初心 shoshin Beginner's Mind

Word for word it is the first mind, the mind of a beginning. The word is older than the maxim it is best known from. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten and the Daijisen give it four senses. The oldest in Japanese writing is the resolve a person first formed. The state of one who has just begun an art comes next, and then the Buddhist sense, the first arising of the mind that seeks awakening; plain greenness comes last. The maxim is Zeami's: he used the word in his own writing before he closed a treatise with the words that the beginner's mind must not be forgotten. Which of those you take, the learner's first steps or the resolve you began with, is yours.

The Japanese word 初心 meaning "Beginner's Mind" is composed of the kanji 初 (read sho) meaning "first time; beginning" and 心 (read shin) meaning "heart; mind; spirit".

The word is in a Chinese sutra translated in the early fifth century, as the first of the minds through which awakening is reached; in Japanese writing the first resolve is attested about 1060 and a learner's state by about 1211, and English took it up as "beginner's mind" from Suzuki Shunryū's talks to the Zen Center of San Francisco's group at Los Altos, in print by 1967.

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