Chan
A living tradition within Mahāyāna. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Chan is a living tradition within Mahāyāna. Also written Ch'an, Meditation school, Zen (Japan), Sŏn (Korea), Thiền (Vietnam).
Origin
Founder named in the sources: traditionally Bodhidharma (d. c. 530). No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. McRae classes Chan among the 'modal traditions', traditionally traced to Bodhidharma (d. c. 530) but emerging as an organised movement only in the 7th century. The Chan School entry dates the split into Northern and Southern lineages to c. 730, when Shenhui (684–758) distinguished his lineage — traced through Huineng (638–713) — from rivals. Chan (Sanskrit dhyāna) means meditative absorption in which dualistic distinctions are eliminated.
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Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Chan.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-chan.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-chan-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Chan},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-chan},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.