Like many Zen priests of his day, Takuan was a literary as well as a religious figure. Besides extensive correspondence and quantities of poems in both Chinese and Japanese, the master produced a number of independent prose works inkana majiri(mixed kana and Chinese characters), the majority, according to Tsuji Zennosuke, probably composed for particular daimyo patrons.¹ The most widely read of these writings, apart from the two works on swordsmanship, areNight Talks at Tōkaiji (Tōkaiji yawa)andKnotted Cords (Ketsujōshū), and a third work,Tinkling Gems (Reirōshū).² While occasionally touching on Zen, all three are essentially miscellanies,...

The ignorance of attachment as the ground of delusion (mumyō jūji bonnō). The term “ignorance” is made up of the characters for “no light”—that is to say, delusion. The term “attachment” is made up of characters meaning “to stop” and “stage.” In the practice of Buddhism, there are the fifty-two stages,¹ among which attachment indicates the way the mind stops at things. “To stop” refers to attaching the mind to things, of whatever sort. Applied to Your Lordship’s² art of swordsmanship,³ [this means that] the moment your attention is drawn to the slashing blade of your opponent, you rush...

Takuan’s life, like the difficult times in which he came of age, was marked by periods of considerable turbulence and uncertainty, and, though a dedicated Zen monk with a penchant for seclusion and rural retreat, the master encountered the sorts of extreme shifts in fortune common to many of the leading secular figures of the day. This experience surely shaped his view of the transitory, unreal nature of things and of the folly of attachment. “So long as those of us in this world consider that we have come as guests,” Takuan reflects in his miscellanyKnotted Cords, “we will...