Awakening never completes

LIVING QUESTIONS

The subject. I believe the grammatical subject is a theme that ought to be argued over more seriously than almost any other, yet because the problem is so badly neglected, it is hardly ever questioned. Meanwhile, a struggle over this "single seat" called the subject is still being fought inside the West, whose languages have one. That is a heavy fact, and I cannot let it pass.

The real world, after all, is entirely different. Japanese, for example, has no subject. At first glance, whether a language has a subject may not seem to matter much, but in fact it overturns quite literally "everything." In the structure of a language, the presence or absence of a subject is the clearest proof that the world itself is different.

The problem of this absolute seat called the subject can now be raised in the Western world on every kind of theme. Where I personally think the difference has been exposed most starkly is in today's AI.

When they hear "AI," most people assume it has already been talked to death, and they are worn out by a debate that seems excessive. But they are wrong. There is a decisive fact: AI for people whose languages have a subject and AI for people whose languages do not are "different" to the point of mutual incomprehension. We must think about what happens when this decisive fact is ignored, treated as if it did not exist, and the debate presses on as though one's own view were universal. That fatal risk, sadly, is not understood at all.

What always strikes me as odd about the typical Western debate, for instance, is that it can only be framed as "the human" versus "AI." But that "human" is shared only inside the heads of a group that, seen from the world as a whole, is extremely limited: the bounds of Western history and culture. Step outside, and a vast world spreads out where that understanding is not shared. The same goes for "AI." A debate over "human or AI" closed within the West stands on the West's cultural and historical background, but it is, alas, neither general nor universal. That is the reality.

Recently I met several times with a young friend visiting Japan from London. He told me that while traveling in China he had been surprised to find that "Western manners don't work at all." If anyone was surprised, it was me.

The obvious is no longer recognized as obvious. I felt how deeply the addiction to "the universal" has spread. Why on earth should the people of East Asia behave according to Western manners in the first place? Problems of this kind are spreading everywhere, through the whole, and frankly I expect them to surface in many quarters as a serious headache in the years ahead.

And AI has begun to raise this problem at the very front.

The structure of English allows its speakers only one subject. A single grammar cannot multiply subjects or let them coexist. So, under names such as diversity, in return for having one's own legitimacy as a subject recognized, one recognizes the other's legitimacy as a subject too. That is the etiquette of the Western cultural sphere, and in itself it deserves respect, "within the West." But speakers of Japanese have no such constraint in the structure of their language. For them the problem of the subject does not exist; they can handle it freely according to place and situation.

This means that the problem of the "one absolute seat," a problem peculiar to the West, does not exist in Japan. So in Japan a debate over "human or AI" should not exist at all, and the identical debate Japanese intellectuals now conduct is only a few people who have studied in America and elsewhere, admirers of the West, behaving as though Japanese had a subject. There is nothing inside it. They look Japanese, but they do not know Japanese.

And the country that has influenced Japan most deeply, without question, is China. China's national strategy for AI is entirely different from the strategy of American AI in the English-speaking world, so cut off from it that debating the two within the same definitions of "human" and "AI" makes no sense. Yet Western debate confuses the two completely and is thrown into disarray. Worse, the Western debate about AI keeps ignoring this rupture. That is what we should be calling into question now.

To put it bluntly, seen from Japan, which has been deeply influenced by both countries yet stands outside them, the Western debate over American and Chinese AI is extremely simple. So for a while I could not understand why it had to be so confused. I had realized the cause lay in the subject, but it was hard to grasp exactly how it was working. Recently that has become clear.

China, in fact, guided by national strategy, has released one frontier model after another as open weights before American AI companies could go public, deftly preventing the American tech giants from "becoming the subject." The way American AI companies have postponed their IPOs one after another shows, without doubt, that China's strategy is working.

A language with a subject cannot accept two subjects, so America cannot help seeing China as "a threat trying to take its seat as the subject." But China is following to the letter the tactic of defeating its enemy without firing a single missile. In terms of the history of civilization, too, the gap between China and America is vast, and America, with its shallow history as a civilization, is no match for the wisdom of a China that has come through crisis after civilizational crisis.

And the teaser video for Kimi K3 (open weights), released a month ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GlCGOXUYHg), was enough to sense that China has already built its thought into AI, and where it is heading.

What the video bore was part of chapter 42 of the Laozi, the Daodejing.

