Kenshō

Kenshō is the Japanese reading of the Chinese jianxing, “seeing (one’s) nature”. It comes from the Chan saying that one should see one’s nature and become a buddha, and names the experience of awakening to one’s own buddha-nature. The near-synonym satori, “understanding”, is used for the same experience or for its deeper forms.

The Rinzai tradition, following the Song-dynasty Chan master Dahui, works toward kenshō through kōans, the recorded encounters of earlier masters, on which the student concentrates until conceptual thought breaks down. Teachers stress that a first kenshō is a beginning, to be deepened and integrated over years of practice. The Sōtō tradition, following Dōgen, places less weight on breakthrough experiences and more on sitting itself as the expression of awakening.

Modern Western interest in Zen, shaped by D. T. Suzuki’s writings, made kenshō and satori widely known as names for a sudden, transforming insight, and sometimes treated them as instances of a universal mystical experience; scholars have since questioned that reading.