Dogen, and Just Sitting

Soto (Chinese Caodong) is one of the two major schools of Japanese Zen, and in Japan it is shaped decisively by Dogen (1200-1253), among the most original religious thinkers Japan has produced. Having trained in China, Dogen returned to teach shikantaza, "just sitting", seated meditation practised not as a technique to attain awakening but as itself the expression and enactment of the awakening already intrinsic to all beings.

For Dogen practice and realization are not two things: to sit is not to seek buddhahood but to do what a buddha does. He founded the mountain monastery Eiheiji, still one of the school's two head temples, and wrote the Shobogenzo, a dense and demanding masterwork of Zen philosophy. Where Rinzai works largely through the koan, Soto's emphasis falls on quiet, objectless sitting; later teachers, above all Keizan, spread the school widely among ordinary people, and Soto became the largest of the Japanese Zen traditions.