a timer for zazen, and the value of silence
June 5, 2026
Zazen does not need much, and that is the difficulty of it. There is no guided voice, no object to concentrate on, nothing to achieve in the next thirty minutes — only sitting, upright and awake, while everything in you that wants something to do goes unfed. A timer for zazen has one job: to mark the beginning and the end with a bell, and then to vanish, leaving the silence in between entirely alone.
how should a timer be set for zazen?
A bell to open, twenty-five to forty minutes of silence, a bell to close — and nothing else in between. No interval cues, no progress, no voice; in shikantaza, “just sitting,” there is nothing for a midpoint bell to divide. The one exception is when you sit two periods with walking between them, in which case the timer marks the seam (more on the bell itself in choosing a meditation bell). A single period is the cleaner place to begin, and twenty-five minutes — one stick of incense, roughly, in the old reckoning — is a traditional length for a reason: long enough to settle, short enough to stay upright in.
the silence is the practice
In a zendo, a period of zazen is timed by a stick of incense and bounded by bells; the doan rings to begin, and rings to end, and says nothing in between. The bell is not part of the meditation — it is the fence around it. Everything that matters happens in the silence the bell encloses, and the less the timer intrudes on that silence, the better it is doing its job. This is why a zazen timer should make exactly two sounds, or four if you walk. An app that buzzed encouragement halfway through would be ringing inside the meditation, not around it.
sitting two periods with kinhin
The traditional form alternates sitting with kinhin — slow walking meditation, a few minutes on the feet between periods of zazen. At home you can keep this shape: a period of twenty-five or thirty minutes, a bell, five minutes of kinhin walked at the pace of one half-step per breath, a bell, and a second period. A timer that lets you chain these — sit, walk, sit — gives the home practice the rhythm of the zendo without the zendo, and the walking is not so much a break from the sitting as the same attention, carried upright across the floor.