Dogen and the Identity of Practice and Realisation

Shikantaza is inseparable from the teaching of the thirteenth-century Japanese master Dogen, founder of the Soto lineage, who brought the emphasis from China and made it the heart of his school. Dogen's radical claim is the identity of practice and realisation: zazen is not a step toward becoming a buddha but the activity of buddhahood itself, so that to sit in this way is already to enact the awakening it might seem to pursue. On this view the common picture of meditation as a ladder to a future attainment is precisely the error to be dropped.

The practice stands in a well-known contrast within Zen with the koan introspection cultivated by the Rinzai school, which gives the meditator an insoluble problem to press against until a breakthrough occurs. Soto's "silent illumination" and Rinzai's koan work represent two long-standing approaches to Zen sitting, and their difference has been debated within the tradition for centuries. Shikantaza has spread widely with the transmission of Zen to the West, where its apparent simplicity and its refusal of technique have proved both its attraction and the source of much misunderstanding.