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

No Squats, No Problem!

  How to Build Mass, Strength, and Power Without Squats Tips, Advice, and Programs      On October 20th, I posted a Q&A article with my answers to a few questions that I had received lately.  One of the questions asked: Could one design a strength-building, mass-gaining program without the use of squats?  The question came from the fact that I have, over and over throughout the years, pushed the squat as the king of all exercises.  On top of that, I have, in fact, written more than once that if you don’t do heavy squats, you can all but forget about building prodigious amounts of muscle mass and strength.  However, I also pointed out that I thought it is possible to build strength and power without the almighty squat if you include enough other big, compound lifts that work the entirety of the body, especially lifts that work the back and the legs.  This essay will include, in much more detail, what I think such programs sh...
11 comments
Read more

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

Skill Training as Size Building

AKA: The 90% Rule for Mass and Power Some Thoughts and Programs on “Skill Training” as a Method for Gaining Size and Strength      In my recent essay “Heavy and High,” I suggested that the key to gaining mass for the natural bodybuilder lies in the ability to do programs that utilize both heavy weights and a high workload.  When a lot of modern bodybuilders think about training for hypertrophy, they largely think along the lines of training hard and then coupling this with plenty of rest and recovery.  Almost every program you encounter—whether you read about them, watch a YouTube video discussing it, or have a casual conversation about them with a fellow gym-goer—revolves around the balance of “intensity” with rest days after workouts.  The harder, or more , you train then the more you should rest.  I’m not denying here that workouts do, and should , involve those considerations, but I prefer lifters to think in terms of workload and work ...
1 comment
Read more