Dokusan is a Japanese word that means to go and see the teacher alone. It is an important part of zen practice together with zazen (meditation), the precepts¹ and koan² introspection.

During extended periods of meditation practice (be that a single day or multiple days known as sesshin), it is usual that the teacher provides opportunities for dokusan.

The dokusan space is sorta sacred and it is traditional to be pretty vague about what it is… or to discuss anything that one experiences there.

Even so, to give you a glimmer, here is an example of one teacher’s description of dokusan³.

Zen meetings have the simplest of forms: two people sitting on the floor, face inches from face, in a candlelit room. And yet that small room is a large field, containing the stars and the earthworms and poems and cities. In the vastness, the Chinese teacher Linji said, the true person has no rank; everyone and everything is perfectly equal, and completely themselves. Here we don’t even have stories about what meetings are for. The world of how you think it ought to be and whether you’re making a good impression is a ghost world; work in the room is sitting together in the real, where anything might be possible. Authority lies in the timeless moment itself: What is most real, most true, right here and right now?

The teacher invites the meditator into this field, and the meditator’s response is where the encounter begins. Every meeting is different—laughter, tears, sitting together in silence, banging about the room, songs sung and koans explored. Most often there is the deepest kind of conversation. I notice in myself that the feeling that arises naturally from this field is love.

[…]

Intimate encounter is so central in Zen practice and literature because of the insight that awakening happens in relationship. In the old stories, someone might speak a turning word to you, or you suddenly see peach blossoms on a mountain path, or you’re living intensely with a koan. The other becomes vividly real and reminds you of who you really are. It’s the same in our lives now, though just as likely to arise with a commercial on the radio or in loving a child. What calls is also without rank; what matters is that it does call, and that you respond. This is another important understanding: All of life is the field of practice, and nothing needs to be left out.

— Joan Sutherland. What is dokusan?

1. The precepts are a set of aspirational guidelines or standards that some zen practitioners will make a commitment (Jukai) towards. A practitioner will usually write their own precepts based on 10 traditional points (If you are interested, here are my own precepts (pdf)). ↩︎
2. This is a whole post in itself. If you are interested there is more about koans (including some examples) here. ↩︎
3. And for a deeper dive here is a short 4 min video. ↩︎