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Zazen: The Practice of Silent Illumination

Meditation is the principal means on which Zen relies to help all beings. In Zen this is called Zazen. It is meditation that awakens us to True Life; it helps us overcome our prejudices and attachments, behind which the reality of human existence is concealed. The word Zazen, meaning "simply sitting," makes clear that we must sit in meditation unassumingly, unburdened by goals or hopes, free from desires or thoughts, including the very idea of sitting free from desires or thoughts. The secret to Zazen and its difficulty lie in the word "simply."
In fact, when we sit in Zazen, we leave behind learning and knowledge and we enter naked into the realm of not-knowing. Passing the threshold of no-knowledge allows us to put aside the divisions between "we" and "they"; we may in turn become attached to all things and not to one thing in particular. Conscious perception is no longer unilaterally and exclusively directed to the objective, external world. Rather, it converges on the subject, that is, on us, on our interior. We discover an almost unknown and forgotten reality. Silence ensues: the no-mind emerges, that is, a condition of calm, peace, no-thought, profound relaxation, and absolute silence. Many Zen Masters have put the onus on the practice of "Silent Illumination," which in the Zen tradition is called Shikantaza, namely, the act of bearing witness to the reality of our own being.
Actually, in Zen it is said: "he who enters Zazen never leaves." That is to say, when we sit in meditation we are burdened with numerous expectations, on the assumption that we are  about to practice something. Once the illusion of being a small, separate "I" is dispelled, it becomes apparent that there is no longer someone sitting in Zazen. When we return to everyday life, to our common human knowledge and faculties, we do so endowed with a heightened awareness of how to make use of them; we've become attached to reality as it is, as it is dwelt upon in Zazen and no longer as the result of our dualistic, discriminating vision.
Intense Zazen, just like Shikantaza or "the Practice of Silent Illumination", must not be confused with the fixing of the mind in Samadhi, that is, the state of "non-thinking," which is absolutely foreign to reality.
Therefore Zazen is not the "practice" of something but the manifestation of what we really are and the discovery of what we have always been. Such is awareness.


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