Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…Zen is interesting in the sense that it does not seem to have originated in India. The claim, of course, is that it had, but here’s the story. The Buddha was about to give a teaching, and instead of giving a teaching, he just held up a flower. One monk got it, and he passed on what they called the mind-to-mind transmission over the generations until it went to someone named Bodhidharma, who traveled to China and brought it to China there. Bodhidharma is probably not a historical figure. So, Zen is among the major traditions of Buddhism. It’s the one that we cannot trace directly back to India. We have this word in Sanskrit, jhāna. Jhāna is the word for meditation. The Chinese often just transliterated Sanskrit terms rather than translating them so they took jhāna and called it chán nà, shortened down to chán. That character chán is pronounced Zen in Japanese. So, Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese mispronunciation of a Sanskrit word that means meditation, and it is the meditation school. Zen is what they call a special transmission outside the scriptures. They don’t care so much about the sutras, at least that’s their claim. They talk about the mind-to-mind transmission, that is, the experience of enlightenment going from teacher to student. If we think about South Asia, Tamil Nadu is not, today, Buddhist, but Nepal and Bhutan are, and of course much of Sri Lanka. How did those lines get drawn? Obviously, Tamil Nadu was part of the British colony of India, and we know that Buddhism had disappeared from that part of the subcontinent by the time the British arrived. Nepal is a majority Hindu country, but there is a small community called the Newars who are Buddhists, and they are the living link to Indian Buddhism, primarily in the Kathmandu Valley. That’s why we have Buddhism there. Sikkim was also a small kingdom, as you know. It became part of India in the 20th century. Again, it’s so close to Tibet that, really, they’re Tibetan Buddhists. In Nepal, the Newars follow Sanskrit Buddhism, Indian Buddhism, and then, in Sikkim they follow Tibetan Buddhism.…

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