Zen’s story goes back centuries, but it is a simple one. 

  Buddhism was birthed in India and it stems from a great pessimistic rejection of Life as we humans experience it. “All Life is suffering,” taught Gautama. 

  Before being mostly absorbed back into the stream of Brahmanic Hinduism in India it brightened from the severely negative ‘lesser vehicle’ path of Hinayana to the easier and lighter ‘greater vehicle’ Mahayana path. This Mahayana was more accessible to the people and in time it migrated both east and west. To the west it influenced the dying Roman Empire’s mystic post pagan cravings through Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism; to the East, China, it developed easily alongside Confucianism and Taoism. 

  In China Chen Buddhism took definite form as a practice involving meditation and monastic self-discipline. From there it kept going, northeastward to Korea, southeastward to Vietnam, and directly east to Japan where in that young and feudal land it morphed into Zen. 

  But here’s the thing we Westerners who’ve taken to it lately little grasp. 

  East of the Iranian plateau the great civilizations of India, China and Japan never experienced the severance from the godhead and hence Life that we who hail from west of the plateau did. There the godhead him/herself gave birth to all Nature including humankind and hence there is an inborn or innate sense of direct connection and participation in Life we cannot even fathom. 

  West of the plateau on the other hand we were ‘expelled from the Garden,’ and with the expulsion came a severance of our direct experience of connection with our godhead and hence Life. 

 That’s all to say for the Easterner Zen Buddhism is a reminder of a state of Oneness that has always resided in their beings and that in the end is in fact their very beings. It is a psychological relearning or reestablishing of what is already there and always been known. 

  For we Westerners Zen is burdened with something much more, an attempt at rediscovering what has long been forgotten, lost…or perhaps stolen from us.

  Here it is tasked with filling an emptiness first before it can remind us of the essential balance and fullness of that emptiness. 

  Ponder that one…

  Then talk amongst yourselves…

  But don’t get hung up on the words….