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Zen is the school of Buddhism prevailing in Japan and in China, where it is called Chan. Zen itself is divided into multiple subgroups with a variety of interpretations. However, in the broad sense, it is considered as the Mahayana branch in distinction to the Hinayana branch, the latter prevailing in other countries such as Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. The fact that Zen was a Chinese interpretation added to a multitude of existent schools, led some to question whether Zen is a Buddhist school or not. This profound objection raised to the fundamental nature of Zen was even more exacerbated by the fact that it introduced concepts which do not prevail in other schools and even sometimes seem directly contrary to their premises.

To answer these questions, the author goes back to the fundamental essence of the Buddhist teachings, which is the enlightenment by putting an end to ignorance. This ultimate objective of the discipline is the same, but while crossing over to China, the language, and the method with which the teaching was handed had to be adapted to the new environment. In fact, according to the author, the metaphysical ingenuity and intellectual brilliance of the Indian people was dropped and replaced by the practical and industrious nature of the Chinese people. This was the major transformation that had to occur and that made Zen the school we know today.

To be more concrete, the Hinayana schools puts a large emphasis on the study of the texts in an intellectual sense, an approach with potentially harmful results. In fact, one of the features of ignorance is the tendency of the human mind to intellectualize what it perceives. In this manner, the mind is trapped in endless intellectual gymnastics in which an idea is only present to be replaced by another idea in an instant. The Buddhist way was from the first place, a way of escape from the miseries of intellectualism, and its teaching transcends the relative and unstable truth of logic which always disguises itself in the form of a universal truth.

By their practical sense, the Chinese tried to drop as much as was possible from this intellectual emphasis, they proposed that the truth is in the real world, and the discipline should be one that is inseparable from the real world. Even the higher truth is in the real world too. Disciples are not to isolate themselves in scholarly discussions and lofty meditation states, but they are to live and practice among the world and its objects, which will show them the way to truth.

Two other important characteristics of the Zen are those of buddha-Nature and instant enlightenment. Contrary to most Buddhist schools, the Zen followers do not believe that disciples advance slowly on a path which transforms them from ignorant humans to liberated sages. In fact, we are all not only liberated sages, but Buddhas, the problem is that leading a life of delusion caused by senses and thoughts made us forget our true nature and create a huge distance from it. But the fundamental truth is that we are all buddhas in Nature. So, to go back to our buddha Nature we need only an instant to remember and retrieve what was lost, rather than a long path of practice. That is the idea of instant enlightenment, however, the instant is not that easy to find, the rigorous search should be carried in the most practical sense of the term and in the most unusual and unpredicted places.

To illustrate this sense of practicality, a multitude of stories and anecdotes about the Zen masters and their disciples are told. To the newcomer, they seem paradoxical, annoyingly repetitive, and absurd. However, they are in fact designed to provide a path to the breaking away of the vicious cycle, powered by the habitual workings of the human mind. Sometimes the masters even use violence and cruelty, in a way that seems beyond the scope of our understanding, yet the teaching continued for centuries, flourished, and survived when other schools lost their spiritual vitality or failed to adapt. For the author, it is a sign of the unique genius and demonstrated creativity that will always distinguish Zen not only from other Buddhist schools but from most spiritual teachings in other religions too.