Shikantaza: a fixed posture, a fixed duration, no object, no technique, nothing to get better at. A timer, a date, and a screen before the first sit, because the record says sitting does something to some of the people who sit. For a guided ten minutes, Tide is the other page.
Before the first sit. A 2017 study of meditators, and a 2021 one, found that most people who practise intensively report at least one unwanted effect, and a minority report lasting ones: fear, dissociation, a flatness that does not lift, old material returning. The traditions knew this and kept a teacher in the room. This page has no teacher. If sitting brings up something you cannot put down, stop, and talk to a person. Start short. There is nothing to improve, so there is nothing to push.
The sit
20:00
Sit down, hold still, and do nothing with the mind. When the bell goes, get up.
No object, no counting, no technique: that is what distinguishes this from Tide, which guides ten minutes. If you want the guidance, use Tide. If you want the bare thing, this.
Sits
The honest limit, stated first. The practice sold as the purest and least political was assembled for English readers by a small number of modernisers, several of them nationalists, and the institution that carried it supported a war and practised discrimination by birth while teaching universal enlightenment. Its own scholars, Hakamaya and Matsumoto, made the sharpest version of that critique, and Victoria documented the rest. Sitting has a measurable harm profile that consumer products mostly leave out; it is on the screen above. The ending is not that you should not sit. It is that sitting does not make you good, there is no evidence it ever did, and the tradition's most decorated practitioners are the proof. Dogen's instruction from 1227 survives all of that: sit down, hold still, do nothing. This page keeps the minutes.