What Is Zen

Zen is not a set of beliefs you sign up for. It asks you to accept nothing on faith and to leave nothing of yourself at the door. It is a practice, the simple and demanding practice of sitting still and paying attention, handed down for more than two thousand years because people keep finding it worth doing.

At its center is zazen, seated meditation. You sit upright, you let your breath be natural, and you bring an open attention to this moment, the only one there ever is. Thoughts arrive and depart like weather. You notice that you have drifted into thinking, and you return, gently, to your posture and your breath. The returning, repeated without end and without judgment, is the whole of it. There is nothing to achieve and nowhere else to be.

The Soto way: just sitting. Our practice belongs to the Soto school of Zen, founded in thirteenth-century Japan by the great teacher Eihei Dogen. Dogen taught a practice he called shikantaza, which means just sitting. By this he meant something radical and freeing: that you do not sit in order to become enlightened later, as if practice were a ladder to somewhere better. You sit because sitting itself, fully given to, is already the expression of an awakened life. The practice and the goal are one and the same. For an hour on a Sunday morning, there is nothing to fix and nothing to chase.

How it reached the Upstate. In 1959 a Japanese priest named Shunryu Suzuki came to San Francisco, expecting to stay a short while, and ended up spending the rest of his life teaching Americans how to sit. The community he founded, the San Francisco Zen Center, sent its students out across the country to start centers of their own, including the Chapel Hill Zen Center in North Carolina, where the two of us learned to practice. Zen is passed from one person to the next, warm hand to warm hand, and the practice we offer here in Greenville carries that same living current.

What people find in it. People come to Zen for many reasons, and often they come during a hard season, carrying something heavy. What they find is not an escape from their life and not a quick calm that fades by Monday. It is a steadier way of being inside their own experience. Many describe a clarity that settles over ordinary things, a little more room between a feeling and a reaction, and the rare relief of, for a while, having nothing to accomplish. The practice will not promise you anything, and that turns out to be part of its honesty and its power. You give yourself to the sitting, and the rest tends to take care of itself.

Why it might be for you. You do not need to be calm, spiritual, flexible, or experienced. You do not need to be a Buddhist or to become one. You need only the willingness to sit down and begin, again and again. If that simple thing speaks to something in you, you already understand more about Zen than any explanation can give. Come and sit with us, and find out for yourself.