Chan is the meeting of classical Buddhism, Brahmanism and Taoism. Chan is the minimalisation of Buddhism that inspired japanese Zen culture. Chan, Zen, yep sounds a bit the same and it's not a coincidence, like Tao and Do.
Greatest figure of Chan is Bodhidharma, also called "the great traveler" he's represented beardy, with crazy hairs...
I mean look at that... isn't it a dudeic style ?
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/BodhidharmaYoshitoshi1887.jpg)
People were having difficulties to understand what he was fuckin talking about, so he went into a cave and meditated in front of a wall, like nine years. That's how the wall story begins for Chan and will continue with the Zen. Zazen position having being invented by Bodhidharma. He did other fun stuffs like training shaolin monks he became the patron of, founding Kung Fu, how cool is that ?
But most of his story had been told long time after his existence, so it's a bit difficult to know for sure what he did. Making deads talk in order to help businesses of alive masters is some kind of Chan tradition. Dudeists know well about fictional icons, that's not a problem, is it ?
Anyway what is cool with Chan is that it destroys almost everything classical Buddhism built. It's a crazy over excited dog dropped in a field of bowling skittles. That's why Zen is minimalist : Chan broke hundreds of esoteric bullshits until subsist only white walls.
Reading about Chan is deep and sometime full of fun, and an important stuff if you want to understand more about Chinese / Japanese martial arts.
Both slacking and abiding; best of both worlds, mang.