無心 mushin No-Mindedness

No-Mindedness in Japanese is 無心 which is read mushin

無心 (mushin): no-mind, the mind clear of obstructing thought and wholly present.

無心 is a mind that settles nowhere. The sword master who made this Zen word his teaching put it plainly: it does not mean having no mind at all. It is only the ordinary mind, and with it every stroke lands. His teacher in Zen wrote that a mind that fixes on one thing is like ice, frozen in place. This mind, he wrote, is like water, free to go wherever it is needed. Archers and nō actors have used the word the same way.

No-Mindedness, our title, is the Kenkyūsha dictionary's word for this sense, and most English books call it no-mind. The Japanese word has other lives that the English does not carry. It can mean innocence, or things that feel nothing, like grass and trees. In everyday speech it can also mean asking someone for money. The design carries only the Zen sense.

The Japanese word mushin is composed of the kanji 無 (read mu) meaning "no; nothingness" and 心 (read shin) meaning "heart; mind; spirit".

The word is in the 莊子 three times and became a term in Guo Xiang's commentary of about 300, five centuries before the Zen masters took it up; in Japan it is in the court anthologies of 814 and 818, and the sense the design carries, the mind that stops nowhere, is the sword-Zen teaching of Takuan and Yagyū Munenori in the 1630s.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 無心.

Your scroll is brushed when you order it and completed within 1 to 3 business days. It ships by USPS Priority Mail from Master Takase's studio in Washington State, boxed and ready to hang, with a printed page giving the art's English, romaji and Japanese.

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Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase brushes your scroll by hand when you order it. Each scroll bears her red seal, 英利, and her signature.

The scrolls are 12 1/4" W × 43" H (31 × 109 cm) with real silk borders and Japanese paper that are layered so the scroll hangs straight and will not warp over time. The scrolls themselves are made by Sankō (株式会社三幸) in Gifu prefecture, which has been making high quality scrolls since 1947, and we have worked with Sankō for over two decades.

Eri Takase was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, and holds the rank of Shihan, the highest rank in Japanese calligraphy, from the Bokuteki-kai and the Bunka-shodo. About Master Takase