On meditation as the tending of ma — the space between — rather than the quieting of the mind
I. You Don’t Have to Close Your Eyes
To be precise, I don’t feel the need to. Day in and day out, wherever I am, I find myself in something close to meditation with my eyes wide open. Waiting for waves, out on the water. Walking the streets in kimono. And in the simultaneous interpreting booth, where I have spent more than thirty years — there, in the very torrent of speech pouring in without pause.
The Japanese word for meditation, meisō (瞑想), commands the opposite posture from the very first stroke. The character mei (瞑) means to close the eyes; the radical for “eye” leans against mei (冥), a character that carries darkness within it. Sō (想) means to picture something in the mind. Put together, they raise an image: eyes shut, the outside light cut off, the mind turning quietly inward. The written form itself prescribes a discipline. Lower your lids. Shut out the world. Go in.
And yet I do not close my eyes.
This is not a glib remark. In that almost beginner’s phrase — you can meditate without closing your eyes — I hear the deepest thing about meditation stated in the plainest possible words.
Because as long as we believe that closing the eyes is the essence of meditation, we hold only half of it — or perhaps only the doorway. What follows is an attempt to take that one phrase, you don’t have to close your eyes, as an entrance, and to unravel once more what meditation is: from its etymology, from Buddhism, and from the body.
Let me give away the conclusion at the outset. Meditation is not the work of putting the mind in order. It is the work of tending the ma (間) — the space between — that lies between one’s own body and others. It looks like the most private of acts, yet it is, in truth, the most social.
II. The Trap of Using the Mind to Manage the Mind
What most people picture when they hear the word “meditation” is fairly fixed.
Find a quiet place. Close your eyes. Clear away stray thoughts. Concentrate on the breath. Make the mind calm. Keep out the sounds that disturb you. — In short, try to steer the mind toward some desired state.
These are all well-meant practices. I won’t say they are wrong. But one thing tends to go unnoticed. Every one of these efforts rests on the same structure: the mind trying to manage the mind.
Who is it that tries to clear away stray thoughts? The mind. Who strains to concentrate? The mind. Who wishes to be calm? The mind again. So we mobilize a second layer of mind in order to still the first restless one. We stack mind upon mind. The very gesture of reaching for stillness is, already, a kind of restlessness.
And something deeper is happening still. This structure quietly swallows an assumption — a way of thinking, a way of seeing — that mind and body are two separate things. The mind tries to manage the body, or the stimuli reaching the body, from above. When we try to shut out a “disturbing sound,” we are scolding the body for receiving that sound at all. Be quiet. Don’t stir. Don’t react.
Here is the point I want to walk back to.
The body never holds still. As long as it lives, it goes on receiving every kind of stimulus. Sound, light, temperature, pain, itch, hunger, wind. To receive and process them ceaselessly is not some malfunction of life. It is precisely what it is to be alive — the most natural state there is.
If that is so, then trying not to receive stimuli — trying to use the mind to suppress the body’s natural working — is not tending the body at all. It runs against the grain of life itself. Seeking silence can become its own form of thirst, its own craving.
We have somehow been led to believe that meditation is a technique of shutting out stimulus and managing the mind. How did that come to be? That question will lead us, later, somewhere unexpected. But first we must return to meditation’s homeland — to “stopping” and “seeing” in Buddhism.
III. Insight Begins in the Body
Buddhism had no word that simply meant “meditation.”
At its center stood two practices. One was śamatha, rendered into Chinese as shi (止), “stopping” — gathering the mind to a single point, halting its scattering, bringing it to stillness. The other was vipaśyanā, rendered as kan (観), “seeing” — observing things as they are, seeing through to their true nature: impermanence, suffering, and no-self. The work of insight and wisdom.
The union of the two, shikan (止観), “stopping-and-seeing,” became the heart of practice in East Asian Buddhism, systematized above all in the Tendai school. By stillness, calm the mind; with the calmed mind, by seeing, perceive the truth. — Put that way, shikan too sounds like a “technique for ordering the mind.”
But here lies a decisive oversight. Shikan does not begin with the mind. It begins with the body.
