“If you want to travel the Way of buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing.”
—Dogen
One of the most famous Buddhist meditations is the Zen practice of “just sitting,” or shikantaza in Japanese. For someone who wants a better world and wants to show up in it as a better person, it’s fair to ask: Why take up a practice of doing nothing in a world like this? Why would we do such a simple, directionless thing?
Twentieth-century Zen master Kodo Sawaki Roshi answered that question with this apparent paradox: “In the world, it’s always about winning or losing, plus or minus. Yet in shikantaza, it’s about nothing. It’s good for nothing. That’s why it is the greatest and most all-inclusive thing there is.”
If there’s one historical figure most associated with just sitting practice, it’s Eihei Dogen (1200–1253), the founder of the Soto Zen school in Japan. A brilliant, poetic, and often enigmatic teacher, Dogen articulated a vision of meditation that has shaped Zen practice ever since.
Dogen said that when things are in their right place, they can rest. That includes us. When we just sit—without forcing anything, without chasing anything, without doing anything—we begin to rest. And in that resting, something basic and original about having a life can be appreciated. It’s the steady presence of ordinary mind, awake, alive, willing.
Just sitting. Nothing missing.
I love how plain that sounds—just sitting. Simple. Ordinary. Doable. Anyone can just sit.
The practice itself is as unadorned as the name suggests. You find a quiet place. You sit upright on a cushion or chair, relaxed but alert. Your hands rest in your lap. Your eyes and face are relaxed. You let your body breathe, let the breath breathe you. You let sounds be sounds, thoughts be thoughts, sensations be sensations. They all come and go. When you notice your mind has wandered off, you gently come back to presence.
That’s it. There’s no need to fix yourself. No need to chase after calm or clarity or awakening. Just sit.
Shikantaza is set up methodically, but it is not a method. It’s been called a method of no method. Just sitting is an orientation to meditation practice. It can also be an orientation to life and a way of being in the world. It is a kind of counterintelligence—not a doing mind, but an awareness of our awareness, a kind of thinking nonthinking. In this way, your ideas about who you actually are can change, and the way you understand what is going on here can change, which in turn changes the way you meet what’s happening in the world you live in.
When people come to see me in my capacity as a Zen teacher, it’s often because they feel something is missing. Some are looking for relief from stress, grief, or illness. Some want to concentrate better, sleep more easily, or stop yelling at their kids. Some want a break from a world that feels overwhelming and fractured and doomed. Some want to become a “better person.” Some are looking for what the Buddha saw when he sat under the Bodhi Tree.
If you’ve been around the block a few times—with successes, failures, love, loss, spiritual highs, angry atheisms, craving, achieving, always reaching for something just over the next hill—after a while, the chase wears you out. No matter what you grab onto, you land back in the same old refrain: I can’t get no satisfaction.
In my case, it was a sense of deep disconnection. I was moving fast, doing more, always scanning the horizon, never quite landing in my own life. I didn’t know how to be still and just be. I was pathologically altruistic—out to be a martyr and save the world—or obsessively self-absorbed, feeling like I needed to save myself at all costs. Ricocheting between the two, I was increasingly burned out and crispy and asking myself, “Is that all there is?”
We live in a world where everything and everyone wants something from you—your attention, your money, your email address, your thumbs-ups and likes. We’re bombarded with ads that promise a self-care routine that will “definitely do the trick,” or a book that’s “the last one you’ll ever need to read,” or a product—medication, beer, or vacation—that will restore your health, your love life, your happiness.
Politicians, pundits, podcasts, and headlines are all telling us who’s right and who’s wrong, what side to take, and what we should do about just about everything. Or they tell us to give up all hope, because nothing at all can be done. We are doomscrolling or hope-seeking as a way of life.
We all experience this endless messaging that we are not enough, and that the thing we’re missing is whatever is being dangled in front of us at the moment.
Shikantaza is the dropping away of all of that.
It’s not self-improvement, not even self-care.
It’s not transactional, not hierarchical.
It escapes ideology.
As the twentieth-century Japanese Zen master Kosho Uchiyama said, “Just sitting is not a means to an end. It is the manifestation of our true self.” We don’t practice to become something else. We practice to come home to what we already are.
The descriptions of shikantaza emphasize the formlessness of nonduality: no separate sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, or mind. Poetry, metaphor, and the spiritual imagination can shine light on the many facets of objectless, themeless meditation. They’re saying that it’s not about reaching some understanding, or poking our intellect into the workings of the world. It’s the subtle activity of allowing all things—not just you—to be completely at rest as they are.
