What if everyone on Earth became a Zen Buddhist and followed its teachings and philosophy?

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It would mean the erosion, and eventual perversion of Zen Buddhism into something completely unrecognizable to its former self, but uncannily resembling Christianity.

Zen is akin to Judaism in that it just doesn’t scale. While you can read about Zen Buddhism, that doesn’t really give you much in the way to go on concerning practice. You can learn ideas from a book, but just learning the ideas doesn’t help you practice them, any more than you can become a martial artist just by reading.

Reading helps an existing martial artist or Zen practitioner with understanding the hard theory, stuff that a sensei or Zen master would have a difficult time explaining, if only because the teacher is there to facilitate the practice and not hold academic-style classes.

As a result, there simply aren’t enough schools and teachers out there to facilitate Zen practice. And it would take a long, long, long, long time to build it up. If you just opened schools anyway, then, just like the proliferation of McDojos in the world, teaching dumbed down, useless martial arts as glorified babysitters for $100 an hour, you’d just have thousands of Zen Buddhist schools with teachers who have never learned real Zen Buddhism themselves.

Zen is passed from master to student, not through books and learning. The teachings and philosophy are useless without the practice.

What you’d get, ultimately, is a pastiche of Zen-themed Christian morals and ethics. Why Christian? Because, in reality, Christianity is the only religion in the world that was built precisely to scale in this way. Early Christians worked tirelessly to solve the problems that bringing the story of Jesus to people who had never heard of him, and those theological lessons have already permeated the world.

A Zen Buddhism that has similarly had to go through the process of adapting itself to scale would have found similar dilemmas and wound up adopting similar answers. While the theming and incidental details of Christianity are as historic and unique as every other religion, the meta-theology of Christianity is by no means an accident, and as religions across the world find themselves needing to appeal to more and more people that don’t share the same culture as the initial society that created the religion, they find themselves more in alignment with Christian meta-theology.

Just like how even different domains of math tend to reduce down to the same axioms, because those axioms just happen to be the most useful, every religion, as they have to appeal to more and more people, ultimately finds itself centering around kindness, brotherhood, personal relationships with divinity, (impersonal spirituality must be taught as it’s unintuitive, though it can be book learned, putting it in a better position than Zen practice, this is why Zen Buddhism is far rarer than the mainstream forms) sacrifice for the greater good, and a humble, charismatic hero-god.

These components are simply the most accessible and teachable ways to construct a religion, so every religion, and, indeed, even most kinds of literature, ultimately evolve to contain these elements.