Mushin (No-Mind) as a Trainable Practice
Being in the world of my head was why I started training in Zen. At the time, I was a young graduate student and excited about the research I was doing – so much so that I thought about my research all the time – even when I should have been listening to a friend or falling asleep. It’s not an uncommon problem, but it is a painful existence.
Somehow I knew that living in the world of my head wasn’t the correct way to live as a human being. No one told me that. I just knew. This led me to seek out zazen (Zen meditation) and Zen training with our school.
In Zen, the tools we have are posture, breathing, and our six senses (including awareness, which integrates the other five). As a beginner, I was taught to “see 180 degrees” and to count my exhalations (susoku) during zazen. In this method, you start over with the count when you get to ten, or whenever you find yourself thinking thoughts, as a way to train the mind.
When I was a live-in at the dojo in Hawaii, people saw the bad mental habit I had and tried to fix the alignment of my head and even gave me a mantra to say when I walked around the dojo grounds. At one point, I had the physical experience of getting enough upward lift and alignment in my zazen posture that my head clicked into place and my thoughts magically cleared. It felt like paradise. So I practiced that, but sometimes no “click” came, and the thoughts kept floating around.
It wasn’t until after I left the dojo that I met one of the teachers from Hawaii on the mainland and he pointed out “when you’re seeing 180 degrees, if you can see both walls at the same time, you’re not thinking thoughts.” I tried it. Crap, he was right. I’d been doing it wrong for years.
Mushin (no-mind) means no thought. That’s a deep state. A more common experience is no attachment to discursive thought – thoughts come, but the related emotions and chains of thought (analysis) don’t arise. Tanouye Roshi, the founder of Chosei Zen, described this as seeing through the spinning blades of a propeller, rather than seeing the blades and getting turned around. In mushin, one relies on the intuition residing below the belly button. At any given moment, what’s needed is clear and actions swiftly follow. This way of being imperturbable yet capable of moving in all directions is described in the Fudochi Shimmyo Roku (Records of the Wondrous Mind of Immovable Wisdom), one of the key texts of our lineage.
The first time I had a deep experience of mushin was a fluke. A few years into my Zen training, I had my first and only anxiety attack, during group zazen. I was sure I would pass out but sat through it anyway. Then, my breath suddenly dropped deep into my hara (lower abdomen) and a deep samadhi (relaxed concentration of no self) followed. After class, I remember setting up for a special archery demonstration. Although I had never performed that set up before, I began moving things around with a strong sense of exactly how everything should be. My hara stayed set like that for weeks, and I felt like a completely different person. I was more self-confident, and my voice was deeper in my body. Even the music I liked was different (instead of rap or reggae, I preferred the clean sounds of 50s and 60s R&B).
The first time I was able to consistently be in mushin was during the first sesshin (multi-day intensive training) where I was jiki (training leader). During sesshins, I was usually the kind of person that experienced a lot of pain, plodded along, and felt like I was barely surviving. So, how was I going to pull this off? Taking the job seriously, I quickly realized that if I extended my focus 100% outside my body into the dojo, something interesting happened. I could feel everyone in the room and whether their attention lapsed or they started falling asleep. I had no pain from zazen, and I never fell asleep. I could stand up easily and move swiftly. In kinhin (walking meditation), I could feel everyone behind me and keep them in perfect rhythm, like a marching army.
About 15 years into my Zen training, I received an explicit correction to my frame of mind from a teacher, which was the one corner that helped me discover the other three. After watching me walk around, he asked me: “Do you need to think to walk around like that?” I reflected for a second and said “No.” I realized I didn’t need to think to walk around – it was just a bad mental habit that I had. So I practiced walking without thinking. Then, I began experimenting with no-thinking during the daily activities that I had already done thousands of times (making me an expert). Some of my favorite activities became the things I previously disliked, like sorting silverware and folding clothes – a whole new universe without thought.
It’s painful to reflect on how long it took me to figure this out. There’s real wisdom in letting people figure things out using their own intelligence so that the learning becomes theirs. But, I wondered why we treated corrections on posture and awareness so differently. Was this related to our own body/mind duality? When it takes a long time to figure something out, the tendency is to assume it’s advanced, or not easily shareable to beginners. Within the last 6-12 months, I’ve experimented with whether mushin was readily trainable in students and found that it was trainable much earlier than commonly acknowledged. Some of the shifts were rather dramatic, even for students doing their first sesshin/keishin. Once I discovered that, I became upset that we hadn’t made better efforts to address it earlier, so I’d like to address mushin with a series of three blog posts.