Seated meditation follows an order: regulate the body, regulate the breath, regulate the mind (調身・調息・調心). First settle the body — straighten the posture, set bone and flesh in their proper place. Then settle the breath — make it deep, long, smooth. And then, at last — at last — the mind settles.
Do not take this order lightly. We tend to think, “calm the mind, and the body will follow.” But the tradition teaches the reverse. When you have settled the concrete ground of the body and the concrete rhythm of the breath, the mind, with no need for you to operate it, settles of its own accord. The regulation of the mind arrives as a result, at the far end of regulating body and breath.
So shikan never tries to work on the mind directly. It seems to have known, more than a thousand years ago, how futile that is. A mind trying to still the mind must itself be stilled by yet another mind — and the only way out of that infinite regress is this: to draw the mind gently back to the body, its anchor.
Seeing, too, is bodily. Vipaśyanā traditionally begins from the “four foundations of mindfulness” — body, feeling, mind, and phenomena — and the first of these is the body. Next comes feeling, the sensations arising in the body. Seeing is not abstract introspection. It begins by observing what is happening, right now, in the body: the breath going out and in, the soles of the feet, the rise and fall of the belly. To see, in this sense, is not philosophy in the head but a descent into the body.
To put it in my own terms: shikan is not a technique for newly constructing a unity of mind and body. Mind and body, which ought to be one, drift apart in the course of daily living — and shikan is the work of laying that drift bare and setting it right again. Not “to integrate,” but “to return to a oneness already there.”
It is close to the feeling of waiting for waves. As I tune myself to the swell of the sea, to the state of my own body, to the wind and the tide, I quietly stop letting thought run on ahead. To that act of attunement.
IV. Stillness in the Midst of Stimulus
Now let me go down one more level.
Seated meditation, beginning from body and breath, does avoid the trap of mind operating on mind, because it starts from the body. And yet — might seated meditation, in a sense, still be surface-level?
Because it is usually done under conditions where stimulus has been reduced. A quiet hall. A composed posture. Eyes closed, or half closed. An environment with input from the outside turned down as far as possible. The harmony of body and mind attained under such conditions is, as it were, a laboratory oneness.
But to live is to go on being exposed to stimulus. We do not really live inside a quiet hall. We live in the thick of it — in the marketplace of the world, swirling with sound and light and other people and things to be done. If a unity can be held only under specially muffled conditions, is it not a fragile unity, dependent on those conditions? A peace that visits only atop the cushion may be a peace that collapses the moment one rises from it.
This is where the true reach of seeing — vipaśyanā — comes into its own.
Seeing is not a technique for reducing stimulus. Rather, it is the work of watching, without adding judgment, the very process by which a stimulus arrives, is received by the body, and passes away.
Suppose a sound is heard. That the sound becomes “something that disturbs my concentration” is a judgment of the mind. The sound itself merely comes, and goes. That is all. For a living thing, to receive a stimulus and process it is an entirely natural event. Seeing does not block that nature. It does not try to erase the sound, nor does it loathe it. It simply watches the sound as something that comes and goes.
If so, then in principle, seeing holds even amid a crowd, even in the thick of stimulus. Indeed, that is precisely where it belongs. For what seeing watches is not the stimulus itself, but the instant in which a reaction rises up against it — disturbed, unpleasant, I want to concentrate — the instant of the mind running on ahead. It does not erase the stimulus. It stands present at the very place where reaction to the stimulus is born.
The Zen tradition did not let this slip. On the contrary, it staged it with great deliberation. In the Rinzai lineage there is a saying: practice in the midst of activity is a hundred thousand million times superior to practice in stillness. The work gained amid movement and stimulus is worth a hundred thousand million times more than the work gained sitting quietly.
Seated stillness is not denied. But it is positioned as a foothold for stepping out into the midst of activity. To master the cushion, and to hold the same state once you have left the cushion, out in the thick of the world — the whole point lies in that movement back and forth. Seated meditation is not the destination. It is the doorway.
