Skip to main content

ZANSHIN: THE MOMENT AFTER


Zanshin, is considered to be the stillness after the technique has been executed. 



It is in martial arts circles, considered as controlling the attacker after the attack. A cinematic example and favourite of mine is a sequence in the movie; The Last Samurai. 

 Tom Cruise has sided with a samurai clan and a political battle ensues eventually resulting in the hiring of assassins by the Meiji inspired politician. Their target is Cruise who leaves his hotel room and walks into the night unarmed. He is immediately surrounded by katana wielding attackers. A fight sequence (one of the better scenes I have yet seen filmed in which traditional martial arts are used) ensues ending with Cruise the lone survivor and in the state of Zanshin. 

 The scene continues and you watch as the fight is replayed in slow motion and black and white. Suddenly a “dead” guy moves and Cruise finishes him because he was able to react due to the state of stillness and mental clarity he maintained after the last technique was executed. 

 I think too often we jump from one subject to another in many conversations during our day-to-day lives. We don’t maintain the stillness, even for the briefest of moments to savour what has been said to us. We hear but we are not listening. 

 In Kime, we focus our mind to the task at hand and by using some form of meditation, guided or otherwise, we are able to intensify our mental focus. Seishin allows for us to direct that intense focus not only to the task at hand, but also to a specific part of that task. Mushin, born from receptive training, cultivating the habit of virtue, frees the mind from  over stimulation allowing our response to be second nature. 

 Zanshin keeps our mind focused on the task for a moment after completion ensuring that we have been successful in our endeavour. We can employ zanshin in our daily lives by allowing time for our actions to sink in, to make their impact felt, just for the briefest of moments before rushing unthinking to the next task.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nirvana

I can no more cease to write than you can stop breathing. It is my salvation. Writing is my path to Nirvana, where suffering has been extinguished, and complete peace is realized, if you believe that sort of thing. I'm not sure that I do, but it's a nice sentiment. For me, since I must work at doing something that fails to excite me in any meaningful way, I must search for my own meaning. Writing is the vehicle I use now. It used to be that my path lay with studying martial arts, but life changes, the body wearies. I suspect many of us, no, most of us, are in the same boat. We are trying to manage our lives the best we can while searching for Nirvana, our own private paradise, or however we might  describe it. Viktor Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning. He posits that our meaning is what we choose it to be and that meaning may change day to day. He said, "“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.” Following your passion ...
2 comments
Read more

My Mother

My mother has died. That somber fact has me processing thoughts of guilt, love, and my own mortality. I am officially an orphan. My mother was one of the “Railway Children,” those Liverpool kids sent to the countryside to escape the bombing during World War II. She and her sister were sent to Wales and were bounced from household to household, relative to relative, and finally to an orphanage. Dad moved to Canada in 1960 to forge a better a life for us. Before my mum took my sister and I to join him, the family held an “American wake,” a mournful goodbye, as if a loved one had died. Mum left everything and everybody she ever knew to join her husband in the new world. My mother and father worked hard to give us a good life. There were tough times, money was scarce, and there was tension between my parents. Hell, let me be honest, my father hit my mother, I saw it. My mum was sixty when she left my dad. She just walked out with the clothes on her back. That was my mum. Tough. W...
Post a Comment
Read more

PEERING INTO THE ABYSS

I don’t know about you, but my existential angst has reached near critical mass. Racism, bigotry, misogyny, and jingoism, while certainly not new to this country, have become legitimized. Truth has always been hard to find, but now verifiable information is a virtual Grail quest. Apparently, all established, credentialed news agencies are not to be trusted. I am now admonished to accept as fact, the posts of a masked person who speaks with an electronically altered voice on the Internet. The mask incidentally is symbolic of Guy Fawkes, a religious zealot who tried to assassinate the Protestant English King James, on the 5th of November 1605. And there are many other Internet sites claiming to speak truth to power that escape that meddlesome chore of fact checking. There are countless sites explaining how the government, that nameless nemesis always the culprit no matter which political party has the majority, is rendering the population compliant by spreading lithium via che...
Post a Comment
Read more