One of the most famous verses from the Tao Te Ching goes:
Thirty spokes meet in the hub.
The wheel’s use comes from where it isn’t.
Clay is shaped to make a pot.
Where it’s not is where the pot is useful.
Cut windows and doors to make a room.
Where the room isn’t, there is room for you.
I am now going to attempt to explain in about a thousand words what Lao Tzu does so beautifully in forty-seven. We are all familiar with the idea of “less is more.” We can see how the spare prose of Ernest Hemingway, the economy of line of a Picasso drawing, or the minimalist architecture and design of Modernism have influenced twentieth century Western culture. Mathematical theorem are tested for simplicity against the principle of “Occam’s Razor,” which states that when presented with competing explanations for a phenomenon, we should select the one that is simplest; or, to put it another way, extra assumptions are a bad idea if they don’t improve the explanation. Mathematicians describe the world of Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity are both described (albeit by other mathematicians) as simple, elegant and beautiful.
We recognise doing less as generally a good thing. We are, for example, aware of the dangers of micromanagement – how a manager who makes his team feel they cannot handle work without his constant guidance, demanding to be cc’d into every email, makes them slowly lose the desire to do anything but that which is demanded of them. Such a manager becomes the very bottleneck he was trying to avoid.
Conversely, we all know managers or workers who don’t do enough and we call them lazy whether they knew they could do more and didn’t or just didn’t know there was more they could do. But is the person who doesn’t know any better truly lazy or at best (or worst) incompetent, and is it fair to judge them in the same way as someone who should know better?
In Japanese Zen Buddhism there is a concept known as “mushin” which is usually translated into English as “No Mind.” Ironically in a blog about simplicity and doing less, this is quite a difficult concept to explain. Part of the problem is Japanese is a conceptual language and the two kanji which form the word have a number of layered resonances which the English words don’t have. “Mu” doesn’t mean just “No.” It can also mean "not", "nothing", "without", “nonexistence”, “nonbeing”, “not having” and “a lack of” amongst many other things. Alone it is a complicated idea, and when you add “shin” which can mean “heart”, “mind” or “spirit”.
It is not the same as mindlessness. That is when you go to work and perform a task like a robot without thinking, or trying not to think about it, or thinking about your next holiday or your last – anything but the task you’re engaged upon. But although mindlessness can be seen as soul-destroying, No-Mind can seem cold. The Chinese thinker Wang Tong wrote:
It is because it is empty that the mirror reflects an image.
The thing about a mirror is that it doesn’t care what it reflects. A mother and baby, a murder, a lump of concrete or a flower – it is all the same to the mirror. It’s cold and unfeeling and does only that for which it was made. There is no relationship between it and that which it reflects. For this reason, the teaching of No-Mind was popular with the samurai because when potential death faced them on the battlefield, awareness had to be encompassing.Recognition of danger and response needed to be instantaneous, the body and weapon fully committed in powerful action without concern for the self or hesitation of thought.This made them useful to their lords, particularly in Japan’s Warring States Period of near constant military conflict, as when faced with a choice between life or death, they would choose death without hesitation.
But I do not believe that this is the kind of No-Mind that Lao Tzu is driving at. I think it is better expressed by Jiddhu Krishnamurti when he says:
When there is space between you and the object you are observing, you well know there is no love, and without love, however hard you try to reform the world or bring about social order … you will only create agony.
The space is created by thinking about ourselves. In terms of Aikido, the space is the technique and tori’s desire to make the technique work. At this point, it has become all about you (tori) and your desire to execute a technique. Uke doesn’t matter at all other than as a piece of meat that ends up on the mat and makes you feel good about yourself. You are making Aikido happen rather than letting it unfold naturally.
Again, part of the problem comes from the English translation of a Japanese concept – tori. It is usually translated as “the thrower”, “the one who throws” or something similar, but it derives from the verb which means “to take”, “to pick up” or “to choose.” Would our attitude to technique be different if we regarded ourselves as “the chooser” or “the taker”? We might then “take” the aggression of an attack and “choose” to reform or bring about harmony instead of creating the agony of a lock or throw.
Interestingly, uke can be translated as “the receiver” (of the throw). Perhaps if we as tori instead regarded ourselves as uke and saw that our role is to allow space to receive the other person, to value them, to care for them and even love them, our technique might become less harsh and less violent, but more effective. And perhaps in everyday life, if we made our interactions with others less about ourselves and more about receiving what the other person is really saying our lives might be filled with more love and less agony.