structural:expansion, linguistic:paraphrasing, structural:summarization
Narratives

The Chán of the Tang dynasty, especially that of Mazu and Linji with its antinomian saying and emphasis on "shock techniques", was retrospectively seen as a " golden age " of Chán by later Chan authors. As Mario Poceski writes, Song dynasty texts like the Record of the Transmission of the Lamp (c. 1004) depict the past masters as iconoclastic sages who embraced radical and transgressive practices like shouting, beating their students and making paradoxical statements. However, these iconoclastic stories cannot be traced back to Tang era sources, and a such, they should be seen as apocryphal lore. This traditional Zen narrative became dominant during the Song, when Chán became dominant form of Buddhism in China, due to support from the Imperial Court and the scholar-official class.

Another important element of the traditional Zen narrative is that Zen is an unbroken lineage that has transmitted the enlightened Buddha-mind from the time of the Shakyamuni Buddha to the present. This narrative is traditionally supported through Zen histories and Zen lineage charts, which developed in China throughout several centuries until they became canonized in the Song.

The traditional picture of the ancient iconoclastic Zen masters has gained great popularity in the West in the 20th century, especially due to the influence of D.T. Suzuki, and Hakuun Yasutani. This traditional narrative has been challenged, and complemented, since the 1970s by modern academic research on Zen history and pre-Song sources.

Modern scientific research on the history of Zen discerns three main narratives concerning Zen, its history and its teachings: Traditional Zen Narrative (TZN), Buddhist Modernism (BM), Historical and Cultural Criticism (HCC). An external narrative is Nondualism, which claims Zen to be a token of a universal nondualist essence of religions.