Concentration

精神統一, read seishin tōitsu: concentration, the mind made one. 精神 is the mind or spirit and 統一 is to make one, and the word means the gathering of the whole mind on one thing before an act, the state the kyūdō textbooks make the first condition of a correct shot and the kendō manuals list among the aims of training. It is not an old word and it has no author. The Japanese scholars who were building a vocabulary for German philosophy made it in the 1890s for the unity of the mind; in the 1910s it became the name of something one does, in the manuals of the hypnotists and the quiet-sitters and in the laboratory of the clairvoyance experiments, a fashion a Zen master noticed and a novelist laughed at; and by the 1920s it was the plain word of the dojo, the archery range, the tea room and the zazen hall. The one book-length definition, the psychologist Fukurai Tomokichi's, has two stages: the mind swept clear of every stray thought, and one aim held in that stillness. A kyūdō reader of the same years puts it as the archer's: the bow to the target is not a prayer to hit, it is a rite toward the universe, and that means making one's own mind one. Concentration is the dictionary's English and the right one. Master Takase's essay below is itself part of the word's history in English, written three years before the Reiki books took the word up. 精神統一 is composed of the words 精神 (read seishin) meaning "mind; spirit" and 統一 (read tōitsu) meaning "gather; unify".