The story of Zen in the west or ‘How the swans came to the lake’ as so tiled by Reverend Mother Peggy Jiyu Kennett, is worth retelling in my own way.
It was after WW2 when Zen started to show up in the West though what I can only say are Japanese refugees who escaped Japan if nothing more because of the forced opening up of Japan to the west through the forced surrender that ended World War 2. Many Japanese men who struggled in Japans unbending highly conservative culture, before and after the war, went to the west and found a receptive audience with the young ‘Beat nicks’ and later ‘hippies’ in the counter-cultural revolution that was occurring both in Europe and the United States to their ideas and teachings of Japanese religion, Zen.
Through the late 50’s into the 60’s the Zen movement in the west became popular, with many groups buying properties and setting up Zen teaching centers in where the Japanese men who immigrated over could teach the Zen the way they wanted to teach it.
Needless to say, the styles of Zen that was taught not only greatly departed from the unbending and staunch Japanese Zen, but took on a characteristics of the Japanese Men found in the Western freedoms that they never had in Japan. What resulted was a Zen in the west that greatly varied from one teacher, or what is now called lineages, from each other often to the point of becoming unrecognizable to each other. In some cases, even within the same western Zen organization the differences just between individual teachers lead to one group not understanding what another group is doing, even though they claim to be in the same lineage.