Immovable means unmoving.
Wisdom means the wisdom of intelligence.
Although wisdom is called immovable, this does not signify any insentient thing, like wood or stone. It moves as the mind is wont to move: forward or back, to the left, to the right, in the ten directions, and to the eight points; and the mind that does not stop at all is called immovable wisdom.
Fudō Myōō grasps a sword in his right hand and holds a rope in his left hand.1 He bares his teeth and his eyes flash with anger. His form stands firmly, ready to defeat the evil spirits that would obstruct the Buddhist Law. This is not hidden in any country anywhere. His form is made in the shape of a protector of Buddhism, while his embodiment is that of immovable wisdom. This is what is shown to living things.
Seeing this form, the ordinary man becomes afraid and has no thoughts of becoming an enemy of Buddhism. The man who is close to enlightenment understands that this manifests immovable wisdom and clears away all delusion. For the man who can make his immovable wisdom apparent and who is able to physically practice this mental dharma as well as Fudō Myōō, the evil spirits will no longer proliferate. This is the purpose of Fudō Myōō’s tidings.
What is called Fudō Myōō is said to be one’s unmoving mind and an unvacillating body. Unvacillating means not being detained by anything.
Glancing at something and not stopping the mind is called immovable. This is because when the mind stops at something, as the breast is filled with various judgments, there are various movements within it. When its movements cease, the stopping mind moves, but does not move at all.
If ten men, each with a sword, come at you with swords slashing, if you parry each sword without stopping the mind at each action, and go from one to the next, you will not be lacking in a proper action for every one of the ten.
Although the mind act ten times against ten men, if it does not halt at even one of them and you react to one after another, will proper action be lacking?
But if the mind stops before one of these men, though you parry his striking sword, when the next man comes, the right action will have slipped away.
Considering that the Thousand-Armed Kannon has one thousand arms on its one body, if the mind stops at the one holding a bow, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine will be useless.2 It is because the mind is not detained at one place that all the arms are useful.
As for Kannon, to what purpose would it have a thousand arms attached to one body? This form is made with the intent of pointing out to men that if their immovable wisdom is let go, even if a body have a thousand arms, every one will be of use.
When facing a single tree, if you look at a single one of its red leaves, you will not see all the others. When the eye is not set on any one leaf, and you face the tree with nothing at all in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye without limit. But if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.
One who has understood this is no different from the Kannon with a thousand arms and a thousand eyes.
The ordinary man simply believes that it is blessed because of its thousand arms and its thousand eyes. The man of half-baked wisdom, wondering how anybody could have a thousand eyes, calls it a lie and gives in to slander. But if now one understands a little better, he will have a respectful belief based on principle and will not need the simple faith of the ordinary man or the slander of the other, and he will understand that Buddhism, with this one thing, manifests its principle well.
All religions are like this. I have seen that Shinto especially is like this.
The ordinary man thinks only on the surface. The man who attacks Buddhism is even worse.
This religion, that religion, there are various kinds but at their deepest points they are all settled in one conclusion.
At any rate, when one practices discipline and moves from the beginner’s territory to immovable wisdom, he makes a return and falls back to the level of the beginning, the abiding place.
There is a reason for this.
Again, we can speak with reference to your own martial art. As the beginner knows nothing about either his body posture or the positioning of his sword, neither does his mind stop anywhere within him. If a man strikes at him with the sword, he simply meets the attack without anything in mind.
As he studies various things and is taught the diverse ways of how to take a stance, the manner of grasping his sword and where to put his mind, his mind stops in many places. Now if he wants to strike at an opponent, he is extraordinarily discomforted. Later, as days pass and time piles up, in accordance with his practice, neither the postures of his body nor the ways of grasping the sword are weighed in his mind. His mind simply becomes as it was in the beginning when he knew nothing and had yet to be taught anything at all.
In this one sees the sense of the beginning being the same as the end, as when one counts from one to ten, and the first and last numbers become adjacent.
In other things—musical pitch, for example, when one moves from the beginning lowest pitch to the final highest pitch—the lowest and the highest become adjacent.3
We say that the highest and the lowest come to resemble each other. Buddhism, when you reach its very depths, is like the man who knows nothing of either the Buddha or the Buddhist Law. It has neither adornment nor anything else that would draw men’s attention to it.
The ignorance and afflictions of the beginning, abiding place and the immovable wisdom that comes later become one. The function of the intellect disappears, and one ends in a state of No-Mind-No-Thought. If one reaches the deepest point, arms, legs, and body remember what to do, but the mind does not enter into this at all.
The Buddhist priest Bukkoku wrote:
Although it does not
mindfully keep guard,
In the small mountain fields
the scarecrow
does not stand in vain.
Everything is like this.
To make a scarecrow for the mountain fields, one fashions a human figure and puts in its hands a bow and arrow. The birds and beasts see this and flee. Although this figure has absolutely no mind, if the deer become frightened and run away, insofar as it has fulfilled its function, it has not been created in vain.
This is an example of the behavior of the people who have reached the depths of any Way. While hands, feet, and body may move, the mind does not stop anyplace at all, and one does not know where it is. Being in a state of No-Mind/No-Thought, one has come to the level of the scarecrow of the mountain fields.
Of the common man who has not found his path, we can say that from the very beginning he has had no wisdom and it will never come forth, whatever the circumstances. The wisdom that is highest of all, being in the most remote of all places, will absolutely not come forth. Finally, the half-baked know-it-all lets his wisdom come right off the top of his head, and this is ridiculous. The decorum of the priests of today can surely be thought of in such a light. This is a matter of shame.
There is such a thing as training in principle, and such a thing as training in technique.
Principle is as I have already explained above: when you arrive, nothing is noticed. It is simply as though you had discarded all concentration. I have written at length about this above.
If you do not train in technique, but only fill your breast with principle, your body and your hands will not function. Training in technique, if put into terms of your own martial art, is in the training that if practiced over and over again makes the five body postures one.
Even though you know principle, you must make yourself perfectly free in the use of technique. And even though you may wield the sword that you carry with you well, if you are unclear on the deepest aspects of principle, you will likely fall short of proficiency
Technique and principle are just like the two wheels of a cart.