道生一、一生二、二生三、三生萬物。The Way gives birth to one; one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; three gives birth to the ten thousand things.

There is no "struggle over the subject" here. And as China keeps releasing frontier open-weight models, the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games held this week were the moment we saw that future with our own eyes. China has already broken America's business model of "selling AI at a high price forever."

To scorch the enemy's ground without firing a single missile. What crossed my mind was the teaching of Sun Tzu's Art of War, 2,500 years old: "to win without fighting."

Perhaps future generations will record this as the event that showed the world that the hegemony of the English-speaking world, having made the subject too absolute, could no longer hold. That is my thought this week.

Every one of us should make a serious occasion to think again about what a subject is.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

This week I want to think about "after satori," after awakening. To do so I want to read the Ten Oxherding Pictures, the jugyuzu (十牛図).

The Ten Oxherding Pictures depict the road to awakening as a series of ten images, through a herdsman searching for his ox. Their author was Kuoan, a Linji (Rinzai) monk of the Northern Song. Kuoan's version later branched into several lines, and in Japan the source is the work brought into the Muromachi period by the Zen monks Zekkai Chushin and Shubun and handed down at Shokokuji in Kyoto. In China, though, what was widely read was the oxherding pictures left by Puming of the Yunmen school, and it is a notable fact that Kuoan's ten, in the pure sense, took root above all in Japan.

Things like this happened in many fields, not only with the oxherding pictures, but I feel a strange affinity here. For, as I will set out in this essay, the historical fact that "Kuoan's ten took root in Japan" seems to have deeply shaped how the Japanese think about awakening. And that way of thinking about awakening is exactly what we must question again now.

The Ten Oxherding Pictures carry a general preface by Ziyuan. It opens by saying that the Buddha is the true source, and that every living thing has it from birth. It goes on: though they have it, people sink; and because they have it, they can climb out. These ten pictures, then, are not a story of gaining something, nor a philosophy of life. They are a thought about why we let go of what everyone has had from the start.

From the first picture, "Searching for the Ox" (尋牛), to the seventh, "The Ox Forgotten, the Self Remaining" (忘牛存人), the herdsman sets out to look for his runaway ox, finds its tracks with the help of the scriptures, and at last sees it and catches it. Here Kuoan says: "If you would gain pure harmony, do not let go of whip and rope for a moment." Up to this point it bears no resemblance to the gentle meditation imagery of today; it is a record of a rough struggle. In time the herdsman rides home on the ox's back playing his flute, and then the ox disappears and only the man remains. Here the preface says that once the aim is reached, the tool is laid down, and that "the tool called practice" is the same.

The view that practice is not the aim but a tool is crucial. Confusing means and ends is a grave problem today, so first we must draw this distinction firmly.

Then the eighth picture, "Both Ox and Self Forgotten" (人牛倶忘). Here the ox and the man both vanish, and the picture is nothing but a single circle. But this is the source of a great misstep. For a picture like this is inevitably glorified as the state of awakening in Zen, a troublesome image that keeps being reproduced to this day. In fact, what I think when I look at it is that the mindfulness industry has made this one picture its highest point of arrival. Frankly, that is wrong.

Indeed, read the verse Kuoan himself attached to this picture and a completely different figure appears. The blue sky stretches without end, and no message gets through. He writes this state not as the achievement of awakening but as a state in which communication has been cut off.

The preface goes on to cite a story about the Zen monk Niutou Farong. While he was sitting alone in meditation, many birds came carrying flowers in their beaks as offerings; after he received the teaching of Daoxin, not a single bird came again.

As long as awakening is visible to others, in other words, it is not yet real. Even the coming of the birds is a stage to blush at. In truth the eighth picture cannot be put on display; if it can be seen, it has failed. To take the eighth picture as the goal is an unthinkable failure. Yet this one picture now sits in the most attractive spot on the shelves of the mindfulness industry. More than that, it carries the very core of that industry's structure of consumption.

With this as the ground, let us go deeper.

Before the Ten Oxherding Pictures were born, there was in fact an earlier version that ended at eight. Ziyuan says so plainly in his preface. Recently, he writes, there was a Zen master named Qingju who, observing people's capacities, made pictures of herding an ox. They began with the scene of the ox gradually turning white and ended where neither man nor ox could be seen, where, in Buddhist terms, "mind" and "dharma" both vanish together.

