Origin 1227 to 1253
Shikantaza, "just sitting", is the central practice of Soto Zen: seated meditation with no supporting technique, no counting the breath, no koan, no object, simply sitting in upright, alert, open awareness, letting thoughts come and go without following or suppressing them. It is meditation without a goal held out in front of it, on the principle that sitting itself is the expression of awakening rather than a means to a future one.
Dogen, who brought the practice from China to Japan in the thirteenth century, made this its defining claim in his teaching of the oneness of practice and realisation: one does not sit in order to become a buddha, one sits because sitting is already the conduct of a buddha. The apparent simplicity is deceptive, and the tradition treats it as demanding precisely because it withholds anything to hold on to.
Facts
Practice
Category of PracticeMeditative: seated meditation with no supporting technique, no breath count, no koan and no object, held to be the central and most demanding form of Soto Zen sitting practice. 2 Who Performs ItAll adherents of the tradition 1 Solitary or CommunalPerformed alone or together 1 Form
Posture and Bodily FormSeated as in zazen, but without a support such as breath-counting or a koan 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionDogen's teaching of the oneness of practice and realisation holds that one does not sit in order to become a buddha at some future point; sitting itself is already the conduct of a buddha, which is why shikantaza is described as meditation with no goal held out in front of it rather than a means toward a separate future attainment. 2 Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Attributions
TraditionSoto Zen Buddhism, associated above all with the teaching of the medieval Japanese monk Dogen. 2 Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginDogen brought the practice from China to Japan in the thirteenth century, making it the defining practice of Soto Zen. Identity
AttributionDogen, who brought the practice from China to Japan in the thirteenth century, made this its defining claim in his teaching of the oneness of practice and realisation: one does not sit in order to become a buddha, one sits because sitting is already the conduct of a buddha. 2 Learn More
Just Sitting
Shikantaza, "nothing but precisely sitting", is the central meditation of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, an objectless practice of alert, upright sitting that takes up no technique, no breath-counting and no koan, but simply the wakeful presence of sitting itself. The practitioner sits in a stable posture, eyes open and lowered, neither suppressing thoughts nor following them, neither seeking any state nor rejecting the one that arises. There is, in the strict account, nothing to attain and nothing to do but sit; the sitting is not a means to enlightenment lying elsewhere but the full expression of it here and now.
This is the practice's characteristic paradox and its recurring difficulty. Because it offers no object to concentrate on and no goal to strive for, it resists the goal-directed effort that meditators naturally bring, and the tradition warns equally against the dullness of mere blankness and the subtle striving that turns "just sitting" into one more technique for getting somewhere.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Zen Buddhism: A History, Volume 2: Japan
Heinrich Dumoulin, World Wisdom, 2005
2. Fukanzazengi (Universal Recommendation for Zazen)
Dogen, 1227The instruction on just sitting
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism
John R. McRae, University of California Press, 2003On the sudden and the gradual in Chan/ZenView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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