In this way, shikantaza goes against the stream of the attainment mind that we’ve all been coopted into having. We are taking our attention back, decluttering and decolonizing the mind. Letting things be, and letting things be free—because, well, things are free. They freely come and go, freely begin and end, freely come together and fall apart and come together in new ways.
This isn’t mysterious, actually. It is really just the way things roll. It’s the nature of things to be free.
Somewhere in us, we know that stillness isn’t just an empty void. It reveals something. It changes how we relate to what’s already here. Life is happening now—not in the next moment, and not the last. And sometimes, simply sitting down and staying close to what is—as it is—is the most human thing we can do.
In that kind of stillness, we begin to appreciate our life as something vast and ungraspable. A moment of silence can open into boundlessness.
This isn’t self-improvement. It’s an expression of something more original than our habits and foibles—something that includes them but isn’t defined by them. It’s the heart-mind before conflict and critique, before waves of grief and bursts of joy. And when we just sit, something settles. Something reorders—not because anything is added, but because nothing is taken away.
When Shakyamuni Buddha first realized the interbeing of his own true nature and the true nature of all beings, he saw that all things are complete just as they are. Nothing is missing. We share in the virtues and wisdom that are our natural inheritance as living, breathing, sensing, thinking, feeling, conscious beings.
The Buddha spent the rest of his life enlarging on this insight into interbeing, teaching how we can return to this naturally wise and compassionate life through practice.
Similarly, Dogen taught that shikantaza isn’t simply about sitting still—it is about embodying the awakened nature of all beings, here and now. Practice and realization are not two separate things: We meditate because the act of sitting is the natural expression of our awakened nature. We don’t sit in order to become a buddha. We sit because we already are one.
And yet we don’t see this. Our understanding gets topsy-turvy. We become confused by the many intoxicants of the world—habits and illusions that accumulate over time and settle into our psyches and our societies—and don’t realize our true, already-awakened nature
In the Lotus Sutra—one of the most phantasmagorical texts of the Mahayana tradition and perhaps the most important to Dogen—there’s a parable about a poor man and a priceless jewel sewn into the pocket of his robe. The man wanders for years feeling lost and forgotten and living with all the hardships that alienation brings: despair, anger, sorrow, loneliness, destitution. All the while, he is unaware that the treasure he needs has been with him the whole time. He just never thought to stop and look.
That’s what shikantaza can reveal: that we already have what we’re looking for, that nothing is missing. But unless we stop and look in our own pocket, the sparkling jewel-nature of our awareness may remain hidden, its color and clarity still in the realm of potential.
Our practice is to realize that potential. To manifest it. We sit not to find something new, but to discover what’s always been there.
Even after we do find the jewel, we still need to learn how to use it. We polish it so it can shine in how we live—in how we speak to a neighbor, care for the earth, stay with things when we’d rather run. We bring just sitting to everything we—by impulse—think we ought to exclude. We open to what’s closed off. We widen our narrowness and rest our attention in something truer than what we’ve bought into with our words and concepts.
Always, we endeavor to use the jewel well. And a jewel found at the bottom of a dark cave is still a jewel—even in its rough, dirty, unpolished form. In fact, it becomes even more beautiful and lovely when it’s polished. We polish the jewel and cut facets into it, so its natural beauty and brilliance can shine through our way of living and be shared with all.
Just sitting has helped me let go of the utopian dream of a perfect world—or the idea that this world is simply a stepping stone to a better one waiting for me. It’s helped me let go of the dream of a perfect and pristine practice, even the dream of perfect stepping stones toward some kind of enlightenment.
The twelfth-century Chinese master Hongzhi Zhengjue said, “Silent and serene, forgetting words, bright clarity appears before you. When you reflect it, you become vast. When you embody it, you are spiritually uplifted. Spiritually solitary and shining, inner illumination restores wonder.”
The jewel in your pocket is the ability to wander in wonder at the truth of this world and this life. The priceless gem is resting in intimacy with all that is. In finding and appreciating what we already have, we get to share what is lovely and beautiful in all the parts of our lives.
Dogen called this the dharma gate of ease and joy. It’s not a gate reserved for advanced monks or spiritual adepts, but one open to everyone. It’s ease because it’s natural and already here. It’s joy because it is always shared—we give it and receive it in the ordinary moments of life with others.
Our world is full of violence, climate crisis, inequality, and grief, and also full of beauty, kindness, resilience, and creativity. Shikantaza includes all of it.
We can choose how to live our lives through a never-ending and ever-deepening process of becoming intimate with all that is, without being crushed by it or running away from it. Just sitting is one way to bear witness to the intimacy, the “just this-ness” of the life we have in our hands.
