The title of the work may be explained in the following way. Hsin (shin) is faith, not in the Christian sense of a bold flight of the soul towards God, a belief in what is unseen because of what is seen, but a belief in that which has been experienced, knowledge, conviction. Hsin (shin), the mind, is not our mind in the ordinary sense, but the Buddha-nature which each of us has unbeknown to us. Ming (mei) is a recording, for the benefit of others. The title thus means a description of that part of oneself where no doubt is possible. This is the same unshakeable conviction that Shelley and Beethoven and Gauguin had. They too recorded what they saw with their eyes and heard with their ears, where no hesitation or indecision could enter. Especially noteworthy is the absolute faith in the value of the apparently trivial.

From R.H. Blyth’s Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. I, Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, and Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988 (first published in 1960), p. 50 (note that the three Chinese characters—hsin, hsin, and ming—are deleted here for technical reasons, R.B.).

Addendum I (December 24, 1989)

This is the clearest programmatic statement concerning my writing I have found so far. It applies both to every individual note or addendum, and to the Residua as a whole. Still, a couple of Blyth’s points warrant further clarification. First, the statement about “the Buddha-nature which each of us has unbeknown to us” applies to Gautama Siddhartha, as well. He was only the first to identify that something which we share, as it were. Second, the statement about recording “for the benefit of others” should be understood to include oneself also. For better or worse, we become others to ourselves after only a few years…

Addendum II (January 21, 2016)

Times have changed. The three Chinese characters, which were omitted in the original piece for technical reasons, are widely available nowadays: 信心銘. Now the poem is known as “Xin Xin Ming,” “Xinxin Ming,” or “Xinxinming” in Mandarin or Pinyin, and it is commonly translated as “Faith in Mind” or “Trust in Mind.” It is attributed to the Third Chinese Ch’an (Zen) Patriarch Jianzhi Sengcan, who died in 606. The essence of the poem can be found in its first verse: “The Great Way is not difficult. / It only excludes picking and choosing. / Once you stop loving and hating, / it will enlighten itself.” For some strange reason, I picked the verse a decade after this piece was written (“Hsinhsinming: The First Verse,” July 28, 1999). Anyhow, the Chinese characters now make me outright happy.