Zazen practice is done seated, traditionally in a formal cross-legged posture on a round cushion, facing a wall in the Soto style, within a meditation hall governed by a fixed schedule of sitting periods, walking meditation and communal work. Soto Zen's characteristic teaching, shikantaza, translates roughly as just sitting, and Dogen presented it not as a technique aimed at a future state of enlightenment but as the direct enactment of Buddha nature in the present moment, collapsing the ordinary distinction between practice and the goal of practice. This differs from concentrative meditation that fixes attention on an object such as the breath, and from the koan-centered zazen of the rival Rinzai school, in which a practitioner works with a teacher on a paradoxical case intended to exhaust ordinary conceptual thought.
Soto practitioners are typically instructed to maintain an alert, upright posture and an open, non-grasping awareness rather than to pursue any particular experience, and Dogen's writings caution against treating any resulting state as an achievement to be prized. Zazen is traditionally embedded within a monastic schedule of ethical discipline, ritual and community life, and traditional teachers regard the surrounding structure, not sitting practice in isolation, as what actually forms a student over time.