⚫︎Crossing, With Companions, Walls One Cannot Cross Alone
Adachi: As we discussed, we want to add game elements so people can face mental health without bracing themselves. On the other hand, in Zen training, you carry out grueling days without any such devices. How do those undergoing training keep themselves together?
Matsuyama: That's a very good question. A Zen training hall is called a sorin—it's like a "bush," a state where many young trees striving to grow stand densely together. The most severe period of the year is rohatsu osesshin, from December 1st to the 8th. It is sleepless, ceaseless training in which you sit in zazen the entire time, never lying down for even a moment. This is something you absolutely cannot do alone.
Adachi: It would be hard without considerable resolve.
Matsuyama: Resolve alone isn't enough. You can do it because you have companions. Being in the same circumstances, sitting while facing one another. If you doze off, you're caught immediately. There is true mutual cultivation there, different from the competition of today's capitalist society. Even without points, you can discipline yourself by seeing the figures of those around you.
Adachi: The presence of companions becomes a support. But I also think this is a world of people who have already settled on "I'm going to do this" as a premise. For many people, facing themselves at all is quite difficult. Metacognition really does require resolve. We have an aspiration to build a tool that helps with that.
Matsuyama: In terms of resolve, another important factor is the presence of a leader. The master during my training years was 71 at the time, and for about half a year I served as his attendant. Morning service began at 3 a.m., but the master was already long awake. From around 2 a.m., you could hear his voice practicing the dharma talk he would give to the training monks that day.
Adachi: Someone over 70, from 2 in the morning.
Matsuyama: Yes. While we in our twenties trained complaining of how sleepy we were, a man over 70 rose earlier than anyone to prepare. Once that becomes the shared understanding of everyone, an atmosphere arises naturally: "How dare we slack off more than that man." The stance of the one at the top working harder than anyone holds tremendous power in our world.
Adachi: A kind of discipline arises there.
Matsuyama: It's deductive rather than inductive, so to speak—when the atmosphere of the top changes, the whole place transforms completely. When the current chief abbot of Myoshinji read out just a few words at his first ceremony after taking office, the whole space snapped to attention. In that single moment, the atmosphere of "this is how the next four years will be" was forged. The resolve of the leader creates the resolve of the whole.
⚫︎The Concentration Inconvenience Creates—Unintended Mindfulness
Adachi: When you're engaged in zazen and labor from morning on during training, do you approach it with a mindset of "I'm going to train"? Or is there a different state of mind?
Matsuyama: As a state of mind, we deliberately do inconvenient things. Cooking rice over a wood fire, sweeping the same spot of the garden with a bamboo broom every morning. It takes enormous effort and time. But precisely because of that, you have to follow the steps carefully or you won't make it in time. Cooking rice over a wood fire, for instance, is genuinely dangerous work, so you naturally concentrate intensely.
Adachi: So by making the process complex, you reach a state where you concentrate on what's right in front of you without thinking about unnecessary things.
Matsuyama: That's right. No one ever says a word like "this is mindfulness," yet you're placed, of your own accord, in an environment where you have no choice but to do it.
Adachi: That paints a very vivid picture. Lately, when I give feedback to my team, I sometimes say, "Maybe all sorts of anxieties come up precisely because you have too much idle time." When you face something and concentrate, before you know it time has passed and your heart feels clear.
Matsuyama: Exactly. People in the old days probably lived that way, which is likely why mental breakdown itself was rare. Right now there's a folk craft (mingei) exhibition at the Kyocera Museum of Art in Kyoto, and people who do crafts are very often emotionally stable. There are people who, without ever undergoing monastic training, have reached spiritual heights comparable to a monk's. In Jodo Shinshu (the Pure Land True sect), they're called myokonin. Generally, they're people who work with their hands. When you're absorbed in handwork for a long time, you have no time to worry.
Adachi: Having an object of concentration outside yourself ends up improving your own state too. As a training environment, it's very rationally designed.
Matsuyama: Mayor Matsui of Kyoto often says "absorption and wonder," and if you have something you can lose yourself in, and you can feel beauty in it, there's no greater peace of mind than that.
Adachi: What a wonderful phrase.
Matsuyama: So the mindfulness you do by setting out to "do mindfulness" isn't mindfulness at all. It's something where you realize it's over before you knew it, you were absorbed and concentrated, ah, that felt refreshing, and looking back afterward you think, "Ah, that was mindfulness." That is its true form. When you try to do it intentionally, you slip into utilitarian thinking—"what effects will I get?"—and end up, more often than not, unable to concentrate.
