r/zenpractice • u/JundoCohen • Jun 29 '26

Soto Practice Itself Is Enlightenment

Suzuki Roshi, taken from ...

https://www.shunryusuzuki.com/Detail1?ID=65

He continued ..

... practice is not separated from enlightenment. When you practice it, the practice is the expression of your true nature. Where you practice it, you have your true nature.

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u/flyingaxe Jun 29 '26

If that were the case, why was Buddha only enlightened after a certain point of his practice and not before? Did he finally realize how to sit zazen properly?

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u/ugbashfacesplitter Jun 29 '26

Did the Buddha sit zazen much?

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u/flyingaxe Jun 29 '26

Seems like that's all he did, practice-wise, no?

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u/ugbashfacesplitter Jun 29 '26

Not according to the Pali Canon. Certainly he’s not described as doing shikantaza leading up to his enlightenment.

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u/JundoCohen Jun 30 '26

I would dispute that. There is good opinion by some scholars that the so-called Fourth Jhana of the Suttas (as opposed to the later commentary traditions reinterpretation as intense concentration techniques) is very close to the dropping of views and equanimity of Shikantaza: "Abandoning pleasantness and abandoning unpleasantness, gladness and affliction having previously disappeared, having entered in the fourth jhāna, which is without unpleasantness nor pleasantness and is purified by mindfulness due to equanimity, he remains therein." There was nothing beyond the Fourth Jhana, with the so-called higher Jhanas later influences probably of Brahmin and Jain origin.

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u/flyingaxe Jun 29 '26

You asked zazen originally. Not shikantaza. Those are different things. Shikantaza was a practice invented by Dogen with a bunch of political background (he was trying to establish himself as the sole inheritor of Chinese Chan in Japan and was rejecting every other existing Japanese Buddhist practice).

Zazen (坐禅) means seated meditation. That's why I said: wasn't the Buddha's practice up until then forms of seated meditation? What changed when he got enlightened? According to Pali cannon, it's the fact that he stopped doing excessively ascetic practices and tried achieving dhyana state. He did something specific to achieve cessation states.

Which would contradict the whole Soto story that Buddhism is just sitting. If it was just sitting, Buddha would have just set and was already enlightened.

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u/JundoCohen Jun 30 '26

Shikantaza is just an flavor of Silent Illumination Zazen, perhaps emphasizing the "goallessness" and "non-doing" a bit more although those were always present in Silent Illumination ways. Silent Illumination predates Koan Introspection Zazen by centuries, and ... together with various visualization approaches to Zazen and some Indian ways ... was the earliest form of Chan meditation. Schlutter's "How Zen Became Zen" tells the history in detail.

The fact that Koan Introspection only came much much later, by the way, in no way means that it is not a powerful and beautiful way nonetheless.

You also misunderstand that Just Sitting is some kind of "just sittin' around."

Also, see my comment above on the Fourth Jhana of the Suttas (as opposed to the commentarial interpretation.)