Zen Buddhism

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

Page 45

CHAPTER TWO
THE BIRTH OF ZEN BUDDHISM
It is said-and what is tradition but truth in the robes of poetry?--that once, when the Buddha was seated with his Bhikkhus on the Mount of Holy Vulture, a Brahma-Raja came to him and, offering him a golden flower, asked him to preach the Dharma. The Blessed One received the flower and, holding it aloft, gazed at it in perfect silence. After a while the Venerable Mahâkaśyapa smiled. Such, it is said, is the origin of Zen Buddhism. But as Dr. Suzuki points out:
“This smile is not an ordinary one such as we often exchange on the plane of distinction; it came out of the deepest recesses of his nature, where he and Buddha and all the rest of the audience move and have their being. No words are needed when this is reached. A direct insight across the abyss of human understanding is indicated.”1
It is further said that the Wisdom which this smile revealed was handed down through the centuries by twenty-eight successive Patriarchs, the Buddha himself being the first, and the last the Indian philosopher Bodhidharma, who arrived in China in the middle of the sixth century A.D. and became the founder of the Zen School of Buddhism. Many of the intervening Patriarchs 1 Essence of Buddhism, p. 22.