In the past, I've been accosted by numerous people recruiting for various religious organizations. I prefer the direct approaches to the subtle, "Hi, I'd like to be your friend. By the way..." approach. As an undergrad, I remember one day where I was getting some food at a deli and starting to head back to my dorm room. Suddenly, this person starts saying hello, how're you doing, and so on. Being absent-minded, forgetful and having a poor memory for names meant that I spent the first 5 minutes of this exchange nodding and triggering the automatic conversation mechanisms while my brain was trying to figure out which class I had with this person. And then it came out -- "Do you consider Jesus Christ to be your savior?" After hearing this, I relaxed. I was relieved that I wasn't walking into a frequent faux pas of having forgotten the name of someone that had been introduced to me. Unfortunately, it took me about 3/4 of a mile of walking to convince him that I was quite comfortable with my spiritual directions, that my path lay in another direction, and that he should go find some other victim.
I had this vision of a Zen cult starting on the Georgia Tech campus. Like some other cults, these followers would be encouraged to recruit other people. Any day now, I expect to have someone walk up to me and ask me a Zen koan like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" or a deeper philosophical one, such as, "Can you reach the moon in the water?" followed by the inevitable, "Have you thought of pursuing Zen in your life?" These people would be slightly mysterious, slightly obtuse in their answers but not enough to be annoying, and never anxious or nervous in their recruiting activities. They might even be more reasonable than the typical cultist, who tends to be rather aggressive, persuasive, and a bit devious. A Zen cultist would be just as prone to sitting while contemplating a rock or tree as to cornering some lonely student with these mystical questions to confuse them into joining. (The average, lonely student type hasn't realized that there are no silver bullets for life's problems and is very confusable).
In some ways, starting a Zen cult would be trivial. For one thing, a Zen cultist wouldn't have to worry about violating the moral exhortations in a text like the Bible regarding theft, lying, and so on. First and foremost, Zen is a philosophy, not a religion or moral code. But a successful cult leader has to separate the flock from their worldly possessions to pay for the mansion and entourage. Zen offers many catchy phrases and terms that allow this to happen with a minimum of fuss. Instead of brainwashing, they'd call it "seeking no-mindedness (mushin)." They would say that in order to reach Enlightenment, initiates must first eliminate the "diseases" or "desires" that disturb the flow of the mind and that foremost of those is the desire for money and worldly possessions, followed closely by the desire to think independently.
Also, all the activities that Zen is associated with are relatively inexpensive and only require lots of diligent, mindless activity. I can almost imagine walking around the headquarters for a college-based, Zen cult. There would be these glassy-eyed, impressionable people dressed in toga-like robes, contemplating the stillness of aluminum cans, writing abstract and atonal poetry, pruning bonsai kudzu, and performing a coffee ceremony -- an intricate ritual where the coffee master roasts the beans, grinds them with a mortar and pestle (using a particular twisting action that takes years to master), purifies the water, and turns on the coffee maker (there's an art to flipping the switch). Every day, they would all go to an obligatory meditation period where initiates would contemplate their relation to the Universe while somebody walked around, whacking their backs with a bamboo switch to awaken them into Enlightenment (this also provides some indirect enjoyment for the whacker). Ironically, assuming that such a cult was sincere in its efforts, the act of pursuing Zen prevents you from understanding it, also stated as "The more you seek it, the more it eludes you."
Of course, the Zen cult is purely fictitious. The cult idea still belongs primarily to the radical religious elements and to those opposed to the integration of different cultures. Also, the concept of Zen has been adopted by the popular media and has been overused in too many erroneous contexts. That person who asked "Do you know anything about Zen?" could easily have been someone confused by the term and was conversing with someone that he'd seen in a philosophy course. But be warned. Next time you hear a random person ask "Do you know anything about Zen?" be ready to have a catchy and more confusing response to fend off the potential Zen cultist. For example, Tosu, one of the classic Zen masters was asked "What is Zen?" by some Monk (monks tend to play the role of the dummy in Zen Socratic dialogues): Tosu answered "Zen."1 If you're not careful, you may be lulled into a state of no-mindedness by some unassuming person, slowly followed by a state of no-moneyness.
1 Whenever someone comes up to me and asks: "Do you know anything about zen?" my response is always to shout "Mu!" and punch my interlocutor on the nose. This hasn't yet resulted in my being asked to become abbot at a mountaintop monastery, but I am clearly on the right path. They invariably retreat, bowing. - Colin Potts
