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Musashi and Takuan · Part Three — The Affliction, Named

Fudōchi Shinmyōroku — the shape of the letter

A private letter, not a treatise. It doubles back, repeats itself, and changes register. That untidiness is the evidence of what it is.

Go Rin No Sho was constructed — five scrolls, ordered, with an architecture that took two years in a cave. The letter was written to somebody. It has no architecture, because letters do not.

The movements, roughly in the order they appear:

無明住地煩悩 — the affliction of abiding in the place of ignorance. The name of the problem. 住 : to dwell, to reside, to stop on a thing.

諸仏不動智 — the immovable wisdom of all the buddhas. 不動明王 Fudō Myōō, with the sword and the rope, wreathed in fire — and the insistence that immovable does not mean unmoving. Fudō does not fail to move; he fails to stop.

間不容髪 — not a hair's breadth between. The interval, and the fact that it must not exist.

石火之機 — the spark-stone. No gap between the situation and the response. Not speed: the absence of a stop.

心の置き所 — where to put the mind. The section that answers itself by removing the question. Put it in the hands and it is in the hands; put it nowhere and it is everywhere.

本心・妄心 — the original mind and the deluded mind.

有心・無心 — the mind that is present and the mind of no-mind.

水上打胡蘆子・捺著即転 — pressing a gourd on water: it turns and goes, and cannot be pinned.

放心を放て — practical instruction, in a register close to advice.

急水上打球子 — a ball on a fast stream, which does not stop.

前後際断 — cutting off before and after.

It ends, as such letters do, without ceremony.

不動心 · The next thing

Fudōshin

This letter is the whole doctrine of Fudōshin — the mind that does not stop, with cold and heat as the apparatus.

Fudōshin$297

One letter, sent rarely. The doctrine as it is written, and nothing else. No launch sequence, no countdown.

This page is one of ten that open out of Musashi and Takuan — The Two Scrolls of 1645, a commentary on Go Rin No Sho and Fudōchi Shinmyōroku, read together. Printed at Part Three — The Affliction, Named. The page can be rewritten; the code in your copy will keep pointing here.