Ishida Baigan (1685–1744) was the second son of a farming family, located in a mountain village in Tanba (in present-day Kameoka city, Kyoto prefecture). In accordance with the custom of that time, he went to the city of Kyoto at the age of 11 as an apprentice to a merchant. Not one to waste time, he devoted himself to reading books in his spare time. First, he read books on Shinto, then on Confucianism, and aspired to become a worthy model for people. Later on in his life, he recalled how as a boy he was by nature quite stiffly theoretically minded, disliked by his friends, and of poor disposition. He realized these flaws when he was 14 or 15 and repented. In his late twenties, he was “mentally afflicted” by his inability to accept anything that deviated from the straight and true path. So, despite being a store apprentice (a seemingly flexible profession), he was a narrow-minded young man.

In his mid-thirties, Baigan was struck by his second great spiritual crisis. Walking about looking for a teacher, he met the recluse Oguri Ryōun. After this, he had an “enlightenment” experience, which he would articulate using the word mushin, or no-mind. But actually, even before that, he already experienced a special state once, when he had returned to his village to care for his ill mother: “During that time, when I looked up, I saw birds flying in the sky. Looking down, I could see fish darting about in the water. I am a naked worm. I realized that the self-nature was the parent of all things on heaven and earth, and I was filled with joy.”

But his teacher Ryōun would not acknowledge this experience, rejecting him with the following words: “The eyes that see the self-nature as the parent of all things still remain. Self-nature is by virtue of being without eyes (and would not manifest if eyes remain). Leave those eyes behind and return to me.” The looking subject remains. He saw the “self-nature” as an object, separate from the self (subject of cognition). His teacher asked him to forget about that subject first before coming back.

Baigan devoted himself to spiritual absorption via an extended retreat (kufu zanmai). After a year of practice, one morning, in the forest, he heard the cry of a sparrow and suddenly attained enlightenment. The cry sounded to him like that of water being parted by a cormorant plunging into a quiet ocean. With that, the “seeing” (subject of cognition) that sees the “self-nature” disappeared.

Drank it all up
The mind too has become
A dumpling of an infant
The sound, “waah!”

The infant’s cry, “waah!” That was his state of mind. Having searched for “nature” (the natural essence of the human being), the “seeing” in “seeing nature” was extinguished. It was no longer seeing nature but nature seeing.

In the essay recalling this enlightenment experience, he writes, “becoming no-self, no-mind, not knowing heaven nor earth.” He had become of one body with the order of all things in the universe.

During this time, not knowing that daybreak had come, I was of no-self, no-mind, not knowing heaven nor earth. Just the emptiness in its elegant simplicity, there was nothing, just like the clear sky. I remember it was like a cormorant plunging into the waters of a perfectly still ocean, no world, no self. There was not a speck of dust, no other thoughts, none but the cry of the sparrow.

No world, no self, nothing but the cry of the sparrow. Of course, this “cry of the sparrow” is not a mere sound or auditory information. The cry of the sparrow enfolds all things in heaven and earth, enfolds the self. It is as if everything had melted within it. Interestingly, this sort of ultimate point is usually depicted as auditory information—a call, a sound, an echo. Perhaps because our everyday consciousness is so tied up with visual information, experiences that go beyond the everyday tend to be remembered as bodily experiences that are not visual.

This was how Baigan “attained enlightenment.” He had become this “waah,” the very workings of heaven and earth. There was no “ego-mind” because he had become one with the principle of heaven and earth. He was the universe, the very process of becoming. On the basis of this experience, Baigan began to teach.

However, Baigan was just a commoner, an apprentice. How did a person who had not learned any orthodox academic discipline gain the right to “rectify the hearts of people” and preach to them? Since he was young, he had a burning passion to preach “the way of human beings in so far as they are human beings.” But when he was 45, teaching to townspeople in Kurumaya-chō in Kyoto, the direct reason for his teaching was the conviction he gained from his enlightenment:

When one comes to a sudden awakening, one sees that self-restraint (kokki) means to forget oneself, and that to forget oneself means to immediately become heaven and earth.

If one awakens, connecting with the true face of the universe, one sees that the self is completely one with heaven and earth. Why? Because the original nature of the human being is “mushin.” Baigan calls this “the heart of a baby.” An infant’s heart-mind is no-mind, and if one is of no-mind, one is of “the heart-mind of heaven and earth” (or “heaven-earth-mind,” for brevity’s sake), a mind that is one with all things. “What I have attained is, if one becomes mushin with the heart of a child, the self becomes the heaven-earth-mind.”

“If one becomes mushin . . . self becomes the heaven-earth-mind.” In other words, if one is in accord with the principle of heaven and earth, who cares about what people say, or what orthodoxy might judge correct? Speaking from Baigan’s sense in those times, “The principle (ri) of heaven and earth manifests as words through me.” Therefore, there is nothing to be confused or afraid about.

