enlightenment or awakening.

Zen arose about a thousand years later, in the cultural explosion that happened as buddhism spread from India to China, and as a reaction to the increasingly more metaphysical and theoretical tradition that had emerged since Gotama’s death. With one foot in Gotama’s original teaching and the other in the more humorous, creative, and down-to-earth Chinese Taoist tradition, on the foundation of silent, sitting meditation, the new Zen teachers set forth a more direct, dynamic, and personal approach to insight and development.

Where the buddhist schools from before had emphasized hope and belief and regarded non-religious art as a distraction, both doubt and art became central in Zen. Especially as it propagated further into Japan and was taken up by the samurai class that ruled there at the time, Zen became deeply integrated with poetry, painting, calligraphy, ceramics, sculpture, architecture, and martial arts.

From the late 1800s and especially from the 1950s onwards, Zen moved across the ocean to Europe and America. Here, in the meeting with science, art, music, psychology, democracy, and all else that characterise our culture, a new blossoming period has begun.