About Soto Zen

WHAT IS SOTO ZEN?

Soto Zen emphasizes the practice of "just wholehearted sitting" as an unparalleled way to realize universal buddha nature, and as a great teaching on how to live. It is sitting without a personal goal, letting go of the mind's usual clinging to ideas and identities, and returning endlessly to full engagement in the present moment. Soto Zen also teaches through koans, classic Zen teachings presented in dialogue and action, through the words of Zen masters, and through study of Buddhist sutras.

Soto Zen pays particular attention to making your best effort in all you do, not separating spiritual practice from the rest of your life, and thus to taking the best care you can of the daily realities of family, work, and community. Ethics in Soto Zen are based on the sixteen bodhisattva precepts that are a guide for one's practice and an inquiry into the best way to live. Ceremony and ritual observances are further ways to express people's joys and sorrows.

The universal spiritual practice offered by Soto Zen is particularly relevant to today's complex, dynamic and pressured world. As anxiety about the future increases, a sense of isolation and sadness grows with it, and it is easy to lose one's spiritual compass. Despite increasing standards of comfort, expanding opportunities for education, and the excitement of technology, people in the modern world have not found peace of mind or peace among each other.

Soto Zen is a way of bringing peace into our lives and into our world, because it is a way of awakening and caring. It is a practice based on the creative, life-force of the universe that is native to all beings without exception as their truest nature, known as buddha nature. As this is our nature we have always at hand in this moment the opportunity to awaken to the vast reality of life. We are already in the complete universe of life as it truly is, but we are all too rarely aware of this, so we are rarely able to act in accord with our true nature. Seeing into one's nature, the anxiety of the self gives way to the generosity of equanimity and caring.

ORIGINS IN INDIA :

Soto Zen had its origins in the earliest Buddhism of the sixth century BCE in India, through the dedicated effort and enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha. His teachings on the natural order or law of life, suffering and its causes in the delusions that beset us, and liberation or freedom from ignorance, flourished widely and entered China at the start of the Common Era.

CH'AN IN CHINA:

Zen (Ch'an) developed in China in the sixth century CE, partly as a return to the original meditation teachings of the Buddha and partly as an expression of Chinese and Taoist temperament, with their preference for naturalness and immediate experience. Soto Zen began in the ninth century with the teachings of the Chinese monks Tozan and Sozan; the first syllables of their names make up the name of the school they created.

SOTO ZEN IN JAPAN:

In the thirteenth century the Japanese monk Eihei Dogen went to China to find true understanding and brought Soto Zen back home to Japan. Dogen Zenji revitalized Soto teachings with his revolutionary emphasis on all beings' true nature as buddha and the necessity of realizing that true nature in our lives moment to moment, activity by activity. He emphasized the importance of manifesting that true buddha nature in zazen (seated meditation) in the form of shikantaza , or "just wholehearted sitting," and he taught the importance of a magnanimous mind, a radical acceptance that includes and values all things.

SOTO ZEN ARRIVES IN THE WEST:

Japanese priests laid the groundwork of Soto Zen in the United States almost a hundred years ago, and then in the 1950s Zen practice began to emerge here under the guidance of a new wave of Japanese teachers and Western students. Several Japanese and a Western teacher were instrumental in training the next generation of Western Soto teachers [view founders].