Zazen · Japanese: za-zen 坐禅

Zazen is the Japanese name for seated meditation and the central discipline of Zen: sitting meditation, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, is “a foundational method of prāxis across the various schools of this Buddha-Way”.

The form is deliberately plain. “There are two postures which Zen recognizes: the lotus-posture and the half-lotus posture”, and the sitting is paired with a simple breathing exercise, the “observation of breath count”: “The breath count is performed while performing an abdominal breathing: one brings in air all the way down to the lower abdomen, and breathes out from there.”

Where the Japanese schools part company is in what the mind is asked to do while the body sits. The Sōtō school, “of which Dōgen (1200–1253) is the founder, does not rely on an elaborate kōan system” but practises shikan taza, just sitting: a “single-minded, diligent practice where the qualifying term ‘just’ means the practice of meditation without any intervention of ego-logical interest, concern, or desire”. Rinzai Zen is the school associated instead with the kōan, which “is formulated like a riddle or puzzle and is designed in such a way that intellectual reasoning alone cannot solve it”. Behind Sōtō sitting lies Dōgen’s hyphenated term “practice-realization” (shushō), whose implication is that “meditation is not a means to an end, i.e., a means to realization”. On that view you do not sit now in order to awaken later; done rightly, the sitting already is it. Our guide to koans covers the Rinzai side.