We sit with our own inner world—with our fear, longing, fatigue, restlessness. All the parts we’d rather fix or avoid. We meet them too. Not to change them, but to realize that we are not identified by them. We begin to forget the self in a particular kind of way.
Dogen famously wrote: “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by the ten thousand things.”
I don’t think this is a sentimental notion. I also don’t think of it as a psychological process. It is a steady and gradual transformation of who you experience yourself to be in the real and tangible world. Instead of a solitary individual—alienated and apart—you begin to see yourself as other and other as yourself. You experience yourself differently and reimagine the ideas that shape and guide us about our marriage, communities, national debates, and world crises. Vast and open, the world opens before us. Hongzhi said we “meet all beings as our ancestors.”
This is a remarkable way to rest in the belonging that is always there. Some call this “true reality.” In my experience, when one lives with this kind of ease and joy, it can’t help but be shared with others.
However, this practice of nonattainment isn’t ethically neutral or passive. Although Dogen wrote about expecting nothing, seeking nothing, grasping nothing, his next words are essential: “Without having the slightest expectation, maintain the prescribed manner of conduct. Think of acting to save and benefit living beings, earnestly carry out all good deeds, and give up former evil ones, solely for the sake of becoming the foundation of happiness for human and heavenly beings.”
We sit within the dynamic and always alive ethic of care. This is the core and truest intention of the practice.
If you want to practice just sitting, you don’t have to be advanced. You don’t have to get it right. If you’re drawn to the practice, that intention is enough to get started. Really. You don’t need much more than that.
That said, the way Zen meditation is sometimes introduced doesn’t always help. Well-meaning teachers might say, “Just sit for ten years and follow the breath,” or they quote Dogen who in turn was quoting the monk Yaoshan Weiyan: “Just think nonthinking. How do you think nonthinking? Nonthinking.” Or they’ll offer Sawaki’s line that “Zazen is good for nothing.”
These are deep and meaningful teachings, but without grounding or context, they can sometimes land as more confusing than helpful. Especially for someone coming to practice in the middle of pain, uncertainty, or overwhelm, phrases like these might feel more like a barrier than an invitation.
Most of us come to meditation because something feels unsettled—maybe a vague sense that something’s missing, or maybe full-blown existential crisis. In those moments, we’re not looking for lofty concepts. We’re looking for a place to land. When meditation is framed as something distant, mysterious, or reserved for advanced practitioners, it can feel out of reach. That’s unfortunate, because silent, still sitting really is for everyone.
The hardest part? Just getting started.
You don’t need perfect conditions to begin. You don’t need a new cushion, or an expert by your side. All you need is a space to sit, a body to sit with, and a willingness to be present with what’s here.
I like to sit at a time of day when I’m unlikely to be interrupted. I chose a space that’s quiet and not too bright or too dim. Sometimes I place something nearby that feels grounding or beautiful: a flower, a candle, a smooth stone. These are small gestures of care, not requirements.
Then I sit. Hands resting in my lap, eyes softly open, I relax my jaw and face. I rest my attention on the rhythm of the breath in my belly, not altering it, just letting it be. And I let myself be open to whatever arises—sounds, sensations, feelings, thoughts. It all comes. It all goes. When I notice I’ve drifted off into a story or a plan, I gently return. That’s the rhythm of it.
There’s nothing to add. Nothing to subtract. In this kind of sitting, we begin to sense the self-sufficiency of our own awareness. Even if we’ve spent years being self-critical or distracted, we can still rest in this moment. We don’t have to improve it. We don’t have to improve ourselves. We’re just giving it all a rest.
Of course, we forget. Of course, we drift. That’s not a failure—it’s the practice.
The golden moment isn’t when everything is quiet and serene. It’s when we notice we’ve wandered, and we make the choice to return. Again and again.
This is hard to trust at first. We may wish practice would fix our lives or make our problems go away. But more often, what it does is help us become more willing to meet our lives and the life of the world with more steadiness, more clarity, and more compassion.
There’s no finish line. Like doing the laundry or cooking a meal, the process repeats because we are taking care of our lives. It’s never over.
Sometimes I think the most radical thing we can do is take some time to do nothing at all. Not doomscrolling. Not fixing all the things that need fixing. Not buying or selling. Not chasing insights or complex ideas. Not reacting to what bothers us, or even to what we agree with.
Yes, there’s a time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to protest and a time to help. As the Bible says, there’s a season for everything. But right now, we’re just sitting.
