Nishihira Tadashi is a Japanese philosopher who held the Chair of Education in Kyoto University, Japan. He is currently professor and vice-director at the Institute of Grief Care at Sophia University, and Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University. He has authored books (in Japanese) on The Philosophy and Psychology of E.H. Erikson (1993), The Spiritual Lifecycle in the Works of Jung, Wilber, and Steiner (1997), Philosophical Investigations into Zeami's Teaching of Exercise and Expertise (2009), Mysteries of Death and Birth in Childhood (2015), Lifecycle Philosophy (2019), The Wisdom of Keiko: Practice and Exercise (2019), The Wisdom of Shuyo: Self-Cultivation in Japan (2020), and The Wisdom of Yojo: Health-Care and Self-Cultivation (2021), among others. He also translated several of E.H. Erikson’s works into Japanese. Catherine Sevilla-Liu is a researcher specializing in narrative and embodied practices at Kyushu University, Japan. She is also interested in how mindful- and compassion-based therapies may be combined with these practices. Aside from being a researcher, she is also a certified yoga instructor and sumi-e artist. Anton Sevilla-Liu is Associate Professor of Clinical Pedagogy at Kyushu University. His research examines how to transform education using the insights of Japanese Philosophy combined with contextual psychology. He is the author of Watsuji Tetsurô’s Global Ethics of Emptiness: A Contemporary Look at a Modern Japanese Philosopher (2017) and the translator of Sueki Fumihiko’s Religion and Ethics at Odds: A Buddhist Counter-Position (2016). He is also one of the editors of the Journal of Japanese Philosophy.
Nishihira’s accessible and delightful book highlights traditional and innovative aspects of No-Mind: consciously becoming-one with rain, music, audience, or opponent; throwing one’s mind into one’s body, stopping nowhere, to be everywhere; disengaging with the self in interpersonal exchange, allowing care to emerge. Sevilla-Liu’s insightful essay encourages educators to juxtapose No-Mind and the cultivation of being-mode to the prevailing doing-mode. * Chiara Robbiano, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University College Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands *