When Bruce Lee was young he studied a martial art. One learns to block the opponent’s blow, then to deliver a counter-punch. When Bruce later developed his own style—not satisfied with the effectiveness of martial arts as it was being taught—he blocked the opponent’s blow in a way that was a counter-punch. And that single counter-punch was followed without hesitation, by other blows, that ended the fight.

This is what the Zen master Takuan (1573 – 1645) was talking about when he advised the samurai Munenori to act without obstruction from the mind and its conditioning.

From the standpoint of sunyata, what one learns is that the “person” (like all things) is empty. If the person is empty, what of the person’s mind? In its natural, or unconditioned, state, it is empty. What does it mean to act with an empty mind, free of qualitative, or comparative and judgmental, thoughts? It means operating in awareness of the ultimate actuality of the emptiness of all things:

 “It means going beyond the dualism of all forms of life and death, good and evil, being and non-being.”

– Takuan

When we take the mind to be real, an existing phenomenon, there is a “me” and “my mind.” With this duality established, I am continually sorting through my mind, within a dualistic, comparative framework. At each point, I am stopping an unrestricted flow in order to analyze a particular element, or thought. An analogy of the disturbance of nature would be to interrupt a beetle on its path, to turn it over on its back.

Allowing the naturalness of following nature, rather than interfering through thoughts of the mind—analysis, judgements, calculations etc.—is what Takuan is suggesting.

The following is Takuan’s Zen teaching to the samurai:

To state in terms of swordsmanship, the genuine beginner knows nothing about the way of holding and managing the sword, and much less of his concern for himself. When the opponent tries to strike him, he instinctively parries it. This is all he can do. But as soon as the training starts, he is taught how to handle the sword, where to keep the mind, and many other technical tricks—which make his mind “stop” at various junctures. For this reason whenever he tries to strike the opponent, he feels unusually hampered (he has lost altogether the original sense of innocence and freedom). But as days and years go by, his training acquires fuller maturity, and his bodily attitude and his way of managing the sword advance toward “no-mind-ness,” which resembles the state of mind he had at the very beginning of training when he knew nothing, when he was altogether ignorant of the art.

When the ultimate perfection is attained, the body and limbs perform by themselves what is assigned to them to do with no interference from the mind.

A no-mind keeps nothing in it. It is also called munen, “no-thought”. Mushin and munen are synonymous.

The secret teaching is known among the masters of a certain school as “The Moon in Water.” According to one writer, it is explained as follows, which is in truth no more than the teaching of Zen—the doctrine of mushin:

The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. It is like a flash of lightning. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword. None of them are possessed of a mind which has any substantiality. As each of them is of emptiness and has no “mind”, the striking man is not a man, the sword in his hands is not a sword, and the “I” who is about to be struck down is like the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning. When the mind does not “stop,” the sword swinging cannot be any thing less than the blowing of the wind. The wind is not conscious of itself as blowing over the trees and working havoc among them. So with the sword.

Therefore, do not get your mind “stopped” with the sword you raise; forget what you are doing, and strike the enemy. Do not keep your mind on the person who stands before you. They are all of emptiness, but beware of your mind being caught up with emptiness itself.

Bunan’s poem reads:

While living

Be a dead man,

Be thoroughly dead—

And behave as you like,

And all’s well.

Japan’s best-known samurai, Miamoto Musashi, is said to have won sixty (consecutive) matches between the ages of thirteen to sixty. before retiring to become a farmer. This was due to an empty, Zen mind.