In both, there are appeals to the importance of  immediacy, rather than reflection, and assertions about the limits of  language and the ultimate irrelevance of thinking to the realization  of truth. Indeed, the Sixth Chan Patriarch, Huineng (638–713),  famously proclaimed that throughout Buddhist history, those  transmitting the true Dharma established  “without-thinking” (wunian, 無念) as  the core doctrine. For many of those involved in the first generation  of “globalizing” Chan and Zen in the first half of the  twentieth century, Chan’s apparent anti-rationality was central  to its promotion as a distinctively East Asian humanism and an  antidote to heartless and humorless scientism.