The Book of Five Rings — The Water Scroll: What Musashi Meant by Everyday Mind

The Book of Five Rings — The Water Scroll: What Musashi Meant by Everyday Mind

On Tuning Yourself — and Why “Calm Down” Is the Wrong Advice

This is one of the articles in the series on Miyamoto Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings”.

Miyamoto Musashi opens the Water Scroll with something that reads, at first glance, like a contradiction.

He has just written a book of instruction. And now, at the beginning of its second chapter, he says this:

「此書に書付たるを、我身にとつて、書付を見るとおもはず、習とおもはず、にせものにせずして、則、我心より見出したる利にして、常に其身に成て、能々工夫すべし。」

Do not think of what is written here as something to be read. Do not think of it as something to be learned. Do not imitate it. Instead, find it yourself — from within your own mind — and make it part of your body, and think deeply about it always.

A teaching that instructs you not to treat it as a teaching. A guide that tells you not to follow it.

I’ve thought about this passage for years. And the more I sit with it, the more I think it is the most important thing Musashi wrote.

The Book That Points Beyond Itself

In Zen, there is a tradition of the kōan — a question or statement that cannot be resolved through ordinary logical thinking, designed to push the student past the limits of conceptual understanding into direct experience. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Not a riddle with an answer, but a device for breaking through the habit of looking for answers in the wrong place.

Musashi was deeply formed by Zen. And I think this opening passage functions in the same way.

He is not being modest. He is making a precise and demanding point: that what he is about to describe — the qualities of mind and body that make a warrior genuinely capable — cannot be acquired by reading about them. They can only be found. In your own experience, through your own practice, forged in your own body over time.

The book is a finger pointing at the moon. Musashi is reminding you, before you get any further, not to stare at the finger.

What Musashi Says About Everyday Mind

What follows this opening is something that surprises many first-time readers of the Water Scroll. This is, after all, a manual on swordsmanship — on the techniques and tactics of actual combat. You might expect him to move immediately into specifics: posture, grip, footwork, the mechanics of the strike.

Instead, he writes about heijōshin — everyday mind. Ordinary mind. The mind of someone going about their daily life without urgency or alarm.

「兵法の道におゐて、心の持様ハ、常の心に替る事なかれ。常にも兵法のときにも、少も替らずして、心を廣く直にして、きつくひつぱらず、すこしもたるまず、心のかたよらぬやうに、心をまん中に置て、心を静にゆるがせて、其ゆるぎのせつなも、ゆるぎやまぬやうに、能々吟味すべし。」

In the Way of strategy, the mind should not differ from the everyday mind. In both ordinary times and in combat, it should be exactly the same — broad and straight, neither pulled tight nor left slack, not leaning to one side, placed at the center, kept still yet moving, and even in its movement, never ceasing.

Neither pulled tight nor left slack.

Not the stillness of something frozen. Not the looseness of something unready. The stillness of something perfectly balanced — still yet moving — available for whatever is required.

I want to stay with this image for a moment, because I think it is one of the most precise descriptions of functional composure I have ever encountered. And I also want to be honest about how long it took me to actually understand it.

The Kendo Match I Kept Losing

I practiced kendo for ten years, starting when I was six years old, at the dojo attached to the police station near my home in Kobe. By the time I was a teenager, I had developed enough technique to compete — and enough ego to be completely derailed by competition.

There is a specific experience in kendo that non-practitioners find difficult to visualize. When two competitors strike simultaneously — both going for men, the strike to the head — the strikes often land within fractions of a second of each other. To a casual observer, they appear simultaneous. To the three judges on the floor, they are not. The difference of a few tenths of a second is visible to trained eyes.

What is less well known is that the competitors themselves can feel it.

When you are in a state of genuine heijōshin — when your mind is placed at the center, neither tight nor slack, moving without stopping — you can sense, at the moment of the mutual strike, whether your timing was ahead or behind. You feel the gap. And if you are behind, and if your mind is clear enough, you can adjust — shifting in the fraction of a second before the opponent’s shinai arrives, turning a mutual strike into a clean point.

When you are gripping the outcome — when you need to win, when the score is close and the match is ending and every nerve is pulling toward the result — this perception disappears. Not because your technique has changed. Because your mind has changed. It has become tight. Pulled toward the future, toward the result, away from the present moment of the strike.

And that tightness, that fraction of a second of mental latency, is the difference between winning and losing.

I lost a great many matches this way as a teenager. I knew what I was doing wrong. I simply could not stop doing it.

The Self-Help Books That Didn’t Help

In my twenties, I read a great deal of what we now call self-development literature. I had been studying Zen and Buddhist philosophy since my university years in Kyoto, and I wanted to understand the relationship — where these Western frameworks overlapped with what I was finding in the classical texts, and where they diverged.

At first, I found some of it genuinely interesting. The early readings were fresh. Ah, so that is how this tradition looks from outside. There were useful observations, clear writing, ideas worth sitting with.

But over time, a feeling accumulated that I eventually found a word for: 修飾 — shūshoku. Decoration. Ornament. Something that makes a surface look richer than what lies beneath it.

Self-development books, at their most characteristic, are books you can read and feel, temporarily, as though you have done something. The reading itself produces a sensation of progress. You close the cover feeling slightly improved.

