Dogen's Fukanzazengi and the Practice of Just Sitting

The Soto school's founder Dogen Kigen (1200 to 1253), having studied under the Chinese Chan master Rujing, returned to Japan and wrote a short manual, commonly translated as the universal recommendation for zazen, that describes seated meditation without describing it as a method aimed at a further goal. The text instructs the practitioner to sit upright, breathe naturally, and let thoughts arise and pass without pursuing or suppressing them, calling this simply thinking of not thinking, a phrase meant to place the practice outside the ordinary opposition between having thoughts and being empty of them. Later Soto usage names this practice shikantaza, literally just sitting, to mark that nothing is added to the sitting itself, no koan to solve, no visualization to hold, no count of breaths to keep. Dogen's companion essay on pursuing the way, addressed to students soon after his return, makes the same point from a different angle: he writes that the zazen he teaches is not a step by step meditation technique among other techniques but the Dharma gate of ease and joy, already complete in itself. A student who is told to sit, and only to sit, is not being given a stripped down beginner's exercise; the sitting is presented in Dogen's own writing as the entire practice, with nothing behind it that the sitting is a preparation for.