Is Zen really Daoism?

Last updated on: June 29, 2026 at 2:27 pm by Barbara O'Brien

0 Comments

Is Zen really Daoism? 2026-06-29T14:27:05-05:00 Barbara O'Brien

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

There has long been a popular belief that Zen Buddhism is as much Daoist as Buddhist. Sometimes one hears that Zen came into existence when Daoism and Buddhism mingled in China. This was a view popularized by Alan Watts several decades ago. A recent book by a well-known translator (David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen) argues that Zen is really a reinterpretation of Daoism and not a school of Buddhism at all. I am not going to review Hinton’s arguments, which are based on close analysis of the language of Zen texts. I just want to point out that this claim makes absolutely no sense in the light of Zen history. (And I hope you don’t mind my use of the Pinyin spelling of Daoism rather than the old Wade-Giles spelling, Taoism. I think everybody should switch to Pinyin, which is a spelling system created by native Chinese speakers. Wade and Giles were a coup0le of 19th century Brits.)

In writing my book The Circle of the Way: A Concise History of Zen from the Buddha to the Present Age (Shambhala) I spent more than three years emersed in current academic scholarship regarding the history and development of Buddhism, The historical record tells a very different story about Zen.

Granted, the historical record doesn’t corroborate the traditional story, either. The traditional origin story of Zen tells us that the Zen school originated in India and was transmitted to China around 500 CE, give or take, by a monk named Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma, the story goes, was part of a lineage of teachers going back to the historical Buddha who practiced a “mind-to-mind transmission” of the dharma, the Buddha’s teachings, without reliance on words. But much of this story appears to be myth and legend. Whether there was such a person as Bodhidharma is not something we can verify. Even so, Zen — Zen is a Japanese name; the school is called Chan in China — emerged as a distinctive school entirely within China sometime after the proposed lifetime of Bodhidharma. And all of the Mahayana Buddhist doctrines that are woven into Zen arrived in China independently of Bodhidharma. We really don’t need him to account for Chan. So let’s look at history.

How Buddhism Came to China

In the 1st century CE, Buddhist monks from the Kushan Empire — located mostly in today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan — followed Silk Road merchants into China and began to teach. By the 3rd century some Chinese translations of Buddhist sutras were in circulation. By the 4th century Chinese scholars had taken an interest in Buddhism. Any proper 4th century Chinese scholar would have had a deep knowledge of Confucianism, and many of them would have studied Daoism as well. Further, the Chinese did not assume that truth had to reside in only one religion or school of thought, and they were brilliant at syncretization. In the centuries that followed, the three major religious/philosophical traditions of China—Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—influenced each other in many ways. Scholars often borrowed phrases and concepts from Confucianism and Daoism to explain Buddhist teachings, a process that influenced all of Chinese Buddhism, not just the Chan school when it came along a few centuries later.

To understand how Chan emerged, it’s necessary to understand how Chinese Buddhism was organized from its beginnings. If you wanted to become a Buddhist monk =– and I believe this was true for nuns also — in China, you first went to a monastery run by the Vinaya school to learn the monastic rules. The Vinaya-pitaka is the section of early scripture preserving the rules for the monastic orders attributed to the Buddha. All Chinese Buddhist monastics received ordination from the Vinaya school, binding themselves to the same vows. The other individual schools did not do their own ordinations but recognized only the Vinaya ordinations.

After ordination a monk could travel to other monasteries whose teachers specialized in the study of sutras, or ritual and liturgy, or meditation. The name Chan is a Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit dhyana, which means “meditative absorption” or just “meditation.” There came to be an elite group of meditation masters, called chanshi, who attracted students from all over China. Sometime in about the 7th century, in the early Tang Dynasty, these meditation masters adapted “Chan” as the formal name of their extended community. This appears to be he true beginning of the Chan school. Among these elite masters was Daman Hongren (601-674), whom Zen students will recognize as the Fifth Patriarch. The first known account of the unbroken line of mind-to-mind transmission from India, along with the first known lineage chart of teachers, appeared in the epitaph of Hongren’s student Faru (638-689). Apparently, a proper school needed a proper backstory, even if it had to be invented.

What About the Lankavatara Connection?

There is something of an alternate origin story for Chan that one hears sometimes. The first Chinese translation of the Lankavatara Sutra, by Gunabhadra in 433, was a major milestone in Chinese Buddhist history. The sutra’s blending of Yogacara, Tathagatagarbha, and other Mahayana doctrines impressed the Chinese, who were struggling to reconcile the many teachings flooding into China from India and central Asia at the time. By the 6th century the Lankavatara Sutra had a devoted following.

Early Chan was influenced by the Lankavatara Sutra, although so were a lot of other schools. According to a 7th century revision of Daoxuan’s Further Biographies of Prominent Monks, Bodhidharma brought the four-fascicle Lankavatara Sutra from India and gave it to his successor, Huike. But the four-fascicle Lankavatara is Gunabhadra’s translation, which pre-dates Bodhidharma’s arrival in China. In the 6th century there was a group of Chinese Lankavatara masters especially devoted to the sutra, and some accounts identify this group as the original Chan. But that theory doesn’t seem all that well supported by evidence to me.

Chan/Zen in Context

This is of course an extremely simplified account of How Chan Started. Through the centuries after Hongren and Faru there were many new developments and no end of remarkable teachers who added to the tradition. This makes a great story that I got to tell in The Circle of the Way. But my larger point here is that in these early centuries Buddhist monks were not isolated within separate schools. Because of the way Chinese monasticism was organized, there was considerable cross-pollination going on among the many temples. This is not to say all was harmonious. There were robust disagreements about doctrines and rivalries for patronage and the emperor’s favor. But the record shows us considerable interaction among diverse Buddhist schools.

By the early Tang Dynasty a number of other schools had emerged that proposed unique teachings on doctrine and practice. These included Tiantai, which was dedicated to creating a synthesis of all Buddhist teachings and schools. The Huayan school is known for its focus on the interpenetration of all phenomena. The devotional Pure Land movement remains a major part of east Asian Mahayana to this day. It was common for Buddhist monks, including those we associate with Chan, to have studied and practiced in more than one such tradition. Guifeng Zongmi (780-841) was recognized as both a Chan lineage holder and a patriarch of Huayan. There is considerable Huayan DNA, so to speak, in Zen to this day. What is absent in the historical record are accounts of Chan monks studying with Daoists. It may well have happened, but it couldn’t have been common.

The historical record shows us that other Buddhist traditions in China recognized Chan as Buddhist, and not something else. Chan also was considered Buddhist by China’s emperors, who sometimes micromanaged Buddhism a tad. If Chan had really been a not-Buddhist recalibration of Daoism, through the centuries no one seems to have noticed.

I want to close by pointing to “Dancing with Words: Red Pine’s Path into the Heart of Buddhism,” by Roy Hamric in Kyoto Journal, July 19, 2011. Red Pine (Bill Porter) will be a name familiar to other zennies reading this, through his translations with commentaries on seminal Zen texts. His books on the Heart and Diamond sutras are especially recommended. Toward the end of this interview, Red Pine said that he doubted Daoism has had a major influence on Buddhism or Zen. “All the early Chinese Buddhist disciples were not necessarily Taoists,” he said. “But they were mostly Confucianists. I think Confucianism has had a much greater role to play.” He goes on to explain the doctrinal incompatibilities between Daoism and Zen, even though they can sound quite a bit alike to western readers.

The bell tower of the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China. The temple plays a recurring role in Chan history and legends. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Photograph by Windmemories. CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Buddhism

Buddhism in China

Previous Post

April 14, 2026

The President and the Pope: An Unprecedented Rift