Leading Buddhist scholar Sam van Schaik explores the history and practice of Zen, based on a new translation of one of the earliest surviving collections of teachings by Zen masters. These teachings, titled the Masters of the Lanka, were discovered in a sealed cave on the old Silk Road, in Dunhuang, China, in the early twentieth century. More than a thousand years old, the manuscripts have sometimes been called the Buddhist Dead Sea Scrolls, and their translation has opened a new window onto the history of Buddhism. Both accessible and illuminating, this book explores the continuities between the ways in which Zen was practised in ancient times, and how it is practised today in East Asian countries including Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam, as well as in the emerging Western Zen tradition.-- Source other than Library of Congress.