Chan coalesced over the course of several centuries of sustained and reflexive engagement with the meaning of being both Chinese and Buddhist. That is, it took shape over the period from roughly 500 to 1000 CE in the context of negotiations taking place within what the anthropologist James Clifford (1988) has referred to as the “predicament of culture”—the feeling of pervasive off-centeredness that occurs when we are confronted with an unavoidable and unprecedented overlay of distinct meaning systems and compelled to choose among or reconcile different and often contrary sources of personal and cultural identity.