What Is Zen?

Hello Can you hear me? Yes okay so good morning so Nim so this is my question.
I'm curious about what is the end?
How is it different from other schools of Buddhism?
And what does it mean? What does mean to say that talking about then true words will only miss the point oxen is trying to convey and what does it mean that Zen has nothing to say or teach at all?
And how does Zen could help people on today's modern society who is being too civilized

and help overcome being overly self conscious and being too anxious and tend to thinking too much about unnecessary things that causes unnecessary problems and sufferings.
Thank you.

So you can approach Zen on whether you can classify it as Zen as Zen or Zen as Buddhism.

So a perspective of Zen is actually supersedes Buddhism in the actually taxonomy of religion.
At that point, Zhen is not classified necessarily as part of Buddhism.
Zen is in itself Zhen.

Then on the other hand, there is Zen which is a part of Buddhism.
It's another tradition of Buddhism.

So Zen started in China.

So it came out of a sense of kind of repentance of the state of Buddhism in China at that time.

So the time where Ben actually arose in China was a state in which Buddhism was a national religion of China.

So that means the monarch, the ruling monarch used Buddhism as the kind of ruling ideology of his country.

So he built a lot of temples it built a lot of pagodas.

There was a lot of translation and publication of original Indian sutras into Chinese

and there was a lot of ordainment, education, ordainment of Buddhist monks.

There was a perception that this was the advancement of Buddhism.

But whether that was Buddhism or that it could have happened to be Islam it could happened to be Hinduism or it could have been something else but it just became another kind of core principles, a way of ruling the, his country.

So people started questioning is this really Buddhism

is studying the sutras the wars on the sutra?
Is that really Buddhism?
Isn't that just academic study?
It is building temples is that really Buddhism?
Isn't that just construction projects?

His ordainment in graduation of a lot of monks is that Buddhism

or are we just producing more clergy?
And they said this is not Buddhism

if we want to say Buddhism the core of Buddhism is to awaken the ignorance in our hearts and liberate ourselves from that ignorance.

A Buddha is somebody who has liberated himself from his own ignorance, not somebody who sits far away or far beyond.

So I am Buddha as soon as I break through and liberate myself from my own ignorance.

So reading all these sutras, it's all about academic achievements.
You're reading books, but you're not liberating yourself from your own ignorance.

So you can't study words and arrive at enlightenment through intellectual pursuit.

So basically they say truth cannot be examined nor validated through words.

The only way to get to that truth is to awaken your own mind.

Therefore, you don't need large tim you don't need to build this pro

you don't need to memorize its thousands of sutras in study Buddhism,

the only thing you need to do is awaken your own mind, which means you can do this anyway

anybody can do it. You don't have to be ordained as a monk.

So those were the questions in the perspective that drove a new Buddhist movement.

So the mainstream Buddhism at that time denied Zen as a Buddhism

because there was a certain discipline, hierarchy and process by which you became an ordained monk.
But these new Zen people were saying that if you awaken your own mind, you can be a spiritual, a practitioner.
So they were going against the order, prevailing order of things

you know, you had to study for 10, 20, 30 years reading the sutra, disciplining yourself to get to the enlightenment.
And even then it's very hard.
But these new people were saying that they could be enlightened by awakening just their own heart.

A spiritual practitioner should be a monk living in temples, not somebody who actually lives in their own house, in the caves or in a forest.
So we can't recognize them as fellow spiritual practitioners.

So they were prohibited from the temples

but the New Zealand practitioners did not need to live in temples so they lived wherever in the forest in nature EN cases they just practiced their own.

And the methodology by which they taught others was through a Q A system by engaging in dialogue, in conversation with everyday people.

You know, sometimes they would ask abstract questions like who are you?

And that's how actually they made inroads into mainstream society.

Then after a certain time has passed and a lot of intellectuals started joining.

Then what happened in China is that a new Chinese country came in and they were prosecuting Buddhists.

So in this World War, a new country where mainstream conventional Buddhism was persecuted, they lost gradually a lot of their power.

