Rinzai's reputation is for abruptness — shouts, blows, the teacher's refusal to accept a merely correct answer — and the style is deliberate: sudden awakening cannot be reasoned into, so the method is designed to produce a crisis rather than an accumulation. The school is associated historically with the samurai class and with the arts (tea, calligraphy, garden design), which is where its aesthetic influence on Japanese culture largely comes from.