The form of meditation we do in Zen, unless we’re working on a koan, is called shikantaza – nothing but sitting – or silent illumination. It’s been called a “method of no method,” in which we let go of any striving whatsoever – even to control our meditative experience. So can we do “bad zazen?” Theoretically, there’s no such thing, and yet it sure feels like there is! What is this about?
Quicklinks to Article Content:
The Tricky Simplicity of Zazen
Judge Bad Zazen, Or Not to Judge Bad Zazen?
“Bad Zazen” and the Matter of Choice
The Choice to Devote Ourselves to Zazen
Complete Surrender to Zazen
The Tricky Simplicity of Zazen
The apparent simplicity of zazen belies its challenging nature. My Zen lineage comes through Japan, and the instructions for zazen on the official Japanese Soto School website are 869 words long, but 89% of those words have to do with physical aspects of sitting: The setting, the preparation, the posture, and the breath. For example (this are just excerpts):
When you do zazen, find a quiet place where you can sit without disturbances. It should be neither too dark nor too bright, warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The sitting place should be neat and clean… Avoid sitting when you haven’t had sufficient sleep or when you are physically exhausted. Before sitting, eat moderately and avoid alcohol… Wear your clothing loosely but neatly… Place a thick square mat (zabuton) in front of the wall and put a zafu on it. Sit down, placing the base of your spine at the center of the zafu so that half of the zafu is behind you. After crossing your legs, rest your knees firmly on the zabuton… Place your right hand, palm-up, on your left foot, and your left hand palm-up on your right palm. The tips of your thumbs should be lightly touching each other… Keep your eyes slightly open… close your mouth and continue to breathe through your nose naturally…[i]
Just 11% of the Soto Shu instructions for zazen have to do with your mind – that is, what you consciously try to do once you’re settled in the zazen posture. Here’s that explanation:
Do not concentrate on any particular object or control your thought. When you maintain a proper posture and your breathing settles down, your mind will naturally become tranquil. When various thoughts arise in your mind, do not become caught up by them or struggle with them; neither pursue nor try to escape from them. Just leave thoughts alone, allowing them to come up and go away freely. The essential thing in doing zazen is to awaken (kakusoku) from distraction and dullness, and return to the right posture moment by moment.[ii]
Simple, right? As long as you maintain a proper posture and let your breathing settle down, zazen more or less takes care of itself. Just leave thoughts alone. But anyone who has tried zazen knows that simple does not mean easy. The statement that if you do zazen correctly, “your mind will naturally become tranquil” can seem like a cruel joke or an indictment when you repeatedly find yourself caught up in thoughts or slipping into dullness.
To Judge Bad Zazen, Or Not to Judge Bad Zazen?
There are many writings about how we should avoid striving in zazen and refrain from judging whether our zazen is good or bad. We recite them all the time to remind ourselves. In his essay “Zazen Yojinki,” Zen Master Keizan says, “Don’t be concerned about how well or poorly you think you are doing.”[iii] Certainly, this must mean that dwelling on and evaluating our meditation is not helpful. In Fukanzazengi, Dogen says, “Have no designs on becoming a Buddha.”[iv] So, we should be sitting without any agenda, right? I have a Zen teacher friend who studied in Japan many years. His Japanese teacher would say, “In zazen, your job is to warm your cushion.” In my own instructions for zazen, I say, “Do not struggle against forgetfulness. The instant you awaken, be grateful and throw away past and future.”
Despite all these exhortations to avoid struggle and judgment in zazen, we still have a sense that sometimes that our zazen misses the mark – or, at very least, sometimes it’s better than others. It’s unavoidable that we have some sense that not all zazen is the same. Some zazen, maybe in the middle of retreat, is spacious, still, and quiet. Everything seems luminous and we truly understand the description of thoughts coming and going freely – they don’t trouble us any more than passing clouds in the sky. We let go of tracking the passage of time. Nothing seems boring, and just being is sufficient. At other times in zazen, we’re spend our whole time mulling over our plans, thoughts, or worries the same way we do when we’re not on the meditation seat. Or we find ourselves falling asleep or just enduring what feels like an unpleasant experience.
