Zen

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Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, referred to in Chinese asChán. Chán is itself derived from the Sanskrit Dhyāna, which means "meditation" (see etymology below).

Zen emphasizes dharma practice and experiential wisdom—particularly as realized in the form of meditation known as zazen—in the attainment of awakening, often simply called the path of enlightenment. As such, it de-emphasizes both theoretical knowledge and the study of religious texts in favor of direct, experiential realization through meditation and dharma practice.

The establishment of Zen is traditionally credited to the South Indian Pallava prince turned monk Bodhidharma who is recorded as having come to China to teach a "special transmission outside scriptures" which "did not stand upon words". The emergence of Zen as a distinct school of Buddhism was first documented in China in the 7th century CE. It is thought to have developed as an amalgam of various currents in Mahāyāna Buddhist thought—among them the Yogācāra and Madhyamakaphilosophies and the Prajñāpāramitā literature—and of local traditions in China, particularly Taoism and Huáyán Buddhism. From China, Zen subsequently spread southwards to Vietnam and eastwards to Koreaand Japan.

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Etymology

Japanese		Chinese		Korean		Sanskrit
Romaji	Zen	Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin	Chán	Revised Romanization	Seon	Romanization	Dhyāna
Hiragana	ぜん	Mandarin Wade-Giles	Ch'an	McCune-Reischauer	Sŏn	Devanāgarī	ध्यान
Kanji	禅/禪	CantoneseJyutping	Sim4	Hangul	선	Pali
Vietnamese		Shanghainese (Wu)	Zeu [zø]	Hanja	禪	Romanization	Jhāna
Quốc ngữ	Thiền	Traditional Chinese	禪			Devanāgarī	झान
Hán tự	禪	Simplified Chinese	禅			Sinhala	ඣාන

"Zen", pronounced [zeɴ] in Japanese, is the Sino-Japanese reading of the Chinese character 禅, which is pronounced [tʂʰán] (pinyin: chán) in modern Standard Mandarin Chinese, but was likely pronounced [d​͡ʑen] in Middle Chinese.^[1] The term "zen" is in fact a contraction of the seldom-used long form zenna (禅那; Mandarin: chánnà), a derivation from the Sanskrit term dhyāna (ध्यान) (pali: jhāna), which refers to a specific type or aspect of meditation.^[2] The Sanskrit word is derived from the Indo-European root *dheiə-, meaning "see, look". While "Zen" is the name most often used in the English-speaking world, it is also known as Chan in mainland China, Seonin Korea, Thiền in Vietnam and dhyāna in India.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Zen

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Important school of Buddhism that claims to transmit the experience of enlightenment achieved by the Buddha Gautama. Arising as Chan in China in the 6th century (introduced by Bodhidharma), it divided into two schools, the Southern school, which believed in sudden enlightenment, and the Northern school, which believed in gradual enlightenment. By the 8th century only the Northern school survived. Zen developed fully in Japan by the 12th century and had a significant following in the West by the later 20th century. Zen teaches that the potential to achieve enlightenment is inherent in everyone but lies dormant because of ignorance. It is best awakened not by the study of scripture, the practice of good deeds, rites and ceremonies, or worship of images, but by breaking through the boundaries of mundane logical thought. Methods employed vary among different schools and may emphasize the practice of zazen (in the Soto school), the use of koans (in the Rinzai school), or the continual invocation of Amida (in the Obaku school; see Amitabha).