Zen expected to become familiar with the classics of the Zen canon". A review of the early historical documents and literature of early Zen masters clearly reveals that they were well versed in numerous Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras, including Madhyamaka. Especially the Lotus Sutra played a large role in the development of East Asian Buddhism, including Zen. Nevertheless, Zen is often pictured as anti-intellectual. This picture of Zen emerged during the Song Dynasty (960–1297), when Chán became the dominant form of Buddhism in China, and gained great popularity among the educated and literary classes of Chinese society. The use of koans, which
Buddhism in the West the popular Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh founded the Plum Village Monastery in Dordogne, France which, along with his hundreds of publications, has helped spread interest in Engaged Buddhism and Vietnamese Thiền (Zen). The sixties counterculture had already established an interest in Tibetan Buddhism, through Timothy Leary's publication of an adaptation of the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead under the title The Psychedelic Experience. Since the 1970s, interest in Tibetan Buddhism also grew dramatically, especially due to the arrival of Tibetan lamas in the West after the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the creation of