Nothing to Fix, Nowhere to Go
The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the dharma gate of ease and joy… the manifestation of ultimate reality.
—MASTER DOGEN
A FEW YEARS AGO I came across an unusual description of shikantaza, the objectless meditation at the heart of Soto Zen Buddhism that is sometimes called “just sitting.”
“Shikantaza,” said Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, “is like sitting in the center of a clearing in the forest, knowing that ultimate danger is about to strike but not knowing what form it will take or from what direction it will come.”
I’d found this quote in an essay by Flora Courtois, a long-time Zen practitioner who’d studied with Yasutani Roshi at the
