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Quote by Bernard Faure

“As it is known to us through East Asian sources, Chan/Zen is the product of two traditions that sometimes overlap, sometimes contradict or ignore each other: namely, the Buddhist orthodoxy the Sino-Japanese historiographical tradition.”

Quote by Bernard Faure

Book:Chan Insights and Oversights
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Chan Insights and Oversights

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Bernard Faure

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“Although Hīnayāna disciplines and traditions continue to exert their influence in the daily activities of Vietnamese Buddhists, Zen comes closest to expressing the Vietnamese character, and as such, their attitude in all walks of life can best be described as a “Zen outlook.”

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Book:Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam: In Relation to the Development of Buddhism in Asia
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“What properly constitutes the study of Zen in the Zendo life is to study on the one hand the writings or sayings or in some cases the doings of the ancient masters and on the other to practise meditation. This practising is called in Japanese to do zazen, while the studying of the masters consists in attending the discourses given by the teacher of the Zendo known as Rōshi.”

StudyZen
Book:The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk
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“Much of this picture of Zen derives from portrayals found in such normative texts of the tradition as the lamp anthologies (Ch. teng-lu), huge collections of the hagiographies and basic instructions of hundreds of masters in the various lineages of Zen. But such texts were never intended to serve as guides to religious practice or as records of daily practice; they were instead mythology and hagiography, which offered the student an idealized paradigm of the Zen spiritual experience. Many scholars of Zen have mistakenly taken these lamp anthologies at face value as historical documents and presumed that they provide an accurate account of how Zen monks of the premodern era pursued their religious vocations. They do not.”

Zen
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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“Modern Zen training offers a matrix within which to evaluate the way one tradition of Zen understands—and puts into practice—the doctrines and teachings of its religion. While Zen training in Korea will differ in certain respects from that followed by the patriarchs and ancient masters of classical Ch'an in China or by Zen monks in Japan, it is an authentic model of how the monks of one national tradition of Zen have tackled "the practical matter of how to live with [their] belief.”

ZenKorea
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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