TAYUTAU — No Meditation, No Mindfulness

Have you ever felt that spacing out is a waste of time? In English, we call it spacing out. Doing nothing. Wasting time. But 1,300 years ago, the Japanese had another name for it. "Tayutau" — to drift. The space between waves and clouds, sung in the Man'yōshū. The hours when the mind keeps working without rest — what neuroscience now calls the Default Mode Network. Not meditation. Not mindfulness. No control. No goal. No answer to seek. Simply — to gaze. The surface of a river, a trembling flame, the drifting clouds — as you keep gazing, the boundary between the one who watches and the thing being watched quietly dissolves. In Zen, this is called shukyaku ichinyo — the unity of subject and object. A quiet wisdom that has lived inside our language for 1,300 years. This is tayutau. 【Chapters】 00:00 Prologue 01:07 Ⅰ. The Discovery of a Word 02:38 Ⅱ. What Is Happening in the Brain 04:10 Ⅲ. Not Meditation. Not Mindfulness. 05:17 Ⅳ. The Practice of Watching 07:34 Ⅴ. Why Gazing Settles the Mind 09:22 Epilogue ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 【References】 ■ Man'yōshū, Poem No. 1089 (Book VII, anonymous) Original text: 大海尓 嶋毛不在尓 海原 絶塔浪尓 立有白雲 Reading: Ōumi ni shima mo aranaku ni unahara no tayutau nami ni tateru shirakumo ■ Default Mode Network (DMN) Raichle, M.E., MacLeod, A.M., Snyder, A.Z., Powers, W.J., Gusnard, D.A., & Shulman, G.L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676-682. ■ Open Monitoring Meditation Lutz, A., Slagter, H.A., Dunne, J.D., & Davidson, R.J. (2008). Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 163-169. ■ Shukyaku Ichinyo (主客一如) A foundational concept in Zen Buddhism, introduced to the Western world by thinkers such as D.T. Suzuki and Kitarō Nishida. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Image source: "Gen'ryaku Kōhon Man'yōshū" (元暦校本万葉集) National Diet Library Digital Collections Public domain (copyright expired), publicly available online DOI: 10.11501/1185464 URL: https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1185464 "Marcus Raichle 2014" by Washington University in St. Louis is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... (Modified from original: monochrome and color graded to match the video style.) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ This work contains some imagery created through digital generation. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ When you find something beautiful, who are you? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #tayutau #揺蕩う #meditation #mindfulness #manyoshu #japanese #japaneseculture #mono_japan