Every other practice in these halls trains toward something. Zazen, in Dōgen’s radical formulation shikantaza, “just sitting,” is the practice of nothing further: sitting as the full expression of what the sitting was supposed to attain. Returning from China in his twenties, Dōgen wrote the Fukanzazengi in 1227 to recommend the practice universally, and inverted the usual logic in a stroke. Zazen is not a technique for becoming awake. Done wholeheartedly, it is the awake life, enacted. Practice and realization, he insisted, are not two.
The practice
The Fukanzazengi’s instructions are famously physical, and mostly posture. A quiet place. A thick mat and a round cushion. Legs crossed fully or half (a chair serves the same architecture: spine self-supporting, feet planted). Ears over shoulders, nose over navel. Eyes open, lowered at forty-five degrees. This is not a practice of leaving the world. Hands in the lap, left on right, thumb-tips lightly touching, forming an oval. Rock gently side to side, arriving at center. Breathe quietly through the nose.
And then, the whole of the method: sit. When thoughts arise, neither chase them nor fight them. Let them pass like traffic heard from a house. Dōgen transmits the old exchange of master Yaoshan as the only pointer needed. Asked what one thinks in steadfast sitting, he answered, think of not-thinking. How? Non-thinking. Not suppression, not rumination, but the open awareness prior to both.
Begin with ten minutes. The tradition sits longer, but the tradition also says one period of honest sitting is complete in itself.
What it trains
Filed under attention, though zazen quietly subverts the file. It is attention with no object at all, bare presence, sustained. For the goal-driven mind this is the hardest instruction in the library precisely because there is nothing to succeed at. The practice works by dismantling the succeeding reflex. Sit long enough and the ordinary furniture of experience, time and boredom and the edges of the self, begins to show its seams. The tradition considers that showing the point.
Cautions
Knees and hips before heroism. Build sitting time gradually, pad generously, use a chair without apology. Zazen surfaces what the mind has stored. In seasons of acute distress, keep periods short and companioned by a teacher or community rather than solitary marathon sitting.