But on the other hand, Zan Buddhists did not have a lot of huge temples.
They weren't getting sponsored by the government.
So their influence actually grew in this new environment.

But as then Buddhism became bigger and more mainstream, they had felt the need to kind of justify itself

because the main question, the most vulnerable question they had to respond to is that they weren't traditional Buddhists.

So they created their own vernacular.

So they said Zen represents the mind of the Buddha and then Buddhism basically represents the teaching, the words of the Buddha.

So when you say that the mind becomes more important than words

so in a way they created this new word called Zen Buddhism with each one representing different aspects of the Buddha and kind of established that kind of hierarchy

and then started claiming that this did not start indigenously in China.
But this was a longstanding tradition that came over from India.

And one of the claims they made is that Zen actually started with Buddha in India and it was delivered or trans from disciple to disciple through the mind you know, the venerable dharma who actually is reputed to have brought from India to China the Zen tradition was the 28th patriarch who actually brought it over from it.

Basically since this was the original mind of the Buddha who has been transitioned this Zen started with the Buddha himself

and this was, you know, what was his mind was the one that was transitioned ah, and handed it down to his closest disciple.

So what's important is that the legend has said that this wasn't taught through words, but it was transitioned directly through the mind without words.

Basically they created this concept of teaching or transitioning your own mind without words.

It saw in three different ways.

So by creating this narrative, Zen Buddhists were able to claim that they are the true kind of inheritors of the original mind of the Buddha.

But since then, since then, Buddhism had the advantage of kind of a simple transmission of his teachings through a specific kind of Q, a method of delivering and with they declined due to persecution of the conventional kind of Buddhist traditions.
Now we have Zen Buddhism, really the mainstream Buddhist tradition across East Asia.

This is basically when you see you know, high ranking Buddhists, the monks as kind of teachers of the monarchs living in luxury and palaces and having a lot of influence in the state of affairs.
People see them not as spiritual practitioners but as just another powerful figure.

You buy them. But in comparison, when they saw the Zen practitioners with their own simple lives, eating meager food, but really focused on their own spiritual practice, they garnered a lot of public respect and support.

So after several 100 years of this phenomenon, Zhen has today now become the mainstream Buddhism in a lot of countries in East Asia or at least a huge part of a tradition of the taxonomy of Buddhism as a whole.

It is mostly mainstream in China, Korea, Japan, in Vietnam.

But in the past as it evolved in Buddhism, it started kind of consuming other parts of the traditional Buddhism.
So it became more of an inclusive and more comprehensive set of Buddhism.

In that sense that kind of purity of Zen tradition Zen thought in the beginning of its journey has largely disappeared in today's Zen.

So I follow up question from him.
So I want to ask why in today's society like in Japan or in Korea why that then Buddhism is not so much

in the younger, younger generation is not so papula, not so many people in Korea or Japan is helping interest and learning about Sen.
So that's why I noticed that because of that, so many people or younger generations is developing depression, mental health problems.
What's the current reasons?
Why is that? Thank you

I think a lot of young people are very difficult approaching sin because right now over the years, it has become too rigid as it is a tradition, it has become mainstream and as mainstream, it has become authoritative, heavy and instead of using simple words, simple vernacular they used to use now it has been jargonized.
It is really specific, difficult words.
So it really makes it difficult for young people to approach it.

So if we want to go back and draw the interests of the young people, I think Buddhism really needs to be made much easier and much simpler

and try to approach them through the suffering that they're feeling by asking the question like why do you suffer?

So let go of the dogmatic aspect of Zambuddhism but approach them through everyday questions and problems.

You know, for example, you know, I'm as a young people I'm more concerned about dating or schools but then if they try to teach me by force me to meditate on the concept of emptiness, it doesn't really touch me and I get bored.

So I think if Zen today were to go back to his original genesis, which started as a simple, approachable way of trying to liberate oneself I think and try to approach young people by questioning and trying to resolve their everyday issues I think be much more approachable.

Thank you Sooning for our wonderful answers for my question.
I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.