Heart Like Water

水の心 (mizu no kokoro): a heart like water, a mind like water. Water and heart joined by の; without the particle the same two characters are a swimmer's feel for the water, and the scroll's の keeps the phrase out of that. The phrase holds two waters, and the tradition keeps both. One is still: the 荘子 says that no one uses running water for a mirror, only still water, and that the sage's still mind is the mirror of heaven and earth; Japanese fixed the image as 明鏡止水, the bright mirror and the still water, and that is the sense A Heart Like Still Water names. The other flows: the 老子's highest good is like water, and Musashi's Water Book of 1645 makes the mind water, which follows the square or the round vessel, becomes a drop and becomes the sea. As a martial teaching the phrase is oldest in kyūdō, where an Edo manuscript of the 竹林派 school has the archer hold the center of the chest as the heart of water until the release breaks the surface like a thrown stone. As the karate teaching, a mind like water, it reaches print first in English, in Nishiyama Hidetaka and Richard Brown's Karate: The Art of Empty Hand Fighting of 1960, paired with 月の心, a mind like the moon: the calm surface that reflects the opponent whole, and the awareness that lights everything at once. Bruce Lee's be water, my friend of 1971 is the other water, the one with no shape of its own. A Pure Land poem of 1320 gives the phrase at its kindest: though the heart of the muddy inlet's water never clears, the moon lodged in it is not dimmed. Heart Like Water keeps every sense; Still Water keeps one.