Zazen

Zen instruction devotes an unusual proportion of its attention to the body, and the reason is doctrinal rather than merely practical.

The classical posture is full lotus, each foot on the opposite thigh, with half lotus, the Burmese position and a kneeling bench accepted as adaptations. The pelvis is tilted forward on a firm cushion so that the spine stacks without muscular effort; the ears align over the shoulders and the nose over the navel; the hands rest in the lap left over right with the thumbs lightly touching to form an oval, which functions as a feedback device, since the thumbs part when attention slackens and press together when it strains. The eyes are left open and lowered, unfocused, toward the floor or a blank wall. Closing them is discouraged as an invitation to reverie.

Soto practice faces the wall; Rinzai practice faces into the room. A period runs commonly thirty to forty minutes and is marked by a bell, with slow formal walking between periods, and during a sesshin these alternate from before dawn until night for a week at a time.

The doctrinal point is Dogen's. He argued that sitting is not a means to awakening but its expression: the practice is not a technique for producing a result later but the result already being enacted now, so that a person sitting is a buddha sitting, whether or not anything is noticed at the time. That is why the physical detail matters so much in this tradition and comparatively little in others. If the sitting is itself the thing, then the sitting has to be done properly.

Just sitting is the most easily misunderstood instruction in Buddhism, because it sounds like the absence of an instruction.

Shikantaza has no object. The practitioner does not follow the breath, does not count, does not repeat anything, does not scan the body, and does not observe thoughts in order to sort them into categories. Nor is it blankness, drifting, or waiting for something to happen. Teachers describe it as full alertness without a target: awake, upright, and not doing anything with whatever appears. The standard warning is against the two failures on either side of it, dullness and daydreaming on one hand, effortful concentration on the other.

Because there is no object there is also no measurable progress, and Soto tradition treats looking for signs of progress as itself the obstacle. This makes the practice hard to teach, hard to verify and hard to sustain without a teacher and a group, which is the practical reason Zen has always been institutionally heavy. It requires a container.

Rinzai work is structurally different. Concentration is directed onto a koan, the resulting doubt is deliberately intensified, and the private interview supplies a test. Rinzai teachers have historically criticised silent sitting as passive and liable to produce nothing whatever; Soto teachers have criticised koan work as goal-directed striving that reinforces the very self it is supposed to dissolve. That argument is old, is conducted inside the tradition by people who understand both sides, and is considerably more interesting than the harmony usually reported from outside. The Harada-Yasutani line of the twentieth century, from which a great deal of Western Zen descends, deliberately combined the two, which is one reason Western Zen does not map neatly onto the Japanese schools.