Bushido. The Book of Five Rings. These books produce the opposite sensation.

You finish them and feel the distance. You feel how far the road is. How much has not yet been done. How many years of practice stand between where you are and what the text is describing.

This is not a criticism of self-development literature in the ordinary sense. It is an observation about what the two traditions are actually trying to do.

Self-development books, at their best, give you something to add. A framework. A technique. A habit. Something to install.

Musashi is not giving you something to add. He is describing something you have to become. And that is a different project entirely — one that cannot be completed by reading, and that the reading itself can never substitute for.

“Just Calm Down” — And Why It Made Things Worse

When I was young and losing matches I should have won, the advice I received — from coaches, from older practitioners, from the books I was reading — was essentially a variation of the same thing: be calm, maintain equanimity, don’t let emotion affect your performance.

Good advice. Useless as instruction.

Because the attempt to be calm is itself a form of tension. I must be calm is a thought. Thoughts take up the same mental space that perception needs. And the harder I tried to achieve the state I’d been told to achieve, the further I moved from it.

I remember sitting with this problem for a long time — not in a formal meditative sense, but as a persistent, unanswered question: What is heijōshin, actually? Is it just the absence of anxiety? A practiced suppression of reaction? Something you arrive at by trying hard enough to arrive at it?

None of those answers felt right. And then, at some point — I cannot tell you exactly when, because it was not a single moment of insight but a gradual settling — I arrived at a different image.

A guitar string.

Not the silence before the string is plucked. Not the tension of a string pulled too tight. Not the limpness of a string left slack. The specific state of a string that has been tuned correctly — taut enough to vibrate cleanly, relaxed enough to move freely. The state that produces the right note when it is struck.

This, I realized, was what Musashi meant. Not be calm. Not suppress your reactions. Not try harder to be still.

Tune yourself.

Tuning, Not Adding

This reframing changed something for me in a way that the self-development books had not.

Because tuning is not addition. You do not tune a guitar by putting more string on it. You do not tune a person by giving them more techniques, more frameworks, more things to remember and apply under pressure. Tuning is the removal of what is wrong — the tightening of what is too loose, the releasing of what is too tight — until the instrument is capable of producing what it was always capable of producing, if only it were properly calibrated.

Heijōshin is not a state you achieve. It is the state that remains when you have stopped pulling too hard, stopped going slack, stopped leaning to one side. Musashi says: place the mind at the center. Not higher, not lower. Not pitched toward the future result, not dragging in the past exchange. At the center. Now.

This cannot be done by adding something. It can only be done by removing the interference — the grip, the anxiety, the need for the outcome to be a particular thing — that prevents the natural state from expressing itself.

Why the Daily Practice Is the Point

And this is where the Water Scroll circles back to the Earth Scroll, to the nine principles, to the thousand days and the ten thousand days.

Because you cannot tune an instrument in the middle of a performance. The tuning happens before. In the daily practice, in the repeated training, in the accumulated experience of striking and being struck, of losing and understanding why, of returning to the dojo the next day and beginning again.

The daily practice is not preparation for the moment when heijōshin matters. The daily practice is how heijōshin is built. Slowly, through repetition, the nervous system learns what the centered state feels like — until it becomes the default, until it becomes the ground from which everything else operates, until the performance and the preparation are no longer different things.

Musashi says: in both ordinary times and in combat, it should be exactly the same.

Not: practice being calm so that you can be calm when it matters.

Be the same person in both situations. Which requires, first, that you have built a person who is worth being consistently.

In kendo, coaches say: don’t be attached to winning. I misunderstood this for years. I thought it meant: accept that you might lose. A kind of resigned equanimity.

It does not mean that.

It means: if you have trained properly, if you have done the daily work, if your ground is solid — the winning will take care of itself. Your job is not to grip the result. Your job is to be present, tuned, available. To place the mind at the center and let the body do what it has been trained to do.

The attachment to winning is the thing that prevents winning. Not because wanting to win is wrong. But because the grip of wanting interferes with the clarity of perceiving — and perceiving, in the fraction of a second that everything is decided, is everything.

What This Looks Like Away From the Dojo

I am aware that most people reading this have never competed in kendo, and will never compete in kendo. So let me say what I think this translates to.

Every situation that matters — every presentation, negotiation, difficult conversation, decision made under pressure, moment when your actual capability will either express itself or fail to — has the same structure as the mutual strike. The outcome depends on whether you are present or not. Whether your mind is at the center or pulled toward the result. Whether the string is tuned or pulled tight.

And the state of the string at that moment is not determined in that moment. It is determined by everything that came before it. By whether you have been building the ground, doing the daily practice, paying attention to the small things, removing the conditions for failure.

The self-development book cannot give you this. The framework, the technique, the morning routine — these are not useless, but they are not sufficient. They are things you add. What Musashi is describing is not a thing you add.

It is what you become when you have been doing the right things, consistently, for long enough.

修飾の書 — the books of decoration — promise to make you better. They are not lying, exactly. But they are describing a different project.

Musashi’s project is older, slower, and harder to sell.

Do not treat this as teaching. Do not imitate it. Find it yourself — from within your own mind — and make it part of your body.

He told you at the beginning. He is still telling you now.

Previous : The Book of Five Rings — The Earth Scroll: The Philosophy of Not Losing

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.