Although Keizan tells us not to be concerned about how well or how poorly we are doing, in the next line in Zazen Yojinki he says, “Just understand that time is as precious as if you were putting out a fire on your head.”[v] Surely, we’re not following that admonition when we’re daydreaming in zazen! Naturally, our rational mind reasons we have to evaluate how well we’re doing in order to practice as urgently as if we had only moments to save our life through our zazen. Keizan also gives some detailed instructions for things to do if your zazen is dull or scattered. He says:
If dullness or sleepiness overcome your sitting, move the body and open the eyes wider, or place attention above the hairline or between your eyebrows. If you are still not fresh, rub the eyes or the body. If that still doesn’t wake you [get up and do walking meditation; if that doesn’t work]… wash your eyes and forehead with cold water. Or chant the “Three Pure Precepts of the Bodhisattvas.” Do something; don’t just fall asleep. You should be aware of the great matter of birth and death and the swiftness of impermanence. What are you doing sleeping when your eye of the way is still clouded? …If the mind wanders, place attention at the tip of the nose and tanden and count the inhalations and exhalations. If that doesn’t stop the scattering, bring up a phrase and keep it in awareness – for example: “What is it that comes thus?” or “When no thought arises, where is affliction? – Mount Sumeru!” or “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West? – The cypress in the garden.” Sayings like this that you can’t draw any flavour out of are suitable.[vi]
In another of our regular chants, Chan Master Seng T’san’s in Faith in Mind, it says, “Merely stagnating in duality, how can you recognize oneness?”[vii] And “Bound by thoughts, you depart from the real, and sinking into a stupor is as bad.”[viii] Chan master Hongzhi, champion of silent illumination, says, “If illumination neglects serenity then aggressiveness appears… but if serenity neglects illumination, murkiness leads to wasted Dharma.”[ix] He means that our practice will be impeded if we’re striving after some kind of experience or realization, but if we sit passively without looking into the profound nature of our sitting – and of Reality itself – we can sit all our lives and miss the point.
So just what are we supposed to do about zazen? The ancestors tell us not to strive, struggle, or judge, and yet they also give us plenty of instructions that sound like ways of improving our zazen or getting it back on course when it’s not going well.
“Bad Zazen” and the Matter of Choice
Let’s set aside for a moment the idea that there is no such thing as “bad zazen.” Let’s explore what our zazen is like when we feel like it’s off the mark. Based on my own experience and what I’ve heard from many others, here’s what “bad zazen” is like:
- You can’t wait for it to be over
- You’re primarily focused on what you’re going to do next
- You’re so caught up in thinking or daydreaming while sitting that you barely remember your intention to do zazen (you end up feeling like “you weren’t even present”)
- You can’t be bothered to stay awake even when you’re not tired
- Your experience is dominated by constant small “corrections” to your sitting, like subtle adjustments to posture, letting go of thoughts over and over, or remembering to keep the eyes open
- You drift off into semi-conscious dreamland, where your thinking doesn’t bear any relationship to reality
- It feels like all you’re doing is enduring pain
- You get stuck in depressing or anxiety-producing perseveration and end up feeling worse for having sat zazen
- You spend your sitting trying to remember why it is you sit
So-called “bad zazen” can look and feel many different ways, but I believe it’s due, more or less, to one thing: For one reason or another, we are not fully giving ourselves over to zazen. We’re not engaging the practice wholeheartedly.
I think about bad zazen as a choice we’re making rather than being the result of a lack of self-discipline or skill. It may be that “choice” versus “lack of self-discipline” are just different lenses we can use to look at the same issue, but I think it’s much more empowering to think of it as a matter of choice.
For example, when I find myself planning my garden during zazen, I’m choosing to do that. There’s part of me that thinks zazen is boring compared to anticipating what I’m going to do next in my yard. Sure, I’ve had some really transcendent and luminous moments in zazen in the past, but I’ll experience them again sometime, right? When I’m dozing off in zazen even though I’m not really tired, part of me has decided I know what’s going to happen next and it’s not worth staying awake for. If I suddenly thought I was soon going to die and this was my last session of zazen ever, I would probably be wide awake. When I’m sitting zazen and rehashing the plot of a TV show I’ve been watching, there’s part of me that thinks I’m going to live forever and there will be plenty of time to give myself to zazen later. When zazen feels like an endurance test because of physical or emotional pain or restlessness, I have rejected the prospect of just being present with what is because I don’t like what is.
