Jixin (机心)
Jixin 机心, the 'machine-mind' — the mind a machine breeds, the Zhuangzi's earliest argument that tools train the mind that uses them: machines bring machine-dealings, and machine-dealings lodge a machine-mind in the chest.
The term
机心 (jīxīn) — 机, machine, mechanism, device (the same character as the well-sweep’s lever); 心, the heart-mind. The term is coined in the gardener’s refusal (ch. 12), in the book’s three-link chain:
吾闻之吾师：有机械者必有机事，有机事者必有机心。机心存于胸中，则纯白不备；纯白不备，则神生不定；神生不定者，道之所不载也。
“I have heard from my teacher: where there are machines, there are machine-dealings; where there are machine-dealings, there is a machine-mind. When a machine-mind lodges in the chest, the pure white is not whole; when the pure white is not whole, the spirit’s life is unsettled; and where the spirit’s life is unsettled, the Way will not carry it.”
Why the term matters
- The earliest tool-and-mind argument. The chain is causal and specific: the machine (机械) does not merely save labor; it trains its user — first in its manner of doing (机事, machine-dealings: the lever’s rhythm of little-spent, much-gained), then in the heart itself (机心, the machine-mind). The site keeps the chain’s grammar because the whole point is that 机心 is not a sin but a sediment: the mind becomes what its tools repeatedly do. Two and a half millennia before the argument needed a smartphone to be obvious, the passage had already stated it, with the gardener’s coda the site quotes in full on the story page: 吾非不知，羞而不为也 — the refusal is informed, not ignorant.
- 纯白 — the white the machine unmakes. The chain’s damage clause is the site’s other state-term in negative: 纯白不备, the pure white not whole. The xushi-sheng-bai page holds the white’s positive home — 虚室生白, the empty room gives birth to brightness — and the two pages are one claim in two directions: the emptied room births the white; the machined chest loses it. The xinzhai concept is the practice that removes what the machine deposits: the fasting of the mind empties exactly this sediment.
- 神生不定 — the unsettled spirit. The chain’s second damage is the term the zuochi glossary names in its sitting form: 坐驰, sitting while galloping — the spirit that cannot rest because its life has been unsettled. The passage runs the two together, and the site keeps them together: the machine-mind is 坐驰’s cause, the empty room its cure, and the zuowang concept is the practice’s name for the whole cycle.
- The word’s afterlife, narrowed. 机心 survives in modern Chinese, but the site flags the drift: the modern word means scheming, calculating mind — the chain’s third link kept, its first two dropped. The passage’s causal argument (machine → machine-mind → unsettled spirit → the Way will not carry it) shrank to a character trait. The word kept its warning tone and lost its argument — the same narrowing the site records for tian-ji and the reverse of the intact cases (涸辙之鲋, 蜗角之争).
Usage notes
The term is always introduced through the full three-link chain, because the chain is the definition; it is never used to condemn tools as such — the gardener’s refusal is recorded as informed, and the site’s own position is the story page’s closing line: treat the machine as a tool, watched; cross-linked with xushi-sheng-bai (the white), zuochi (the unsettled spirit), and xinzhai (the emptying).
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 12 (Tiandi, outer chapter), the Han-shade gardener passage, verified in full on the bao-weng-guan-qi story page (two independent texts that agree): 吾闻之吾师：有机械者必有机事，有机事者必有机心。机心存于胸中，则纯白不备；纯白不备，则神生不定；神生不定者，道之所不载也。吾非不知，羞而不为也