It may be said that Buddhism, especially Northern Buddhism, is a vast, complicated system.  It has a literature and a sacred canon which one can think of only in connection with long trains of camels to carry, or freight trains to transport, or ships a good deal bigger than the Mayflower to import.  Its multitudinous rules and systems of discipline appall the spirit and weary the flesh even to enumerate them; so that, from one point of view, the making of new sects is a necessity.  These are labor-saving inventions.  They are attempts to reduce the great bulk of scriptures to manageable proportions.  They seek to find, as it were, the mother-liquor of the great ocean, so as to express the truth in a crystal.  Hence the endeavors to simplify, to condense; here, by a selection of sutras, rather than the whole collection; there, by emphasis on a single feature and a determination to put the whole thing in a form which can be grasped, either by the elect few or by the people at large.

The Zen sect did this in a more rational way than that set forth as orthodox by later priestcraft, which taught that to the believer who simply turned round the revolving library containing the canon, the merit of having read it all would be imputed.  The rin-z[=o][24] found near the large temples,—­the cunning invention of a Chinese priest in the sixth century,—­soon became popular in Japan.  The great wooden book-case turning on a pivot contains 6,771 volumes, that being the number of canonical volumes enumerated in China and Japan.

The Zen sect teaches that, besides all the doctrines of the Greater and the Lesser Vehicles, whether hidden or apparent, there is one distinct line of transmission of a secret doctrine which is not subject to any utterance at all.  According to their tenet of contemplation, one is to see directly the key to the thought of Buddha by his own thought, thus freeing himself from the multitude of different doctrines—­the number of which is said to be eighty-four thousand.  In fact, Zen Shu or “Dhyana sect” teaches the short method of making truth apparent by one’s own thought, apart from the writings.

The story of the transmission of the true Zen doctrine is this: 

“When the blessed Shaka was at the assembly on Vulture’s Peak, there came the heavenly king, who offered the Buddha a golden-colored flower and asked him to preach the law.  The Blessed One simply took the flower and held it in his hand, but said no word.  No one in the whole assembly could tell what he meant.  The venerable Mahahasyapa alone smiled.  Than the Blessed One said to him, ’I have the wonderful thought of Nirvana, the eye of the Right Law, which I shall now give to you.’[25] Thus was ushered in the doctrine of thought transmitted by thought.”

After twenty-eight patriarchs had taught the doctrine of contemplation, the last came into China in A.D. 520, and tried to teach the Emperor the secret key of Buddha’s thought.  This missionary Bodhidharma