There are seemingly countless rituals in Buddhism. If you’ve spent time with a Tibetan Lama, rituals are not quite 24/7 but in an extended retreat of three years, they are ever present. It is not that difficult to trace the roots of Buddhist rituals. They can be traced back to Indian religious culture.
When it comes to Zen meditation, or zazen, it may seem to the beginner that it is ritual free. But this is not quite true. In ritualized meditation how the body is positioned is extremely important. This includes how the hands are supposed to be positioned. Even how one approaches their sitting cushion bowing to it, for example, is part of the meditation ritual process. Time is also important. When meditation ends is given by a certain signal which we have to obey.
What such rituals add to our spiritual character can certainly be debated. How does sitting ramrod straight on a meditation cushion for the time it takes a stick of incense to burn down add spiritual character? Does it make reading the discourses of the Buddha any easier?
Abandoning ritualized meditation for sitting on a small rice sack stuffed with cotton by some unnamed waterfall might be a better substitute. Sitting in an abandoned mine, too, might be a better alternative that doing zazen in some Zen center. One wonders, however, why sitting is always connected with meditation. Truth be known, we should not presume that sitting is the royal road to realizing our Buddha-nature.
Real meditation is not something you do by assuming a particular physical posture such as sitting in a full or half lotus on your ass. It is all about getting in touch with the Buddha Mind which transcends physical bodies. One has to use non-physical means.