ABSTRACT
The Mahayana itself developed many schools, though it is not easy to say in what order. The Pure Land, which took such root in Japan as Shin; the Shingon which via Peking acquired great influence in Japan for many years; Tibetan Buddhism, a complex form of its own; the magnificent range of mysticalmetaphysics, if one may coin that term, of the Madhyamika or 'middle way' school of Nagarjuna and others; and the Ch'an school of China which moved into Japan as Zen, all these and more are profoundly different from the Buddha's traditional teaching to the people, whatever he may have taught of the esoteric tradition to his inner group of disciples. But Ch'an/ Zen is unique in being a return full cycle to the Buddha's own Enlightenment. Scorning words and all authority it looks directly to the centre of the heart/mind of the individual, and on a plane far beyond the limitations of conceptual thought. Founded, as we shall read later, by Bodhidharma in the sixth century AD in China, and developed a century later by HuiNeng and other great masters, it moved in the thirteenth century to Japan where in two main branches, the Rinzai and Soto, it flourishes today.
