Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen

After four years in the monasteries of Song China, Dōgen came home in 1227, and among the first things he wrote was this manual on how to sit in meditation. It is an independent treatise, not a commentary, some 750 characters of formal parallel prose in classical Chinese, and its title recommends zazen, seated meditation, to all. It opens on an objection: if the Way is complete from the start, why practise at all? Dōgen answers that the slightest deviation opens a gap as wide as that between heaven and earth, and that the Buddha himself sat for six years and Bodhidharma faced a wall for nine. Then the instructions: a quiet room, moderate food, a thick mat and a round cushion, legs crossed in full or half lotus, ears in line with the shoulders and nose with the navel, eyes open, breath passing softly through the nose. The thinking asked for is what he calls hishiryō, non-thinking. Zazen in this account is not a technique for reaching awakening but a practice of ease and joy that is awakening itself. Much of the wording on posture comes from a zazen manual by Changlu Zongze, a Chinese abbot, in a monastic code of 1103. Three versions are known: the lost text of 1227; a copy of 1233 in Dōgen's own hand, kept at Eihei-ji and made a National Treasure in 1952; and the version preserved in his collected sayings, which Sōtō temples recite today. Carl Bielefeldt, an American scholar of Zen, argued in 1988 that this last version could not have been finished before 1242. Among those who lectured on it was the Sōtō scholar Kaiten Nukariya, whose talks were printed in 1925.