The Mind Must Be Set Free

心は放たん事を要す (kokoro wa hanatan koto wo yōsu): the mind must be let loose. The sentence is the Japanese reading of three Chinese characters, 心要放, which a 1905 book on tea and Zen credits to the Song philosopher Shao Yong, with the tea masters' image for it: tie the mind down and it is a tethered cat, and the body cannot work. Funakoshi Gichin, the founder of Shōtōkan karate, set the same sentence among his twenty precepts, and its sense there is the tea book's: a mind fixed on one thing cannot move the body.