12/27/2025
December 26 marks the birthday of Mao Zedong (1893–1976). While Mao was not a Buddhist figure, his impact on Buddhism in China—particularly Chan (Zen)—is inseparable from the story of Zen as it exists today, both in China and in the West.
To understand why Zen looks the way it does in America—and why Chan in China today often appears quieter, more restrained, and less visible—we have to look clearly at Chan before, during, and after Mao’s era, not as ideology but as lived historical reality.
For more than a thousand years prior to the 20th century, Chan Buddhism was woven into Chinese life. It was not a narrow meditation school nor a purified lineage system. Chan existed in large monasteries and small mountain hermitages, but also in poetry, calligraphy, medicine, farming, and everyday conduct. Meditation was central, but it was never isolated. Monks chanted, performed rituals, taught ethics, and often practiced alongside Pure Land devotion. Lineage mattered, but embodiment mattered more. Awakening was measured not by credentials, but by how one lived. Historically, Chan thrived as a flexible, culturally embedded tradition rather than a rigid institution.¹
The mid-20th century brought a rupture unlike anything Chan had previously endured. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, religious life was increasingly constrained, culminating in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when Buddhism was labeled feudal superstition. Monasteries were closed, destroyed, or repurposed. Monks and nuns were defrocked, imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or killed. Public religious practice was effectively prohibited nationwide. Chan as an institutional tradition collapsed.²
Yet Chan did not disappear. What survived was not lineage charts or temple walls, but people—memory, ethical sensibility, habits of mind and practice carried quietly through daily life. Scholars of Chinese religion widely agree that while institutional Buddhism was devastated, religious belief and practice persisted in fragmented, private, and often invisible forms. Chan endured underground, transmitted through embodied knowledge rather than formal structures.³
After Mao’s death in 1976, China entered a period of reform that allowed limited religious revival under state supervision. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Buddhist temples were gradually reopened or rebuilt, ordinations resumed, and Buddhist associations were reestablished. Chan returned to public life, though in a form shaped by regulation and reconstruction. Much of this revival emphasized ritual, ethical teaching, cultural heritage, and social harmony. Meditation continued, but rarely as an isolated or publicly emphasized practice. Lineages were often reconstructed rather than seamlessly continued, and many contemporary teachers were trained in formal Buddhist academies as well as monasteries.⁴
Alongside this regulated revival, a quieter development unfolded. In remote mountain regions historically associated with Chan practice, small numbers of monks and lay practitioners returned to abandoned temples, caves, and hermitages. Some rebuilt structures by hand; others lived with minimal resources, studying classical Chan texts and practicing meditation largely outside formal institutional recognition. This was not a mass movement, nor a public renaissance, but a reappearance of Chan in one of its oldest forms—marginal, decentralized, ascetic, and difficult to see. Field studies and historical documentation confirm that this pattern mirrors Chan’s traditional mode of survival during periods of political constraint.⁵
Today, Chan exists in China in a dual reality. On one level, it is publicly visible through restored monasteries, rituals, and lay participation under state oversight. On another, it persists quietly in small communities and solitary practitioners who emphasize meditation, textual intimacy, and simplicity. Chan in China today is alive, but it is not the confrontational Zen of classical koans, nor the minimalist Zen imagined in the West. It is measured, rooted, cautious, and persistent.
Many qualities Western practitioners associate with Zen—strong emphasis on meditation, independence from institutions, questioning authority—could not openly develop in post-Mao China. Those expressions matured elsewhere. At the same time, Chinese Chan retains something essential: a long memory of impermanence and a lived understanding of how practice survives power. Zen in China today is not a return to the past. It is a continuation shaped by rupture.
Zen in America carries freedom—but also the responsibility to remember what that freedom cost elsewhere. Both forms are authentic. Both are incomplete. Both are still unfolding.
