Shoshin is written with two characters, beginning and mind, and it means the attitude of someone doing a thing for the first time: attentive, uncertain, open to being shown. In Zen it is a state to be kept on purpose, long after the first time has passed. In everyday Japanese it is advice given to adults who think it is too late to start.
Both uses come from the same place, and both are useful to anyone wondering whether to take up something new in the second half of life.
Two sources
The older one is Zeami, the fifteenth-century actor and playwright who shaped Noh theatre. In his treatises for his own family’s troupe he wrote that the beginner’s mind must never be forgotten, shoshin wasuru bekarazu, and he meant something precise. The actor should remember the awkwardness of his first performances, because that memory keeps the mature performer from going stale, and because every new role is a beginning again. The phrase left the theatre centuries ago and is now ordinary Japanese, said to new employees, to people returning to a sport, to anyone starting over.
The modern source is Shunryu Suzuki, the Soto Zen teacher who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, whose talks were collected in 1970 as Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. His point was that the beginner sees many possibilities where the expert sees few, and that practice is the work of keeping the beginner’s openness after the skill has arrived. The book made the word known outside Japan, and it is the reason shoshin appears in English at all.
What the beginner has
The beginner’s mind is not ignorance. It is a set of things the expert has usually lost.
Attention. A beginner cannot do the thing automatically, so every part of it is noticed. The first month of a language, an instrument or a craft is the month in which the most is actually seen.
Permission to be bad. Beginners are expected to be poor at it, which removes the fear of looking poor at it. That fear is what stops most adults from starting anything.
Questions. A beginner asks why the thing is done this way, and sometimes there is no good reason. Most improvements in a craft come from someone who did not yet know what could not be done.
The expert’s mind has skill and speed, and it has also closed. Shoshin is the practice of reopening it, and the beginner has it for free.
Why fifty
In Japan the question of ikigai is asked most sharply around retirement, when the structure that supplied purpose for forty years is removed. The article on ikigai after retirement on this site describes what the longest-lived Japanese elders actually do: they have somewhere to be, something their hands do, and a reason to be expected. Most of them started at least one of those things late.
Shoshin is the attitude that makes a late start possible. The adult who refuses to begin the piano at fifty-five is usually not refusing the piano. They are refusing to be a beginner, in public, at an age when they are expert at other things. Zeami’s phrase is the answer: the beginner’s mind is not a stage to pass through but a thing to keep, and the person who has kept it can start anything.
Also on Etsy: the same planners and singles, in the Ikigai Daily Studio shop.
How to begin, in the shoshin way
Three practical rules follow from the idea.
Choose something with a teacher. Beginner’s mind needs someone to be a beginner in front of. A class, a club, a group that meets on a day, is the ikigai structure and the shoshin condition at once.
Keep a beginner’s notebook. One line after each session: what was new today. In the first weeks there will be too much to write. After a few months the line gets harder, and that is the signal to look again rather than to stop.
Hold the first month in memory. Zeami’s instruction was to the mature actor: remember what it was like at the start. Write a short note at the end of the first month, and read it a year later. It is the clearest record there is of what attention looks like.
Shoshin is a word for the state in which a person is most awake. Japan’s advice is to keep it on purpose, and to begin things, at any age, in order to have it again.
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This article is part of a series exploring Japanese philosophy and intentional living: