The Faith-Mind Inscription (Xinxin Ming)
The Faith-Mind Inscription (Xinxin Ming; Japanese: Shinjinmei) is early Chan’s most beloved poem — traditionally credited to the Third Patriarch, Sengcan (d. 606). It opens with the most quoted couplet in Zen:
“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”
The diagnosis
Everything that follows unpacks that first line. The mind, the poem observes, is a ceaseless voting machine: for and against, grasping and rejecting, running toward one experience and away from another. Set the smallest preference against reality — wanting this breath calmer, this noise gone, this feeling different — and “heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.” The problem is never the ten thousand things; it is the constant campaign for and against them.
Not indifference
“No preferences” is routinely misread as beige detachment. The poem forecloses that reading itself: trying to reject the world is as much a preference as chasing it, and clinging to emptiness is one more clinging. What it points at is a mind that meets each thing fully without lodging anywhere — the same non-abiding the Diamond Sutra teaches, here sung in four-character lines. Love, grief, effort, taste all remain; the exhausting litigation drops.
Why sitters keep it close
Because it is a mirror for zazen at the exact point where zazen goes wrong: the moment you prefer the calm sit over the noisy one, you have left the practice while still on the cushion. “When you try to stop motion to achieve stillness,” the poem notes, “the very effort fills you with motion.” Return to the breath without a verdict — that is the whole inscription, enacted.
Reading it
It is 146 lines — ten minutes aloud, a lifetime otherwise. Public-domain and open translations abound. Read it whole once, then keep the first couplet where you can see it; the rest of the poem unfolds from that seed whenever practice waters it.
Practice, not just reading: MyRoshi is a daily zendo — zazen with bells, then a teisho on the classics from a teacher who adapts to how you understand. Begin with 7 free days.