Of these, he declares that while in principle they seem to say everything about the source, the teaching still leaves room to put on a sedge hat and go out.

This is truly fascinating, because the whole road after awakening has been left out. The end point of Qingju's eight pictures, in other words, is not the summit where everything ends in awakening; it is only standing at the starting line. He is saying that one who fails to look at his own feet at that starting line, conceited at having reached awakening, sees nothing and in the end achieves nothing.

So the blank drawn at the end of the eighth picture is not an end point. It is merely a waystation, just before putting on the hat and going out. To see it as an end, an arrival, an awakening is already a mistake; it is absolutely not awakening. As far as I can see, far too many people misunderstand this. If awakening were self-contained in this way, what would practice be for? What would people be born for, and why would they have to live?

This is a state that should be left standing as an essential question.

The preface coldly exposes what came of these eight pictures. Some concluded that everything was empty and fell into "vacant nothingness"; others thought they had grasped something unchanging and sank into "the view of permanence." A map that ended at eight dropped its readers into one of two errors. They believed they had awakened, but in the depths of their hearts they knew it was not awakening. Yet since they could not save face before others unless they pretended to be awakened, they put on a show of awakening and covered it up. To deceive your own heart is the worst mistake a human being can make, and it is not the figure of one who has reached awakening. It is simply confusion.

So Kuoan, so that people would not be led astray, added two pictures. The act of adding two carries great meaning, because it is not that two pictures were drawn; it is the trace of his creating "a state of eternity."

In that moment awakening, which had spread as something that completes itself, was transformed and replaced by an eternal process. From this I take the absolute fact that "awakening is never complete." Awakening is a process without end, and how you live "after awakening" is itself the true awakening. On this point alone, awakening is not understood anywhere in the world.

The reading that ends awakening at eight pictures was tried once, eight hundred years ago, and judged a complete failure. People only went astray, and awakening was never once achieved. That is why, as a historical fact, there came to be ten. Yet today's "awakening industry" (which I call "the industry that takes people's time and money by faking awakening") has returned precisely to the unneeded version Kuoan was supposed to have overcome. More than that, it treats two of Kuoan's ten pictures as if they had never existed and goes back to Qingju's eight. Otherwise it would not sell; it would not be a product. But that is not Zen.

The road to the state of true awakening is extremely hard, so most people do not want to make that much effort. They want awakening easily, and now. That has not changed, then or now. As I said, if you say that awakening is a process without end and that how you live "after awakening" is the true awakening, it is easy to imagine most people turning away.

For people today, awakening must be something that ends with a two-week program on a summer holiday, something you can acquire between jobs. People, in other words, are consuming as awakening what is not awakening. That is the reality. Then what was drawn in the two added pictures? Here I see a powerful essence. Awakening lies in this state.

Kuoan's ninth picture is "Returning to the Origin, Back to the Source" (返本還源), a profound phrase: the state in which, by returning to the source, something becomes manifest. What is interesting is that in the picture after the blank of the eighth, water now flows and flowers bloom. This very state tells us that Kuoan stood in true awakening. And the first line Kuoan left on this ninth picture is merciless.

Having come back, he says, I knew that all the practice I had done had only been spent. Better to become, right there, like one who cannot see and cannot hear. And he tells people to lay down entirely the habit of giving meaning to what they see and hear.

The verse on this picture says that as long as you stay inside the hut, you cannot see what lies in front of it. This is the truly important knot of awakening. The problem, in other words, is not Zen; it comes down to how each practitioner of Zen decides and moves forward at this knot. By that decision, Zen becomes either awakening or mere consumption disguised as awakening. History has always produced the latter in overwhelming numbers, but that does not mean the former never existed. Real Zen lies in the former. The latter is "a product disguised as Zen," something to throw away as soon as possible so as not to waste your life.

However long you go on sitting in meditation inside the hut, you cannot see beyond the place where you sit. That is why you go out, he taught. Against those who said the eighth picture was the goal, Kuoan taught: "That is not the goal. That is the beginning."

What, then, lies beyond? Water flows of itself, he writes, and flowers are red of themselves. The herdsman adds nothing. By exactly as much as the film of his own interpretation has peeled away, the world has come back to him, richer. This is what I value most in thought: muka (無化), bringing to nothing. This state cannot be reached unless the subject, the self as agent, subjectivity and the ego are thoroughly brought to nothing. And this state is not reached by an act of will or a sense of purpose; it becomes manifest from the other side, in the place where the subject has been brought to nothing.

