Shikantaza Is Not Limited to the Mind
CONTRARY TO POPULAR understanding, zazen is not a practice of mind. It is not just a thing you do with your mind, even if the thing you’re doing is attending or concentrating. It includes the mind but is not limited to it.
In American culture, people tend to identify themselves with the arisings and goings-on of their minds, but zazen is not overly concerned with such things. Zazen also includes the breath and body; even so, we don’t exactly apply the mind to the breath, nor do we focus specifically on bodily sensations. Rather, zazen is simply sitting in presence to breath, sitting in presence to mind, sitting in presence to body. Zazen is body, breath, and mind harmoniously “zazening.” Body, breath, and mind are in fact one thing. Or, more accurately, body-breath-mind is actually body-breath-mind-universe. As Dogen Zenji, the Japanese founder of the Soto Zen sect, wrote in Shobogenzo Yuibutsu-yobutsu (“Only Buddha and Buddha”), “The entire universe is the true human body … The entire universe is the dharma body of the self.”
In the lineage in which I teach, as in many others, the tradition is to encourage people who are new to zazen to begin by