Seen this way, the deepest shikan may dwell precisely where no special place or posture is required. In waiting for waves, for instance. Atop the endlessly rocking surface of the sea, receiving with the whole body the incoming wave, the receding wave, the wind, the cold, the salt — and still not running ahead, quietly matching oneself to the next single swell. That state.
Not silence with the stimulus cut off, but stillness in the very midst of stimulus. Not the darkness of closed eyes, but clarity with the eyes held open.
For me this is no metaphor. Simultaneous interpretation is exactly that. The speech pours in without pause; it cannot be stopped or slowed. Shut out the stimulus, and the work cannot stand. On the contrary — the moment the mind runs ahead to “what shall I say next,” the rendering collapses. Receive the words that come, let them go, receive the next. Every sense held open, and yet not running ahead. — This has the very structure of seeing itself.
You don’t have to close your eyes. That, then, is no mere casual turn of phrase. It is a sentence that, without breaking the form of seated meditation, releases its essence alone into daily life. Surface and depth, here, quietly change places.
V. Take Out God, and the Vessel Remains
One question, though, remains.
Why is the modern image of “meditation” so heavily tilted toward shutting out stimulus, closing inward, and managing the mind? If the original shikan was a horizontal practice opened out into the thick of stimulus, where does that inward gravity of the present-day image come from?
Part of the answer lies in the history of the English word meditation itself.
The word we translate as meisō traces back to the Latin meditatio. And this word originally had nothing to do with the East; it carried a clear meaning within the tradition of Christian monastic practice.
There is a way of prayer called lectio divina, “sacred reading.” Its four stages run thus: lectio (reading), meditatio (meditating), oratio (praying), contemplatio (contemplating). One reads the scripture, ruminates on it inwardly, prays to God, and at last contemplates God. Meditatio was one stage in this process of vertical ascent toward God.
So the very ground of “meditation” in the West is steeped in introspection, repentance, and prayer — in short, in the manner of facing God. Search the inner self, examine one’s sins, offer oneself up to a transcendent Other. The structure is thoroughly vertical. From the self below, to God above.
Then, in the twentieth century, into this vessel flowed the East’s shikan and Zen.
What happened? The addressee — God — was removed. Secularized, stripped of religion, meditation became “a technique of mental self-care that anyone can practice.” So far, this is a familiar story.
But here is what has gone overlooked. Take out the addressee, and the shape of the vessel remains.
Inward, ever inward, one burrows. One observes the state of the mind, orders it, moves toward something better. That same vertical gesture. Into the seat left empty by the departed God, there now quietly settled “the true self,” “inner peace,” “getting centered.” The vessel kept its shape — the cell where one faces God alone — and only the contents were swapped out.
If so, then the fact that modern mindfulness is so often received as “an introspective work of searching and ordering the inner mind” is not because the Eastern shikan was originally such a thing. It is because the Western vessel that received it was, from the start, shaped like introspection and prayer. It was not that shikan became Westernized. It was that the Eastern word was poured into the Western vessel of meditatio.
And here, precisely, lies the answer to the question raised in Section II. Why does modern meditation tilt toward cutting off stimulus, closing inward, managing the mind? Because within its genetic code lies the silence of the monastic cell — cella — where one faces the transcendent God, just the two of them. The structure of prayer rising vertically toward the Other still echoes, even after the loss of God, as “interiority.”
This is not a criticism. Christian prayer holds the accumulation of a millennium and a half, and a deep truth of its own. I want only to make one thing clear, by way of contrast: the image we hold of “what meditation is” may not be the figure of Eastern shikan at all, but the shape of the Western vessel of prayer.
VI. Desire Is Not Sin — From the Vertical to the Horizontal
This matter of the vessel connects to a deeper layer still: the handling of the body.
In the Christian tradition, much of sin is rooted in the body. Recall the seven deadly sins. Several of them — lust, gluttony, sloth — take the body’s desire itself as the thing to be overcome. The flesh (caro) was set in opposition to the spirit (spiritus), as that which must be suppressed, transcended, disciplined.
This structure carved the separation of mind (spirit) and body (flesh) deep into the foundations of a culture. It was only natural that meditation became a work of burrowing vertically into the interior. For there the body was less a partner one “faces” than an obstacle one must “get past.” The mind governs the body — meditation was even a training ground for that.
