Sitting Still in Japan: What a Zen Monk Taught Me About Doing Nothing

# Sitting Still in Japan: What a Zen Monk Taught Me About Doing Nothing

Katagiri Roshi doesn't look at you when he corrects your posture. He walks behind you in white-socked feet, and the first thing you know is the pressure of two fingers between your shoulder blades — firm, unhurried, like he's straightening a painting he's adjusted a thousand times. Your back opens up. Your chin drops. He moves on without a word.

I met Katagiri-san — he's not technically a roshi, I'm borrowing the honorific — at Ryōsen-ji, a small Rinzai temple in the hills above Tōfuku-ji in Higashiyama, Kyoto, about three years ago. He's been sitting zazen for 31 years. He was an accountant in Osaka before that. He still uses an old casio watch, the kind that costs ¥1,200 at any convenience store, and when I asked him about it once, he said something that landed differently in Japanese than it would in English: *Jikan wa jikan da.* Time is time. The watch doesn't need to be enlightened.

That's the thing about zazen that most travel content gets wrong. It's not mystical. It's almost stubbornly ordinary.

What Zazen Actually Is (And Isn't)

Zazen is seated Zen meditation — *za* meaning seated, *zen* from the Sanskrit *dhyana*, meaning absorption or concentration. It's the central practice of Zen Buddhism and has been formalized in Japan since at least the 12th century, when monk Dōgen brought his interpretation back from China and established Eiheiji, the great training monastery in Fukui Prefecture.

Here's the part nobody tells you upfront: you're not supposed to achieve anything. No emptying the mind. No visions. No bliss. You sit in a specific posture — half-lotus or full-lotus or the more forgiving *seiza* — you hold a particular hand position called the *hokkaijoin*, and you watch your breath. When thoughts arrive, you don't fight them. You notice them the way you'd notice a cloud crossing a window, and you return your attention to breathing.

The discipline is in the returning, not in the not-thinking. This distinction sounds minor. It completely changes the experience.

Most temples that offer zazen sessions for non-Japanese visitors run them early — 6:30am is typical, and some open as early as 5:45am. There's usually a brief instruction period, 20 to 40 minutes of actual sitting, and often a short walking meditation called *kinhin* between sits. The whole thing runs about 90 minutes.

You don't need to be Buddhist. You don't need to believe in anything except that sitting quietly might be worth your hour and a half.

Katagiri-san's Morning

Katagiri-san arrives at the temple hall at 5:15am to prepare the incense. He uses a pressed blend that the temple has sourced from the same shop in Nishiki Market — the covered food arcade that runs between Teramachi and Takakura Streets in central Kyoto — for over four decades. The scent is sandalwood-forward, slightly sweet, and it clings to your clothes for the rest of the morning in a way that isn't unpleasant.

The hall at Ryōsen-ji seats about 18 people on a good day. The floor cushions, called *zafu* and *zabuton*, are stacked along one wall — round black cushions on top of flat square ones — and participants take them without being told. By the time Katagiri-san strikes the *kin* (the brass bowl that starts the session), the room has already developed a particular quality of sound. Not silence, exactly. More like an agreement about silence.

I've been to three different zazen sessions in Tokyo, two in Kyoto, and one in Kamakura, and what I've found is that the quality of instruction varies enormously. The best experiences — the ones that felt genuinely useful, not performative — happened at smaller temples where the instructor leading the session was the same person who'd been sitting that hall for decades. The worst was at a large temple near Asakusa where the instruction was entirely in English and felt almost comically rushed, like a meditation speed-run.

You sit in a particular posture, you watch your breath, and the discipline is in the returning — not in the not-thinking.

Where to Go, Specifically

If you're in Kyoto, Kennin-ji — the oldest Zen temple in the city, about 8 minutes on foot from Gion-Shijō Station — runs zazen sessions most Saturday mornings at 8:00am and charges a suggested donation of ¥500. The hall they use is spare in the way that feels intentional rather than austere, and the monks who run it have a patience for beginners that reads as genuine rather than performed. Show up by 7:45am. The session fills without prior reservation.

