Buddhism Is Not One Thing

When people say “Buddhism,” it’s easy to picture one tradition: the Buddha, meditation, a few ideas about suffering and awakening.

In practice, over more than two thousand years Buddhism moved across countries, languages, and cultures. It reached Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, China, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and many other places. In each place it kept some ancient parts of the path, reinterpreted others, and developed its own forms of practice.

So a monk from Thailand, a Tibetan lama, and a Japanese Zen priest can all be Buddhists — and still read different texts, hold different ceremonies, practice in different forms, and even use very different language to talk about awakening.

To understand the differences, it helps to first put some order on the map.

First: there aren’t three equal types of Buddhism

Buddhism is sometimes presented as if it divides into three branches: Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. That’s useful as a first map, but reality is a bit more layered.

Theravada is a living Buddhist tradition that developed from the early schools of Buddhism. Mahayana is a broad family of traditions, texts, and ideas that developed in India and later spread mainly across Central and East Asia. Vajrayana developed within the Mahayana world and adds tantric methods to it. Today it’s especially identified with Tibetan Buddhism, but isn’t limited to it.

Zen sits within Mahayana. So do Pure Land, the Tendai and Nichiren traditions in Japan, Chan in China, and Seon in Korea. So Zen isn’t an alternative to Mahayana — it’s one of the ways Mahayana took a particular shape.

Theravada

The name Theravāda means roughly “the teaching of the elders.” Today it’s the central Buddhist tradition in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia.

Its textual basis is the Pali Canon, a huge collection of discourses, monastic rules, and other writings preserved in Pali. It’s the most complete Buddhist canon preserved in a classical Indian language.

At the center of the path are teachings found in almost every form of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, impermanence, dukkha, and not-self. Great importance is also given to the three trainings: ethical conduct (Sīla), concentration (Samādhi), and wisdom (Paññā).

In the Theravada tradition, the central figure of liberation is the arahant — one who has completed the path and been freed from the factors that bind them to samsara. The bodhisattva ideal also exists in the Theravada world, especially in stories about the Buddha’s previous lives, but it doesn’t usually function as the universal ideal for every practitioner the way it does in Mahayana.

What about vipassana? In the West, an impression sometimes forms that Theravada simply means “vipassana meditation.” That’s not so. The Theravada tradition includes a whole world of ethics, monasticism, study, ceremony, generosity, devotion, and meditation. Vipassanā — clear seeing, or insight — is one part of that world. Many of the modern meditation movements that reached the West grew out of Theravada meditation reforms of the last few centuries, which is why in the West they sometimes became the most familiar face of the whole tradition.

Mahayana

Mahayana began developing gradually in India, around the start of the first millennium CE. It didn’t appear in a single day, and at first it wasn’t a “new church” splitting off from earlier Buddhism. Communities, texts, and new ideas appeared over time within the existing Buddhist world.

One of the most important features of Mahayana is its expansion of the bodhisattva path. A bodhisattva is one who develops Bodhicitta — the aspiration to awaken not only for oneself but for the benefit of all beings. So instead of seeing personal liberation as the end of the path, the Mahayana ideal points toward full buddhahood and activity in the world for the liberation of others. This is also where the bodhisattva vows still recited in Zen monasteries today come from.

But the difference between Theravada and Mahayana isn’t simple: Theravada = save myself, Mahayana = save everyone. That’s a caricature of both traditions. Compassion and action on behalf of others are central to Theravada too, and Mahayana practice of course includes deep work on the practitioner’s own liberation. The difference lies mainly in how each tradition articulated the ideal of the path and its goal.

New texts, new ideas. Mahayana received a large collection of sutras that aren’t part of the Pali Canon — among them the Heart Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, the Avatamsaka Sutra, and the Pure Land sutras. Out of these grew a very rich philosophical world. One of its central ideas is śūnyatā — emptiness. “Emptiness” doesn’t mean nothing exists. It points to the fact that things don’t have independent, fixed, unconditioned existence. Things exist by virtue of conditions: our body depends on food, air, our parents, our society, and countless processes we don’t control. What we call “I” also exists within a web like this. Philosophers like Nagarjuna developed this idea in depth, and it became one of the central foundations of Mahayana thought.