It is precisely this premise that I want to turn over.
The body’s stimulus, reaction, desire are neither sins to be suppressed nor obstacles to be transcended. They are the state of things as they are. The natural condition of a living thing. The problem is not that desire exists. The twist lies rather in trying to sever desire, in trying to govern the body with the mind — in that gesture of separation.
So, having acknowledged desire “as it is,” how then do we handle it?
This is the pivotal turn of the whole essay.
Not by repressing desire within the private interior. Nor by letting it run loose. Rather — within one’s relationship to others, how does one take the ma, the space between? That is everything.
My desiring body and your desiring body are in the same space. In that case, how do we set the interval, how do we be together? The task is not to erase desire. The task is how bodies that carry desire are to live the space between one another.
Here the very axis of meditation rotates.
From a vertical work of closing inward, to a horizontal work of opening out into the space between oneself and others.
In the Western lineage, the disposal of desire was a vertical matter between “God and self.” In the cell, in the interior, toward the transcendent, one disciplines the flesh. But if we acknowledge desire as it is, then the disposal of desire becomes a horizontal matter between “self and others.” The moment desire is sealed away as sin in the private interior, it loses its sociality and closes off vertically. Conversely, when desire is opened as it is, it opens — of itself — toward others.
At the trunk of my own thinking stands the word ma (間), the space between. Neither opposition nor assimilation. To stand in the between, to live the between. If Western meditation was the vertical relation of two terms, God and self, then shikan is the work of standing, and staying, in the between of stimulus and body. It does not look at a partner it faces. It watches what arises and passes away in the between.
Living in kimono belongs, for me, to this same family. Kimono constrains the body’s movements and continually calls awareness back to the body — how I walk, how I sit, how my hands move. It is a form of responsibility for one’s bearing within a shared space. How I am there is not my problem alone. It is a matter of the between.
VII. The Most Private, and the Most Social, of Acts
And so we have drawn a circle and come back to where we began.
From two characters that seem to command “close your eyes,” we passed through the trap of the mind managing the mind, ducked under the shikan that begins from the body, dived into stillness in the midst of stimulus, gazed at the vessel of prayer that remains even after God is removed, and then turned the axis — from the vertical that treats desire as sin, to the horizontal that takes desire as it is.
At the end of that road, the conclusion that comes into view sounds, at first, like a paradox.
Meditation is the most private of acts, and at the very same time, the most social.
It may sound contradictory. But anyone who has walked this road should already see that it is no contradiction at all.
We acknowledge the body’s desire as it is. And precisely because of that, it ceases to be a private interior problem of “how to endure,” and becomes a relational problem of “how to take the space between, with others.” The moment desire is sealed within as sin, meditation loses its sociality and closes off vertically. To open desire as it is, is itself to open toward others. To acknowledge as it is, and to be social, are not two separate things. They are the front and back of one and the same thing.
The oneness of mind and body was never an integration completed inside the individual. It was a dynamic adjustment, a standing-and-staying in the between with others. As waiting for waves is an interval kept with the sea. As interpreting is an interval kept between speaker and listener. As kimono is responsibility for one’s bearing in shared space. — All of it was the between.
So: you don’t have to close your eyes.
Indeed, perhaps you must keep them open. For what we truly need to tend is not the darkness of our own interior, but that ma — that space between self and world, between self and others — arising and vanishing moment by moment.
It can be done anytime, anywhere. On the water, in the street, in the very torrent of work. No special place is required, no special posture. All that is required is this single thing: not to shut out stimulus, not to let the mind run ahead, but to stay present — quietly, continuously — to what is happening in the body now, and to what is happening now in the space between oneself and another.
Meditation is not the calming of the mind.
It is the tending of the between. And to tend the between is one way of taking responsibility for being here, in this world, together with someone else.
An accompanying note — “Is Renunciation an Arrival or a Departure?” — follows separately. It concerns Christian celibacy and Buddhist renunciation: how the two echo each other in form while pointing in opposite directions in structure, an opposition read against this essay’s axis of the vertical and the horizontal.