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Still they are both accepted as are all the traditions of Buddhism.
Neither the Buddha, nor Jesus, nor Shankara, nor Lao Tzu created a school or a
religion. The schools, sects and cults of religion are human inventions and bear the
limitations, distortions and dualism of secondary human gross and subtle egoic
ignorance (avidya) as we conceptually and experientially unpack their view and
meditation teachings.
That the esoteric and nondual teaching of Zen and Dzogchen are historically associated
with Buddhism, does not mean that they began with or are limited to historical Buddhism.
Dzogchen, for example, was practiced by the ancient pre-Buddhist Bonpos of the indigenous
Tibetan Bon wisdom teaching, and by the pre-historic "Twelve Teachers of Dzogchen"
centuries before the incarnation of the historical Nirmanakaya Buddha Shakyamuni (Norbu, 1999).
Just so, esoteric Christianity teaches “That which is called the Christian religion
existed among the ancients, and never did not exist, from the beginning of the human race
until Christ came in the flesh.” (St. Augustine, Ch.V). Nor does the fact that Nyingma
Dzogchen was influenced by Shivaism and Ch’an, or that Ch’an and Zen were influenced by
Taoism mean that one is derived from or reducible to the other. As we recover from our
habitual, linear cause and effect thinking we see that all of the traditions of our great
Primordial Wisdom Tradition have arisen not so much one from another in a linear
historical cause and effect chain, although these influences exist, but interdependently, as a
continuum from the Primordial Wisdom Base. The various traditions of our Great Wisdom
Tradition all respond to the primordial wisdom of this same ultimate ground of arising
reality forms. Contemplation and meditation upon this “wisdom of emptiness” opens
equally into that ground for all of them.
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