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 A review of the early historical documents and literature of early Zen masters clearly reveals that they were well versed in numerous Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras, including Madhyamaka.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
Anecdote Anecdote An anecdote is a brief, revealing account of an individual person or an incident. Occasionally humorous, anecdotes differ from jokes because their primary purpose is not simply to provoke laughter but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, such as to characterize a person by delineating a specific quirk or trait, to communicate an abstract idea about a person, place, or thing through the concrete details of a short narrative. An anecdote is "a story with a point." Anecdotes may be real or fictional; the anecdotal digression is a common feature of literary works, and