If one awakens, connecting with the true face of the universe, one sees that the self is completely one with heaven and earth.

Baigan referred to this “heaven-earth-mind” as “sages” and to their wisdom as “sagacity.” (Seijin and seichi literally translate to holy person and holy knowledge.) In sagacity, “ego-mind” (shishin, also translated as selfishness) does not arise, and one can accept reality as it is.

“Accept as it is” means not distorting the object (“the thing one faces”) with ego-mind, thus receiving things just as they are. (“There is no ego to twist the thing one faces, one sees directly, responds directly, and becomes as a mirror.”)

This same thing is said with regard to becoming completely one with the object (“thing one looks at”):

What one looks at is becoming one’s heart-mind. This is the key part of sagacity. Without moving or twisting that which is before you, like a clear mirror or still water.

Sagacity is not the subject looking at the object. In sagacity, there is no border between the I and the thing, the object as it is becomes “my heart-mind.” Or more precisely, there is no longer “my heart-mind”; “my” disappears, allowing unity with the object. However, that “object” is not something separate from the I, and so there is neither self nor world, and everything is all things on heaven and earth.

This is “heaven-earth-mind.” Baigan’s mushin is this mind, which has become one with heaven and earth. And if we examine it carefully, we find that this mind means “the workings of becoming” (seisei no hataraki).

Heaven and earth give rise to things, raise them up, and continue to become. Baigan calls this “birthing and nourishing” (shoji yashinau). The sage takes up this intent to birth and nourish as his own, with his entire being, and becomes “the workings of becoming.”

[The heart-mind of a sage] takes heaven and earth giving rise to things as the heart-mind. In each thing within this space of becoming, heaven and earth attains the heart-mind of giving rise to things, and takes it as heart-mind. Therefore, exerting oneself to the full, one returns to heaven-earth-mind—this is called seeking released mind. If one finds it, it is called the mind of heaven and earth. When one becomes this mind, this is called mushin.

The sage lives as heaven and earth does, birthing and nourishing things. One lives just as “the workings of becoming.” Originally, all things in the universe lived as the workings of becoming. But we human beings, mired in our human desires, are caught up in ego-mind and artifice. And so Baigan teaches the necessity of turning away from human desires and returning to “heaven-earth-mind.”

Baigan started teaching on the basis of this conviction. However, lacking orthodox academic training, he was not held in high regard. As Tsujimoto Masashi, a contemporary Japanese historian of education, puts it, Baigan went about teaching in a way that deviated from academic orthodoxy.

The orthodox academic discipline of his time—Confucianism—required that he be able to correctly read and write the classics under the guidance of a teacher. People were warned against reading the texts on their own or commentating on them using ordinary (spoken) language, for this would be a deviation from the writings. But contrary to this, Baigan started out learning by ear—listening to lectures. He tried to grasp it via his own experience and interpreted it in a way that strayed from orthodox textual hermeneutics. Not only that, Baigan spoke of the limits of learning from the written word. Studying is possible without relying on texts. (“This is not the domain of texts but of spiritual cultivation.”) The becoming of heaven and earth is not something that can be reduced to words.

It was no longer seeing nature but nature seeing.

What is Baigan’s logic behind this? Before we have texts and words, we have names (mei or na, spoken language). Prior to names are things and the very becoming of heaven and earth. Therefore, seen from the point of view of the becoming of heaven and earth, texts come very late, and are no more than containers made as an expedient means for transmission. If so, there is no way that the becoming of heaven and earth can be contained completely within texts. Words do not arrive at it. There is no other way but to experience it directly through the heart that is one with heaven and earth. Here, Baigan criticized the Confucians during that time as being “one-art geishas” who learned only from texts, without drawing on their own experiences and sensibilities.

The enlightenment experience cannot be communicated through words. The only way is for one to attain it for oneself. But with that in mind, to still speak means to hope that through words, others will continue to seek to attain things for themselves as “experiential knowledge.” In other words, scholarship is no more than a “means to polish the heart.” Confucianism, Buddhism, all scholarship is an “abrasive” for polishing the mirror. When one has completed polishing the mirror, scholarship is useless. It is unnatural to cling to these polishing tools (Confucianism, Buddhism, Shinto) even after the heart-mind has been polished. Baigan is famous for the following words: “The enlightened heart-mind in Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism are one.”

♦

Mushin No Dainamizumu: “Shinayakasa” No Keifu by Tadashi Nishihira © 2014 by Tadashi Nishihira. Originally published in 2014 by Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo. This English edition published 2024 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London by arrangement with Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo. The Philosophy of No-Mind: Experience Without Self, English language translation © Catherine Sevilla-Liu and Anton Sevilla-Liu 2024.