Effortless Zazen (Progress is Automatic)

Zazen is virtually an automatic process. The practitioner does his or her part by sitting in the zazen posture with the intention to focus on breathing. Thereafter, the internal process of zazen operates of itself.

Thoughts, feelings, memories come to the sitter’s mind of themselves. The Buddhist teaching that we have no control over the skandhas can be easily verified by the person doing zazen, who need simply notice, when thoughts and so on come to mind, whether he or she asked them to come there. The answer is always “no” – they bubble up of themselves like a fountain.[1]

They also depart of themselves. Perhaps they appear as a respite from the slight energy that it takes to focus on breathing. When the respite has been enough, the focus on breathing reappears. The sitter need not bring the focus back himself. Thoughts drop away and the focus reappears automatically.

By rights, zazen is virtually an effortless process. The focus on breathing is more an intention rather than a big expenditure of energy. After the practitioner sits down with this intention, the zazen process consists mainly of looking. If the sitter is laboring, he or she can experiment with backing out of the laboring and just looking at the breath coming in and going out. If it seems to the sitter that he or she must do the breathing, he can reflect that outside of zazen, he breathes without any deliberateness or will at all. A person breathes all day without ever thinking about it. Breathing occurs of itself.  

The key to just “looking” while doing zazen is to back the “you” or the “I” out of mind. Then it can be easily seen that by and large zazen proceeds by itself, like a train moving through a varied landscape.