What is Fudoshin?
The most famous and articulate source of information relevant to the concept of fudoshin is the letter written by the Zen Buddhist priest Takuan to the master swordsman Yagyu Munenori of the famous Shinkage-ryu school of fencing during the first half of the 17th century.
The letter is titled in Japanese Fudochi Shinmyo Roku, and is variously translated, but carrying the notion of "Divine Record of Immovable Wisdom." "Immovable Wisdom" or fudochi, expounded on as it is by a Zen priest, is a rather paradoxical concept. As we shall see, in its application the term connotes a mind that is at once firmly in place and yet ever moving.
For help in understanding, we can turn to the translation and commentary on Takuan's letter by the late D.T. Suzuki, arguably Zen's most adept interpreter to the West.
Suzuki relates Takuan's treatise, which he translates as The Mystery of Prajna Immovable, to the Buddhist concept of transcendental wisdom (the Sanskrit prajna). When applied constantly, it is the mind of Buddha, the state of ultimate enlightenment. Takuan and Suzuki further relate fudochi to the Buddhist guardian Fudo Myo-o (Sanskrit Acala-vidyaraja), the Immovable, who protects Buddhism with his sword, rope and glaring fierceness. He is the destroyer of delusion, unaffected by the seduction of worldly attractions. In his unassailable detachment, Fudo Myo-o is the steadfast image of the mind unmoved by carnal temptations. Immobility from the enlightened state is accomplished by maintaining a mind that remains detached, that is, a mind that does not stop or become fixated on any one thing.
The main thesis of Takuan's letter. . .consists in preserving the absolute fluidity of the mind (kokoro; alternatively -shin) by keeping it free from intellectual deliberations and affective disturbances of any kind. . . The Mind in its suchness is at once movable and immovable, it is constantly flowing, never "stopping at any point, and yet there is in it a center never subject to any kind of movement, remaining forever one and the same.
Takuan's letter to the famed Yagyu master swordsman, official instructor to the third Tokugawa shogun, makes it clear that attaining this unfettered and imperturbable mind is at the core of true mastery.
Applied in the context of the samurai swordsman, the unmoving and unstopping mind is one that will remain free from fixation on either the enemy's sword as it cuts at him, or by his own cut in defense. In such a state of mind, he spontaneously, naturally and effectively responds, without an instant's hesitation (or in less than a "hair's breadth" of time, in Takuan's imagery).
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