Of course, the drawback to thinking of bad zazen as being a matter of choice is that then we’ll conclude that we should blame ourselves for our bad zazen. This is counterproductive. When we blame ourselves, we are dividing ourselves against ourselves. We imagine some noble part of us wants to devote ourselves to zazen wholeheartedly while some other lazy, undisciplined, ignorant, or obstinate part is foiling our plans. We imagine that the part of ourselves that’s letting us down should be criticized, judged, castigated, rejected, disciplined, lectured, punished, or denied membership in the club of acceptable aspects of self. Then it will get in line and let us meditate properly. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), if you can win a battle against yourself, it’s likely only a temporary win.
Navigating the reality of choice turns out to be subtle thing. It turns out that it takes a while to recognize opportunities to make choices and learn where our capacity for choice resides. It takes a while to get to know the conflicting desires within us and how to get our internal committee to agree on course of action. You might say that good zazen is a matter of choice, but it takes skill to learn to make the choices consistent with our deepest aspirations. (And even then, of course, we won’t always make those choices!)
The Choice to Devote Ourselves to Zazen
The only place we have any choice is in this moment, here and now. Ultimately, this moment is the only thing that’s real. The choices we can make – or are likely to make – are constrained by our conditioning and our limited views, but each choice matters. Our choices can be shaped by vow – by our intentions and aspirations. When we have a decision to make, we can align our choice with our vows. Over time, we can affect the quality of our zazen – and, of course, our life – through our moment-by-moment choices.
Over time, we can become more familiar with ourselves – the way our particularly body-mind, with its unique karma, works. We learn how to recognize moments of choice and respond to them in a way that’s freer of habit energy, unhelpful desire, or fear. In terms of zazen, we learn how to work with ourselves just as we might learn to be a skillful parent to our child or learn to be effective leader in the workplace. How can we encourage ourselves to pay more attention? How can we gently remind ourselves of what we want to be doing on the meditation seat?
If we want to convince ourselves to devote ourselves wholeheartedly to zazen, it’s very helpful to experience what that really feels like. For most people, that happens – at least early in practice – in the space of silent retreat. Given many hours, or multiple days, of simplicity, silence, and a whole lot of sitting, our body-mind naturally becomes more settled. We glimpse the next level of depth that’s possible in zazen. Our bodhicitta – our way-seeking mind – is strengthened. We become a little more inspired to give ourselves over to the process of zazen and practice as whole.
We should not, in Soto Zen, become slack and complacent, thinking that “just sitting” means to sit passively like a sack of potatoes and allow habit energy or dullness to overcome us. We all do this to some extent, of course, at least now and then. When we recognize we’re not surrendering everything we can to zazen, we should remind ourselves of the mystery and power of zazen. Despite its elusive nature, we should keep opening up to it, exploring it, learning to trust it, and giving ourselves to it. We can call to mind an inspiring teaching about zazen, like Keizan’s phrase in Zazen Yojinki: “Zazen means to clarify the mind-ground and dwell comfortably in your actual nature,”[x] or Dogen’s phrase in Fukanzazengi, “[Zazen is] the dharma gate of joyful ease.”[xi]
Those of us who primarily sit shikantaza may think that profound experiences belong to people who formally work with koans and strive for awakening. However, although shikantaza is more subtle, it is equally profound. I had a conversation with some of my fellow Zen teachers the other day and we were talking about koans versus shikantaza. I asked, “How do you encourage people to work on insight if their primary practice is shikantaza?” A teacher who trained in Japan quoted his teacher in response: “If you are sitting true shikantaza, you can pass every koan.” The key to this teaching is if you are sitting true shikantaza. What is that?
The Japanese term “shikantaza” doesn’t mean sitting around like we usually do, it literally means, “nothing but precisely sitting.” Just sitting and absolutely nothing else. That’s not an easy thing to do! And yet it’s also not something we do by pitting one part of ourselves against other parts, trying to discipline our own minds or hearts. Nothing but precisely sitting is an activity we surrender to, that we entrust ourselves to, or allow.
