History & overview · every faith gets one
Direct pointing at the mind. Sudden awakening. Sitting.
A school of Mahayana built on one conviction: awakening is available directly, in this life — through sitting meditation and the mind-to-mind meeting of teacher and student, not through scripture or ritual. It venerates no god; the practice is deliberately minimal: you sit.
The founding
A monk from India is said to have crossed to China, sat facing a wall for nine years, and answered an emperor's boast about pious works with: no merit whatever. The school he seeded became Chan — in Japan, Zen.
Its founding is bound to Bodhidharma (semi-legendary) — 520 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Impermanent; empty of fixed essence.
The divine. None — no god at the center.
Death and after. Rebirth, until awakening ends it.
The line
descent is public here — where it came from, what left itBranches:
Rinzai — The kōan school — awakening arrives like a shout. Sōtō — Just sitting. That is the whole of it. The Order of the Quiet Hour — One hour of silence a day, kept together, apart.