When Buddhism reached China

Buddhism began reaching China in the first centuries CE. There, it didn’t arrive into an empty space. It met a culture that already had deep philosophical and spiritual traditions of its own, especially Confucianism and Taoism. Over hundreds of years thousands of Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese, and new traditions developed: Tiantai, which gave central importance to the Lotus Sutra; Huayan, which focused among other things on the mutual relations and mutual interpenetration of all phenomena; Pure Land, which centered on the Buddha Amitābha and the aspiration to be reborn in his pure land; and Chan — the tradition from which Japanese Zen would later grow.

Something important to understand here: these traditions didn’t always exist as separate boxes. A Chinese monk could study sutras, practice Chan, and recite Amitābha’s name. The sharp division we like to draw between “schools” is often much clearer on paper than it was in actual Buddhist life.

Chan — the source of Zen

The Chinese word Chan comes from Dhyāna, an Indian word related to meditation. Tradition says Bodhidharma brought Chan from India to China in the fifth or sixth century. Bodhidharma is a very important figure in Zen’s identity, but it’s hard to fully separate the historical person from the legends built around him.

Chan actually developed within China over hundreds of years, out of a meeting between Buddhist meditation traditions, Mahayana thought, and Chinese culture. Over time it developed a strong rhetoric of directly seeing one’s own nature, and of not being satisfied with intellectual understanding alone.

That doesn’t mean Chan rejected sutras. Chan teachers themselves knew Buddhist texts well, quoted them, and wrote commentaries on them. The point was different: knowing how to explain what emptiness is isn’t the same as seeing how grasping is arising right now.

From China to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan

Chan didn’t only become Japanese Zen. In China it’s called Chan. In Korea the tradition that developed is called Seon. In Vietnam — Thiền. And in Japan — Zen. They all belong to the same broad historical family, but they aren’t identical. The Zen many people in the West know is largely Japanese Zen, which is why it’s easy to mistakenly equate “Zen” with the entire Chan family.

Japanese Zen

Even within Japan there isn’t one “Zen.” The two best-known traditions are Rinzai and Sōtō. There’s also a smaller tradition called Ōbaku. Rinzai and Soto share a great deal: zazen, monastic life, ceremonies, sutra chanting, bowing, working with a teacher, and lineages of transmission. But over the course of history they developed different emphases.

Rinzai and koans. Rinzai is especially identified with systematic work with koans — stories, encounters, and sayings from Chan literature, sometimes given to a student as questions to work with as part of practice. A koan isn’t simply “a riddle with no logical answer.” Within the Rinzai tradition, an organized way of working developed in which the koan becomes a means of investigating how we perceive ourselves and reality. An important figure in the development of the koan in Japan was the teacher Hakuin in the 18th century, one of whose most famous koans is the inquiry into the sound of one hand. Rinzai is also identified with the concept of Kenshō — “seeing one’s nature,” a direct experience or recognition of one’s own nature. But here too it’s worth being careful of oversimplifying: this doesn’t mean Rinzai is looking for a single moment of enlightenment and then stopping. Kenshō is understood as something that requires continued training, deepening, and expression within life.

Soto and shikantaza. The central figure in the development of Soto Zen in Japan is Eihei Dogen, who lived in the 13th century and, after studying in China, brought back to Japan the tradition he received there. The practice most identified with Soto is Shikantaza, usually translated as “just sitting.” That phrase can mislead: “just sitting” isn’t sitting and waiting for something to happen, staring at a wall, trying not to think, or deciding there’s nothing to do and so any form of sitting counts as Zen.

For Dogen, zazen isn’t only a tool we use now to receive, in the future, something called “enlightenment.” He speaks of the unity of practice and realization. We don’t practice because we aren’t yet buddhas, hoping that one day the practice will end and we’ll receive the prize. The practice itself is already an expression of the Buddha’s way. This is one of Dogen’s most important turns.

But Soto isn’t “Zen without koans.” Here too, the simple Western picture — Rinzai = koans, Soto = just sitting — is only useful up to a point. Dogen himself made extensive use of koan literature and wrote about it. The difference isn’t that one tradition “has koans” and the other doesn’t, but in how they were woven into practice and into the training system that developed in each tradition. In the same way, Rinzai isn’t a tradition where people don’t sit but only “solve koans.” Both are full Zen traditions.

