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Growing out of the wisdom of China, India, and Japan, Zen became a powerful movement to explore the lesser-known reaches of the human mind. Today we are rediscovering modern significance in its ancient insights. This course is an attempt to encounter Zen in its purest form, by returning to its legendary masters.
This course offers a treasury of Zen tradition: teachings, anecdotes, stories, legends, sayings, and wisdom culled from the classic texts of Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen.
When Westerners first encountered the strange Zen dialogues
and antics that had been treasured in East Asia for a thousand
years, there seemed to be more madness than method. Now we realize
that the masters were communicating with exceptional directness and
freedom in a language of awakening. Today, across vast spans of time
and culture, they are still teaching us. 
In this course we try to let Zen speak for itself. Rather than engage in interpretation and analytical commentary, we present the stories of Zen in as straightforward a manner as possible, Of course, even in the process of putting together our source material we have had to choose whether to present the legends as they have been reported or engage in the questions raised by modern scholarship. While we try to strike a balance, like Andy Ferguson in Zen's Chinese Heritage we start from the premise that:
. . . understanding how the tradition views itself must be the basis
for all later criticism. The traditional view is not yet sufficiently
appreciated by Western readers.
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For an introduction to the practice of Zen and instruction in Zen meditation, see the Ashoka course Zen Meditation: Entering the Path.