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

High-Frequency Wave Load Training

A Highly Effective High-Frequency Program for Strength, Power, and Muscle Mass      In several recent articles, I have presented a few key concepts to building strength, power, and muscle mass.  One of the concepts is the “90% method” where you do most of your sets at 90% of a certain rep range.  It could be 90% of 1 rep, of 3 reps, of 5 reps, or even as high as 10 reps.  (If you want more in depth discussion on the 90% method then read my article “ Skill Training as Size Building .”)  I have also presented the concepts of weight ladders and wave loading , where, instead of sticking with the same weight throughout several sets before moving to a different weight, you move back and forth from heavier to lighter sets.      One of my more popular recent articles that used the above concepts is “ The 1-5 Program .”  It’s a high-volume program.  It’s good for lifters who like to use split programs, as it’s a mul...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mass on Demand - The 5x10 Workout

The 5x10 Workout Program      The longer that I have been training and working with other lifters, the more that I believe that simple, though not necessarily easy, programs are the best methods to use.  I think this is the case for the majority of lifters.  There are times when this is not so, but that’s usually for either elite athletes or programs for strength athletes at the top of powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting.      In my last article on different ways that you can incorporate heavy, light, and medium workouts into your training, I mentioned a few ways that this can be done.  One of them is to keep your weights the same at each workout session but rotate the sets and/or reps.  This is in direct contradiction to the most popular method of H-L-M, Bill Starr’s 5x5 training, where you keep the sets and reps the same (5x5) but rotate the amount of weight used on the lifts.  The program here uses the firs...
Post a Comment
Read more