Zen versus Pure Land

The difference becomes clearer when you compare Zen to the Pure Land traditions. At the center of Pure Land is Amitābha, the Buddha identified with the “pure land” Sukhāvatī. In various Japanese forms of Pure Land, a practice developed called Nembutsu — reciting Amitābha’s name. Especially with Shinran and the Jōdo Shinshū tradition, the idea of Other Power took a central place: instead of basing the path on my own ability to purify myself through my own practice, there’s trust in Amitābha’s vow and compassion.

From the perspective of a Western Zen practitioner this can sound almost like a different religion — sitting without a goal on one side, reciting a Buddha’s name and trusting in rebirth in a pure land on the other. And yet both are Mahayana. And both ask, in their own way, how we’re freed from the illusion that the separate “I” can save itself through total control over life.

Zen versus Tibetan Buddhism

Tibetan Buddhism offers us another interesting contrast. It too is based on the Mahayana bodhisattva path, but it weaves in Vajrayana — tantric Buddhism. In Tibetan traditions you can find practices that include mantras, mandalas, visualization of enlightened figures, initiation ceremonies, and deep work with the relationship between student and teacher. It also has a very strong tradition of systematic philosophical study.

The outer form is very different from that of Japanese Zen. But the difference isn’t Tibetan = ceremony and imagination, Zen = simply sitting with reality. Japanese Zen too is full of ceremony, incense, bowing, chanting, robes, altars, and a relationship system with teachers and lineage. The difference is more in the language and the technology of practice: Vajrayana sometimes deliberately uses imagination, symbols, and ritual to change how the practitioner experiences themselves and the world. Zen tends to return again and again to sitting and to the activity itself — sitting, walking, eating, working — as the place where the path is realized.

And what about Nichiren?

Another large Japanese Mahayana tradition is Nichiren, named after the 13th-century Japanese teacher Nichiren. Nichiren gave the Lotus Sutra an especially central place. One of the practices most identified with the tradition is reciting Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō — devotion to the Dharma of the Lotus Sutra.

Again we see how broad the concept “Japanese Buddhism” is. Soto Zen, Rinzai, Pure Land, and Nichiren all existed within the same culture, yet offered very different ways of living the dharma.

So what’s actually special about Zen?

After all these comparisons, it’s tempting to try to distill Zen into one sentence.

“Zen is Buddhism without beliefs.” Not true. “Zen is Buddhism without ceremony.” Certainly not. “Zen says there’s no need to study texts.” Also not. “Zen is simply being present.” That’s already closer to the language we’re used to hearing — but it’s also too general.

Maybe something more modest can be said: Zen gives extraordinary weight to direct practice, and to the way Buddhist understanding takes on a body within the action itself. Not just understanding impermanence — but sitting inside a changing world. Not just learning about not-self — but examining what that “I” is that’s sitting. Not just talking about the bodhisattva path — but getting up from the cushion, walking into the kitchen, and seeing how we meet the person standing in front of us.

And in Dogen’s Soto there’s a further twist to this: this life isn’t only the place where we train toward the path. It’s the place where the path can be realized.

Which tradition is the right one?

After getting to know the differences, a natural question can arise: which of them understood the Buddha correctly?

There’s no simple way to answer that. The traditions themselves don’t always agree with one another. They differ in their relationship to scripture, in how they understand buddha-nature, in how they speak about liberation, and in the methods they offer for reaching it.

There’s no need to blur these differences. But there’s also no need to turn them into a competition. Underneath the different language you can find, again and again, the same questions: What is dukkha? Why do we grasp? What is this thing we call “I”? Can we be freed from this grasping? And how do we live in a way that reduces suffering — ours and others’?

Theravada, Pure Land, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism don’t always give the same answer. Sometimes they even start from places that look opposed to one another. But maybe the best way to understand the differences between them isn’t to ask which of them holds the “true” version of Buddhism. It’s better to ask: what problem is each tradition trying to solve, and what exactly is it asking the practitioner to do?

The moment you ask that question, the map starts to become much clearer.