Adachi: I myself did waterfall meditation in my student days. At first it was cold and breathing was painful. But after a few minutes there was a moment when my body suddenly felt light, and from there it was over in a flash. It's embodied knowledge you can't understand without trying it. I don't think our service can carry people all the way to that state, but I'd be glad if visualization could function as an entry point—a trigger for becoming curious about your own state.
Matsuyama: Yes, as a trigger I think it's very good. I don't think it solves everything, but it can become a trigger for awareness for a great many people. Conversely, truly deep spiritual experience—and the kind of discontinuous awareness where something leaps forward amid extreme stress—is a state unreachable through adjusting numbers. But there is great meaning in opening the entry point that leads toward it.
⚫︎"Anjin" as a Way of Accepting—Toward an Abundance Free of Comparison
Matsuyama: Going forward, what I'd love to be able to learn through a service like MENTAGRAPH is one's own characteristics. In work and everything else, there are so many people who feel stressed doing things completely at odds with their own type. For instance, some people find peace in simple, repetitive tasks, while others find them painful. It would be even better if, after understanding your own characteristics, it could suggest actions suited to them.
Adachi: That's exactly part of our vision—we're researching how to categorize types of stress. For example, someone who recovers slowly by the next day but can store up a great deal, versus someone who recovers quickly with sleep but has small capacity—the measures you should propose are completely different. We're developing those kinds of individualized solutions.
Matsuyama: That's marvelous. But there's one thing I'd like to be careful about. We live in an age where it's very hard to feel happy, and one reason, I think, is our "hyper-comparison society." Temples, hospitals, universities, human beings themselves—everything has become an object of comparison. If even mental health numbers become tools for comparison, all that's left is superiority and inferiority. That wouldn't mean much.
Adachi: I think you're absolutely right.
Matsuyama: In Buddhism, there's a difference between anshin and anjin. Anshin is the image of a heart that's light, free of troubles and anxieties. But just as there's hardly ever a state where not a single part of your body is unwell, such a perfect state doesn't exist.
Adachi: Indeed.
Matsuyama: Anjin is not that. It's a way of accepting that says it's okay to carry anxiety, that this is only natural. To be able to think, while still incomplete, still holding anxiety, "Ah, this was good as it is." That is anjin. So when your own characteristics come to light, even if some part is out of balance, if you could be granted the peace of mind that says "no one is perfect, and that's okay," that would be the best.
Adachi: That concept of anjin is exactly the world we want to create. Rather than straining yourself, feeling you have to be proper, have to get it right, you accept as a premise that something is lacking, and within that, ask how to do your best. Being short of 100 points isn't a bad thing. Within how things are right now, we want to make something that can gently nudge users forward.
Matsuyama: Rather than quantifying and comparing yourself to others, you come to know your own characteristics and, in the true sense, build an abundant way of living. I hope it becomes a new technology that can be a trigger for that.
⚫︎Wavering Between Inside and Outside
The self exists within relationships, and the heart does not waver alone. By placing yourself in an inconvenient environment, concentration arises naturally, and within something you can lose yourself in, peace of mind takes root. And then there is anjin, a resting place for the heart that accepts the incomplete self just as it is. The wisdom of Zen that Mr. Matsuyama speaks of offers an important guidepost for when technology draws close to the heart. The metacognition of turning your gaze inward, and the concentration of immersing yourself in the outside world. Rather than leaning to one side or the other, taking balance while moving back and forth between them. Through this dialogue, Adachi rediscovered the form of "fluctuation" that MENTAGRAPH should aim for.
Profile
Daiko Matsuyama (Deputy Head Priest, Taizoin, Myoshinji head temple of the Rinzai sect)
Born in Kyoto in 1978. After completing graduate studies at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, he underwent monastic training at a Zen temple before becoming Deputy Head Priest of Taizoin. With the theme of opening Zen culture to the world, he is active in Japan and abroad, including a talk at TEDxKyoto. His books include Forget the Important Things First—A Recommendation for the Zen Way of Living (Gentosha Shinsho).
Jun Adachi (CEO of MENTAGRAPH Inc. / Director of D-LAB, Japan Tobacco Inc.)
At D-LAB, the corporate R&D organization of the JT Group, Adachi has led the planning and development of new businesses and founded MENTAGRAPH Inc. Previously, he worked at a UX consulting firm before joining Japan Tobacco Inc. in 2018.
