Just Sitting, and the Identity of Practice and Enlightenment

Dogen is the founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan and one of the most original religious thinkers his country produced. Trained on Mount Hiei and dissatisfied with the Buddhism of his day, he travelled to China, where under the Caodong (Soto) master Rujing he had the awakening he described as the "dropping off of body and mind."

Returning to Japan around 1227, he taught a form of practice stripped to its essence: shikantaza, "just sitting", seated meditation (zazen) undertaken not as a technique to reach some later goal but as itself the full expression of enlightenment. This is Dogen's most radical teaching, the identity of practice and realization (shusho-itto): one does not sit in order to become a Buddha; sitting is already the activity of Buddhahood, and to seek enlightenment as a future attainment is to miss it. He set out the method plainly in his Fukanzazengi ("Universal Recommendation for Zazen") and developed his thought at length in the Shobogenzo ("Treasury of the True Dharma Eye"), a vast and philosophically dense collection whose subtle meditations on time, being, and impermanence, famously that "firewood does not become ash," each moment complete in itself, have made him a subject of serious study by modern philosophers as well as practitioners. Withdrawing from the capital, he founded the monastery of Eihei-ji, still the head temple of Soto Zen, and shaped a tradition that emphasizes rigorous monastic practice and the sufficiency of simply sitting.