There is a peculiar conflation that persists in Western understanding of Chan and Zen—a nesting doll of confusions in which ordination is mistaken for Dharma transmission, and Dharma transmission is mistaken for enlightenment. The logic seems to run: if someone is ordained, they must have received transmission; if they've received transmission, they must be enlightened. Each equation is wrong. Understanding why requires disentangling three entirely different things.

Ordination is a ceremonial entrance into monastic life. It involves taking precepts, receiving robes, learning temple etiquette, and being formally accepted into a religious community. When I traveled to China in 1998 for the inaugural ordination ceremony at Hong Fa Temple, I spent thirty-five days mastering the art of bowing and offering incense, learning traditional chants, and navigating the intricate procedures for donning and doffing monastic vestments. I was taught temple etiquette for everything from eating and walking to performing kowtows. None of this had anything to do with enlightenment. It was training in institutional form—valuable in its own right, but ceremonial rather than mystical.

Dharma transmission is something else entirely—or rather, it is several things depending on how we understand it. The institutional view holds that transmission passes the "Buddha Mind" from teacher to student in an unbroken chain stretching back to the Buddha himself. By this logic, only someone who has received transmission can be considered enlightened, and only an already-transmitted teacher can confer it. The whole system rests on what Alan Cole calls "the conceit that enlightenment, as the final and fullest form of tradition, can be privately held as a Thing-like entity by members of a Chan lineage"—an heirloom passed down in "sudden and inexplicable moments of transmission."

Historians have traced the origins of this system. It didn't emerge from the Buddha's teachings but from Chinese ancestor veneration grafted onto Buddhist institutional structures. The lineage charts connecting modern teachers back to the Buddha were constructed centuries after the fact, manipulated and lengthened to serve institutional purposes. By the Sung dynasty, the only "indispensable external marks of a Chan master" were the regalia of Dharma transmission—chief among them the inheritance certificate. Not awakening. Not liberation from suffering. A certificate.

From a mystical rather than institutional perspective, we can understand Dharma transmission in less reified ways: as a fabricated means for establishing hierarchy within an institution; as a way of expressing the value of preserving the Buddha's message across generations; or as an acknowledgment of spiritual development that, through the very act of naming it, brings it to life as a "thing." These understandings are more honest about what transmission actually is and isn't.

Then there is enlightenment—wù in Chinese, bodhi in Sanskrit—which is neither conferred by ceremony nor transmitted by certificate. It is not something one "gets" or "has." It cannot be validated by a master, because anyone who genuinely needs such validation hasn't had the experience. Enlightenment is a radical shift in awareness that happens suddenly, unexpectedly, and only when we're ready. It belongs exclusively to the one who experiences it. No teacher can give it; no institution can authorize it.

The Buddha himself seems to have understood this. He referred to himself not as "the enlightened one" but as the Tathāgata—"one who has arrived at suchness." His final words, according to tradition, were: "Work out your own salvation with diligence." He left no successor and told his followers they didn't need him or any other person to lead them. They only needed the Dharma, discipline, and themselves. The entire apparatus of lineage and transmission arose later, shaped by Chinese cultural forms—particularly ancestor veneration—that the Buddha never endorsed.

Why does this confusion persist? Partly because institutional religion benefits from it. If enlightenment can only come through transmission, and transmission can only come through ordained masters, then the institution becomes the sole gateway to liberation. The master becomes equivalent to the Buddha—"perfect and beyond reproach," as the institutional rhetoric would have it. This grants enormous power to those who hold the certificates, and it keeps practitioners dependent on a hierarchy rather than turning inward to discover what the Buddha actually taught: that freedom is found through our own investigation of mind, not through external authorization.

The conflation also flatters our desire for certainty. We want to know who is "really" enlightened. We want credentials we can verify. The messiness of genuine spiritual life—where awakening can happen to anyone, where teachers are flawed humans, where there's no ultimate authority to appeal to—is uncomfortable. A system of certificates and lineages offers the illusion of order.

But chan, as mystical practice, doesn't work that way. Chan's great teachers have always pointed beyond institutional forms. Linji famously said: "Don't take the Buddha to be the ultimate. As I see it, he is just like a privy hole." This isn't disrespect—it's liberation. The moment we make anyone into an unquestionable authority, we've stepped off the path and into religion in the narrowest sense.

So let us be clear: ordination is entrance into an institution. Transmission is a convention for acknowledging and perpetuating that institution. Enlightenment is neither. It cannot be conferred, certified, or inherited. It is seeing what was always there but couldn't be seen. And it is available to anyone willing to do the work—regardless of robes, certificates, or lineage charts.