Shohaku Okumura, a Soto Zen priest, has said that "Zazen is good for nothing". I was thinking after my own zazen practice one day, and this haiku came to mind.

sitting in silence
is it good for nothing?
maybe so

^{"Moon of the Ruins" by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi}

The picture is Bodhidharma, the guy who introduced Zen from India to China. It is said he meditated in zazen for so long that the building crumbled around him.

Zazen (座禅) is, by the way, Zen sitting meditation. That's kind of a strange term, actually, because Zen itself simply means meditation. It comes from the Sanskrit word ध्यान dhyāna, meaning meditation, which the Chinese represented as 禅 and pronounced chan, and the Japanese pronounce as zen. But there are many forms of meditation and it can get confusing which we are talking about, hence I usually specify Zen meditation

The phrase Zazen is good for nothing is actually Okamura Roshi's translation of an idea put forth by Kodo Sawaki, a man who is very important in modern Zen Buddhism as the guy who basically reintroduced zazen as an important practice in Japan.

It refers to a specific kind of zazen called shikantaza which is the main form the Soto school practices. The basic idea is to not focus on anything and just sit. No focusing on the breath, as many forms of meditation teach, nor focusing on a burning candle, nor counting breaths, nor silencing repeating a mantra. Just sitting without focus on anything. It's harder than it sounds.

The idea is that we shouldn't be doing it for a reason: Not for chasing enlightenment or for health or whatever. We do it to do it and that's all.

Zazen is good for nothing. And that's exactly why I've been doing it for over twenty years.

Well maybe it's good for one thing: for writing haiku about how it's good for nothing 😉

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.

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