For Tokyo, Zōjō-ji near Shibadaimon Station (a 3-minute walk from Exit A6) occasionally runs public zazen mornings, though they're less consistent — check their website before you go because the schedule changes. The backdrop of Tokyo Tower visible through the temple gardens is either deeply incongruous or a kind of perfect statement about modern Japan, depending on your mood that morning.

The most rigorous option in the Kantō region is Engaku-ji in Kita-Kamakura — literally a one-minute walk from Kita-Kamakura Station's main exit — which runs a serious Sunday morning zazen program that has been going for decades. This one comes with the *kyōsaku*, the flat warning stick a monitor carries around the hall and uses to strike sitting practitioners on the shoulder muscles (you request it by putting your hands together in *gassho*). It's not punishment. The pressure and sharp impact genuinely relieves the accumulated tension in your back and shoulders after 20 minutes of stillness. I was skeptical and then immediately converted.

What Nobody Warned Me About the First Time

The pain in your knees is real and will arrive at approximately the 12-minute mark if you're not used to sitting cross-legged for extended periods. Most temples have accommodations — a chair is usually available if you ask before the session starts, and nobody will think less of you for using it. What Katagiri-san told me about this, when I asked, was simply: *Gaman suru hitsuyō wa nai.* There's no need to endure.

The counterintuitive part is that your mind isn't the hard part. The body is the hard part. Your brain will race and produce a continuous commentary about the racing — this is normal, and anyone who tells you they achieved pure thoughtlessness in their first few sessions is either unusually wired or embellishing. But your knees and lower back will make genuine demands. Stretching your hamstrings and hip flexors the night before is practical advice that no travel piece seems to bother with.

Dress in something comfortable that covers your knees — a light tracksuit, loose trousers, anything that won't cut circulation. You'll be removing your shoes at the entrance (standard for any Japanese temple), so don't wear shoes that take a minute to unlace.

The other thing: the bells. There are more bells in a zazen session than you'd expect. The *kin* bowl that starts the sitting. The larger *densho* bell that marks transitions. The small handbell that ends the session. By the second or third time you sit, these sounds start to organize your attention the way a metronome organizes a musician. The first time, they're just strange and beautiful, which is fine too.

The Question Katagiri-san Won't Answer

After about six months of occasional sessions at Ryōsen-ji, I asked Katagiri-san what he thought about during the sits. I expected deflection — this kind of question often gets a Zen koan by way of answer. Instead he was quiet for a moment and said he thought about the smell of the incense, and about his feet, and sometimes about an argument he'd had with his brother in 1987 that he'd never resolved.

I didn't know what to do with that. I still don't, entirely.

What I've come to understand — imperfectly, through sitting in cold temple halls on Tuesday mornings when I probably should have been writing — is that zazen doesn't promise transformation. The more honest practitioners will tell you that directly. It promises, at most, a slight loosening of the grip you have on your own noise. Whether that's spiritual or physiological or just a function of sitting still for 40 minutes without your phone, I couldn't say.

What I can say is that if you're planning a trip to Japan and you have any interest in understanding how Japanese culture processes the relationship between form and emptiness — which shows up everywhere, from the pause in a tea ceremony to the blank space in a Hiroshige print to the way a soba chef handles silence — sitting zazen once, even badly, teaches you something that no museum can.

Practical Notes Before You Go

Sessions are almost always free or dana (donation-based, typically ¥500–¥1,500). A few temples now offer structured beginner packages through their English websites, which can run ¥3,000–¥5,000 and usually include a brief temple tour afterward. Both models work; the donation-based ones tend to feel less like tourism.

If you're navigating temple websites in Japanese, the word you're looking for is 坐禅会 (*zazenkai* — zazen gathering). Filtering for 初心者歓迎 (*shoshinsha kangei*, beginners welcome) helps. If your Japanese isn't there yet, most larger temple websites now have English pages, and the internet connectivity you'll want for on-the-go research is worth sorting before you leave home.

One last thing. Katagiri-san, when I told him I was writing about zazen for foreign visitors, tilted his head slightly — not dismissive, but considering — and said that the hardest part of teaching zazen to first-timers wasn't the posture or the pain or even the distracted minds. It was convincing people that not getting it immediately wasn't failure.

He adjusted his Casio and walked back toward the incense.

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