Throwback Thursday - No Mind
Furuya Sensei posted this to his Daily Message on September 27, 2004.
When my Zen master, Kenko Yamashita was in his office during the normal course of the work week, he often practiced his calligraphy. He often wrote letters with a brush rather than with a pen just to continue his practice. Many people would keep these letters because they were examples of his wonderful calligraphy. Much of his calligraphy, he told me, was self-taught and only developed through many decades of practice. I always thought his calligraphy had a strength and nobility in which his character always shined through. One of the words he used to practice quite often were the three words coined by Dogen - hishiryo (非思量). How do you translate hishiryo? I don’t really know. It means literally, "thought without thought.” or "consciousness without thought." Hishiryo is our primal state of mind of pure thought and awareness without all the baggage, mental obstacles, distortions, illusions or prejudices. Thought without thought - we experience this all the time when we become absorbed in something we are doing and, at other times, when we are totally relaxed and doing something but not really thinking of anything. Generally, we are in a conscious state of the calculating mind or the money mind in which we continually calculate profit and loss, good and bad, yes and no.
In our Aikido practice, we should practice with the hishiryo mental state of total absorption - it is at this moment when we are 100% both mind and body.
It is not the mind of "I hate this person," or "when does practice finish" or "I am hungry" or "it is too hot and I am sweating," or “when will I become rich and famous!" It is the mind of being totally focused, not attached anywhere, but everywhere at the same time - this is total absorption. Sometimes, we call this "no mind," but people often get confused with this term. Maybe we should say, the "mind of no mind!"
In practice, lose everything! Let everything drop away, - even your own mind and body. When we can "let go," then, at that moment, we gain everything. This too is hishiryo.
Watch Furuya Sensei being interviewed on FSN/UPN1 in 2000.