Skip to main content

Sokuzan on Why Practice Shikantaza

 I have - on and off since my youth - practiced zazen.  But the sort of zazen that I was introduced to as a young man in the Isshin-Ryu dojo of my formative years was (as I have said before elsewhere on this blog) decidedly of a Soto-style nature.  Specifically, it was what is known in Zen as shikantaza, often translated as just sitting.  But "just sitting" can be a lot harder than it sounds.


The following is from Japanese-American monk-priest Sokuzan, in a new book of his entitled "108 Meditation Instructions."  I admit to knowing very little about Sokuzan, despite typically being familiar with the American-Buddhist "scene", but what he has to say here has a depth to it that you don't typically encounter in American Zen.


Enjoy!

Kodo Sawaki sitting in Zazen


Why do this kind of meditation (shikantaza) rather than shine or thaktong or samatha and vipassana?  Why not do creation/completion practices or deity yoga visualizations?  Or mantras?  Why not do walking meditations in the forest?  Or follow the breath?  These kind of practices try to stabilize the mind.  If you endeavor to calm the mind, you are calming what you think is the mind, not the actual mind.  It will just look like it is calm because you have done something artificial to it.


Shikantaza is not about training your mind to be more calmful - though that may occur.  If you are looking for peace, then this kind of meditation is not going to help you.  Shikantaza is much more rough, rugged, and realistic than that and will take you right into the labyrinth of your karma.  For that ambitious undertaking, it seems necessary to have a solid discipline that summons you to sit down, hold still, and watch what happens in the mind stream without agreeing or objecting.  Shikantaza is a practice because you may have to watch yourself shut down, disagree, or ignore what arises in your mind over and over.  But you don't have to fix anything.  You don't have to correct anything.  You don't have to get better.  It's pretty good news - you don't have to be somebody else.  You get to be exactly who you are.*



*From "108 Meditation Instructions and 6 Dharma Talks: A Foundational Guide to Zen Buddhist Meditation" by Sokuzan (from the book's introduction)

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Feel free to leave us some feedback on the article or any topics you would like us to cover in the future! Much Appreciated!

Popular posts from this blog

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

  The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan  magazine.      In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.”  I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time .  In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The 1-5 Program

Develop Mass and Power with This Unique Wave Loading Method      In my recent article “ Skill Training as Size Building ,” I introduced the concept (on the blog, at least) of the “90% rule.”  I believe it’s one of the most effective ways to make consistent gains in the gym, whether you’re after strength, strength with a size side-effect, or hypertrophy alone.  Basically, the method involves doing the majority of your sets in a workout with 90% of a certain rep range.  This doesn’t mean 90%, necessarily, of your 1-rep max, though it most certainly would if you were to do multiple sets of singles—as we will be doing in this program.      In our previous article, the workout programs I suggested utilized 90% of one’s 5-rep max and 90% of a 10-rep maximum using “cluster sets.”  If you want to know more about what those programs look like, then, please, read that article.  Also, it wouldn’t hurt, if you haven’t done s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Your Body Becomes its Function

Is this “Forgotten” Principle the Key for True Physique Transformation? Some (Slightly) Rambling Thoughts and Musings      I suppose the slogan “your body becomes its function” isn’t exactly “forgotten,” but it is little known—oh, and it also makes for a catchy little subtitle.  It comes, supposedly, from the “Bulgarian system” of training.  I first read the pithy saying when I shelled over something like $50 for the “Big Beyond Belief” manual, a.k.a. “Serious Growth 3,” sometime in the early to mid ‘90s.  Written by Leo Costa Jr. and, believe it or not, Tom Platz, even though Platz had always trained in the exact opposite manner of every training principle the book touted, it was hugely marketed in all of the bodybuilding rags at that time.  If you were around, and training, back then, there’s very little chance that you don’t remember it.  Its subtitle was “the most effective muscle producing program ever!”  So, yeah, it was pre...
Post a Comment
Read more