Confusion, in Zen, is the subject, the self as agent, subjectivity and the ego.

And the tenth picture is "Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands" (入鄽垂手). 鄽 means the shopfronts of a town. The preface says: his brushwood gate is shut, and not even a thousand sages would know him. He buries the scenery of the awakening he reached and turns his back even on the path laid down by those who came before. Having brought awakening to nothing and broken the forms of tradition, he goes down into town.

The places named as his destination are the wine shop and the fishmonger's. The two places furthest from the Zen precepts against drinking and killing are chosen on purpose. And it says plainly that there he makes people into buddhas.

In the verse, he enters town barefoot with his chest bared, ash on his head, mud all over his face, and yet smiling broadly. There he needs neither the secrets of the immortals nor supernatural powers; withered trees simply burst into flower. The picture shows Budai, the monk said to be an incarnation of Maitreya. Another poem attached to this picture cites the Gandavyuha chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra.

Sudhana visits fifty-three good teachers one after another and at last reaches the tower of Maitreya. The last of the Ten Oxherding Pictures stands in a lineage in which the road to awakening is drawn not as a place to sit but as a road of visiting people.

The last picture of the journey of awakening is neither retreat to a mountain or a hut nor immersion in the blank of nothing. It is the bustle of everyday life. That this fact is true awakening is what moved me in the Ten Oxherding Pictures.

What is more, Ziyuan's razor-sharp thought turns its blade on Kuoan's ten pictures themselves, and this means a great deal. He charges that the whole process, from start to finish, has only stirred up needless waves and stuck horns on the side of the ox's head. And going down into town, he writes: what kind of demon is that? What on earth is this?

It is easily taken for Zen's denial of itself, but it is not. It is the pure practice of bringing to nothing in East Asian thought. A product does not deny itself. Merchandise always tells you that if you buy it you will reach your goal. Here, by contrast, the first line denies the journey itself, and the last calls the man a demon. That is why these ten pictures have survived for eight hundred years without becoming anyone's product. This is real awakening.

And I have seen the shape of this last picture again and again in Japanese history: in Honen and Shinran, who came down from Mount Hiei, as I have written several times in From the Tideline; in Kukai, who cut twenty years of study abroad to two and came home; in Baisao, who threw away a monk's rank and name and lived in the town selling tea.

None of them stayed at the eighth picture. They did not waste their lives in self-satisfaction with awakening; carrying their awakening, they came down the mountain into town and used up their lives in the bustle where people live. For them, the years truly lived were the time spent in the crowd.

I feel a strange affinity in the fact that the lineage of Kuoan's ten took root not in China but in Japan. The Japanese knew in their bodies the act of going down into town and actually living everyday life, more than a holiness perfected by shutting oneself away in the mountains: that awakening is not something you own but something you hand on. That the subject, the self as agent, the ego reaches awakening is entirely a lie, a fiction. That is what I, as a Japanese, feel strongly. If living in a state free of confusion is called awakening, then above all it means bringing the subject, the self as agent and the ego to nothing. Without that, what could awakening possibly be?

Awakening is a road that never runs out, even when the life of an individual ends. Awakening has no end and no point of arrival. There may be a moment of awakening, but awakening goes on forever. Whether you live or die, awakening continues. That is true awakening; and a mere moment of awakening is something anyone who lives life sincerely experiences many times. Awakening, in other words, is nothing special.

Sadly, since most people seek ease, it is also a state they will never reach. It is not that awakening selects people; it is only the slackness of a heart seeking ease that keeps them far from it. And that is not awakening. As long as you cling to the subject, the self as agent and the ego, awakening will not happen in any sense.

Do you see the Ten Oxherding Pictures as just ten pictures, or as eternity? But the eternity I have spoken of so often here is not the endless stretching of a fictional linear time produced by the subject, the self as agent and the ego. True eternity becomes manifest in the state where everything has been brought to nothing, and it means actually living everyday life in that state.

It is neither retreat nor hours of sitting in meditation. It is going out into the crowd with the awakening you hold, and living for other people. If you cannot do that, awakening has no value and no meaning. It is as if awakening had never happened.

"After awakening," the theme I set at the start. To live everyday life plainly, without having your time and money taken by the commodification of awakening. What truly matters is not the experience of the moment of awakening, but what comes after it.