a special transmission outside the scriptures

not founded upon words and letters

by pointing directly to the mind

it lets one see nature and attain Buddhahood

This representation of Chan is ascribed to Bodhidharma (circa 470-543), the first Chan patriarch, and brought into our time by the japanese Zen tradition. Chan, neither to be grasped  nor to be explained, is a subtle experience independent of space, time and culture. Chan manifests as "buddhanature", given the mind "has emptied itself of everything". Chan training guides the student such that he or she may enter through the door of Chan and experience this "nature" directly.

Chan is the Chinese transliteration of dhyana, meditation in Sanskrit, or jhana in Pali, and has two meanings beyond "buddhanature":

Chan stands for Chinese Buddhism, a Mahayana tradition, in general, and the five Schools of Chan ("Houses of Chan") in particular. Two of them, Caodong and Linji, have been transmitted to the present. Buddhism reached China in the first century AD. Then it took half a millennium to collect, translate and classify the Indian scriptures, to debate their intrinsicacies, compare them with the Daoist heritage, and develop an indigenous practice. It took the Tang Dynasty (618-907, a renaissance time, for buddhism to find its particular Chinese form. The root teacher of all Chan Schools is Hui-neng (638-713).

It is the wish of Shifu Sheng-yen, to emphasize a practice, centered on experience and verification, that is adapted to our time without loosing any of its substance.