I HAVE been practicing Sōtō meditation for some time now, but I still come across plenty of people who seem to think that zazen (‘just sitting’) is all about striving for enlightenment. Prior to the late-twelfth century – and directly inspired by the Sixth Ancestor of Chan, Dajian Huineng (638-713) – the main tendency within Zen tended towards a belief in ‘sudden awakening’. Naturally, one would assume that the monks who meditated during this period were hoping to experience a very immediate form of enlightenment and practitioners of modern Rinzai Zen still adhere to such a method.

However, when Dōgen Zenji (1200-1253) arrived on the scene some four centuries later, having visited China and then brought the message of Zen back to his native Japan, this notion underwent a process of critical re-evaluation. Whilst Dōgen himself is often assumed to have promoted a more ‘gradualist’ approach to enlightenment than Dajian Huineng, the scholars who began to unearth the wisdom of Dōgen’s huge Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma’s Eye) soon discovered that he was defending neither method.

In fact it was during the Kamakura period that prevailed in Japan between 1185 and 1333 that Dajian Huineng’s belief in ‘sudden awakening’ was slowly replaced by the notion of hongaku, or ‘original awakening’. Promoted by the Tendai sect of Buddhism, hongaku states that all sentient beings are already enlightened in some way and it was this tradition that Dōgen was born into. In other words, the principle that everything is Buddha Nature (Busshō) has prevailed over a period of around nine hundred years. At just twenty-three, when he had first left for China, the young monk asked himself one crucial question:

“How is it that if we are already awakened, the buddhas, bodhisattvas and great ancestors continued to practice some path towards awakening?”

This would seem to be a very pertinent and logical query and brings us back to my opening remark about people assuming that zazen meditation is all about achieving enlightenment. In his very first treatise, Fukanzazengi, Dōgen provides the answer:

“Non-thinking. This is the essential art of zazen. The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It is simply the dharma gate of joyful ease, the practice-realisation of totally culminated enlightenment.”

Both practice and realisation, therefore, are viewed as one and the same thing. Far from being a means to an end, zazen must have no goal in sight. Whilst it is intention-free, such meditation is designed to enable the sitter to constantly improve upon oneself by way of this very practice.

One criticism of ‘original awakening’ is that to insist that everything which exists is Buddha Nature is like presenting samsara (aimless wandering, rebirth) as nirvana (liberation from the cycle of rebirth). It would, of course, be wrong to infer from the doctrine of ‘original awakening’ that we sentient creatures need do nothing more than strut around as though we are already perfect, and when some of the monks in Dōgen’s time began to adopt this fallacy he was quick to point out that one must make a distinction between ‘original awakening’ and ‘final awakening’.

What he meant by this, is that whilst we do indeed possess Buddha Nature the regular practice of zazen helps us move towards the realisation of who we really are. This, from a spatio-temporal perspective, is similar to what the German theologian Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) described as the ‘eternal now’. Whilst, as ‘originally’ awakened beings, we move along a steady trajectory, zazen adds an extra flourish in the sense that Dōgen’s practice-realisation offers a more pronounced form of alignment. Not as a specific objective that seeks to essentialise awakening, but as a release from attachment and a simple affirmation of that which is eternally apparent. It is all about being in the moment. Again and again and again.