The Buddha holds up a flower and smiles

CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wikipedia edit Mahākāśyapa smiles at the lotus flower

The Buddha shows Maha Kassapa a lotus in an apocryphal Mahayana sutra (Hishida Shunso)

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This monk gets it. He understands.

One of the Buddha's Great Disciples, Maha Kassapa (Mahākāśyapa) smiles at a lotus flower the Buddha shows instead of delivering a Dharma talk.

In East Asia, there is a Chan and Zen tradition, first recounted in the The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp (Chinese 景德傳燈錄, Pinyin Tiansheng Guangdeng-lu), which is a 1036 genealogical record about Chan Buddhism.

According to this tradition, Venerable Mahākāśyapa once received a direct "transmission" from the historical Siddhartha Gautama Buddha.

Artist Hishida Shunsō

Chan and Zen purport to lead their adherents to insights akin to that mentioned by the Buddha in the [apocryphal] "Flower Sermon" (Chinese 拈華微笑, Pinyin Nianhua weixiao, literally, "Holding up a flower and smiling subtly") given on Vulture's Peak, Rajagriha (India), in which the Teacher held up a white flower and just admired it in his hand, without speaking.

All the disciples just looked on without knowing how to react, but only Ven. Mahākāśyapa smiled faintly, and the Buddha picked him as one who truly understood him and was worthy to be the one receiving a special "mind-to-mind transmission" (Pinyin yixin chuanxin).

The painting (wikiart.org) is by Hishida Shunsō, 1897, in the Nihonga style. Source