I’ve heard that a Zen teacher I really admire, Rev. Issho Fujita, used to teach people about zazen by having them walk on a slack line. That’s like a tightrope suspended between two anchors, but it’s only a few feet off the ground (so you don’t hurt yourself if you fall off) and slack instead of tight. I’m not saying it’s easy to walk on a tightrope, but in some ways it’s even harder walking on a slack line, which will start swinging back and forth if you wobble. Despite this tricky situation, it’s possible – at least for some people – to balance, walk, and even do tricks on a slack line! The key to doing this is a curious kind of physical relaxation and trust of the body, not a tightly controlled physical effort. This is exactly the kind of physical relaxation and trust of the body that’s called for in zazen. Sometimes we get it just right and something larger than us carries us along. Other times we fall off – but then we just get back up and try again.
When it comes to “choosing” to devote ourselves wholeheartedly to zazen, “nothing but sitting” may sound really boring to our small mind. We may have some idea of what rewarding meditation might feel like, and when we don’t find ourselves able to make that happen, “just sitting” anyway seems less interesting and attractive than the most banal of daydreams. When we feel like this, we have forgotten what true shikantaza is. That’s okay. No need to beat ourselves up about it. But if we want to explore zazen, we can try to remember what it is and what it’s not. We can try to let go of all our ideas about it and allow our body-mind to discover what it is right here, right now. When we are sitting true shikantaza, boredom is impossible.
Complete Surrender to Zazen
The complete surrender to zazen is not at all easy, and that’s the point. The effort to completely surrender to zazen is our effort to realize our true nature and awaken to Reality. Zazen is not a means to an end, it is the end itself. We are sitting there practicing being enlightened. Of course it’s hard, because we’re not yet fully enlightened, right?
It takes time and diligence to learn to make the kind of effort that is required in Zazen. Most of the time we will miss the mark, just as if we were walking on a slack line. We try too hard, or we don’t try enough. We get too fixated on a result, or we go passive and stop being engaged.
Fortunately, when even for a moment we manage to wholeheartedly give ourselves to zazen, when even for a moment we sit “true shikantaza,” it fuels our bodhicitta, or our determination to practice. As Keizan said, “If you dwell in this samadhi for even a short time, the mind-ground will be directly clarified. You should know that this is the true gate of the buddha-way.”[xii] Samadhi is a state of nondual awareness that we imagine must take lots of effort to attain, but in reality, it’s a natural state of being that’s accessible to us right here, right now, if we surrender completely to what’s actually happening.
Here’s a little poem I wrote to express this:
The buzz of my karma rarely subsides but when it does
The luminous intimacy of this moment
Outshines every worldly concern.
In summary, zazen is not a slack state devoid of aspiration and effort. Our zazen requires us to let go of all striving toward a result, and yet it asks us to show up in a way that requires a lifetime of diligent effort to master. Can our zazen be “bad?” Exploring that question for yourself is part of the practice and answering either “yes” or “no” fails to capture the truth of the situation.
Let’s compare our zazen practice to trying to walk on a slack line, again: The whole activity of trying to walk on the slack line is zazen, including the line, the anchors, your body, your aspiration, your struggle, your successes, your falling, and what you learn about your body and mind. In this sense there is no bad zazen. At the same time, how wonderful when you find yourself balanced on the slack line, relying on something infinitely more profound than your conscious will power or your discriminating mind, learning how to be alive in a whole different way!
Endnotes
[i] https://www.sotozen.com/eng/zazen/howto/index.html
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Keizan, “Zazen-Yojinki.” Translation posted on the website of Antaiji monastery. It seems that at least part of the translation is by Shohaku Okumura, as excerpts of the text were published under his name in 2002 in a booklet produced by the Japanese Soto Shu (Soto Zen school) called Soto Zen: An Introduction to Zazen.
[iv] Dogen, Eihei; Soto Shu (translation). Fukan Zazengi (Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen). Click here for the text.
[v] Keizan, “Zazen-Yojinki.” Ibid
[vi] Ibid
[vii] Sheng Yen. Faith in Mind: A Guide to Chan Practice. Dharma Publishing, 1987.
[viii] Ibid
[ix] Leighton, Taigen Dan (translator). Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. Boston, MA: Tuttle Publishing, 2000
[x] Keizan, “Zazen-Yojinki.” Ibid
[xi] Dogen, “Fukanzazengi.” Ibid
[xii] Keizan, “Zazen-Yojinki.” Ibid
