The Freedom That Was Already There

The Drift That Knows — Notes from the Kyosei Era | Part 1/4

Someone shared a post on Facebook about a word. The post was short. It said something like: in Japan, the word kyōyō （教養）— what we translate roughly as “education” or “refinement” — tends to conjure images of intellectual display, of people performing their cultural membership. But in English, the original term is liberal arts. And liberal once meant something specific: the arts of free people. The technology of freedom.

That framing stopped me.

Not because it was new — the etymology is documented. But because of what it implied. That education, at its root, wasn’t about accumulating knowledge or signaling membership in a certain class. It was about learning not to be owned. By circumstance. By expectation. By the part of your mind that tells you what’s possible and what isn’t.

From Concept to State

The Japanese word for freedom, jiyū (自由), carries its meaning inside itself. The character ji (自) means “self” or “naturally arising.” The character yū (由) means “to be grounded in,” “to originate from.” Together: that which is grounded in itself. Not freedom as escape, but freedom as rootedness.

This is different from the Western conception — freedom from constraint, freedom as the expansion of options. The Eastern reading is quieter. Less about what you can do and more about where you’re coming from when you act.

In this reading, freedom isn’t achieved. It’s remembered.

Buddhism took this further. The jiyū of Buddhist thought isn’t freedom to pursue desire — it’s freedom from being consumed by it. The distinction matters. One points outward, toward more. The other points inward, toward less grasping.

The Floating Cloud

When I read that post, an old manga character surfaced in my mind: the protagonist of Hgure-gumo (浮浪雲) — “Floating Cloud.” He holds no steady job. He doesn’t pursue status. He moves through Edo-era Japan without urgency, without agenda.

And yet he’s never quite absent. He doesn’t drift into isolation — he exists fully within the society around him, moving through its structures and obligations without being fixed by them. He responds to what’s in front of him without being consumed by it. He contains competence he doesn’t display.

He is, in a particular sense, free.

Not free because he has resources or options. Free because he doesn’t seem to be pulled by his own grasping. There is a Japanese word for this: jinen (自然) — often translated as “nature,” but closer to “self-so-ness.” Things happening as they naturally are, without forcing. Furō-gumo is jinen as a person.

What interests me is not his freedom from society but his freedom within it. He doesn’t escape the structures. He passes through them. The difference between those two postures is, I think, everything.

The Memory That Stayed

When I was young, there was a Japanese children’s television program called Ugo Ugo Lu-ga — strange, surreal, hard to describe. I remember almost nothing about it. Not the segments, not the characters, not the humor.

But one phrase has stayed with me for thirty years: o-ki-raku goku-raku（お気楽極楽）. Easy-going paradise. Four syllables that shimmer without a single concrete image attached to them.

Why does a phrase remain when everything surrounding it dissolves?

I think it’s because the phrase didn’t teach me anything. It confirmed something. It landed on a feeling I already carried — an orientation toward effortlessness, toward minimum friction, toward life without the grinding urgency that seems to animate so many people around me — and gave that feeling a name.

This is what I’ve come to think of as state memory. Not the memory of events, but the retention of a quality of being. The content was irrelevant. The texture remained.

The Effort That Isn’t

Here is something I’ve noticed about myself: I don’t experience much that I would call effort.

Not because I’m passive. I’ve built things, sustained practices, completed processes I didn’t particularly enjoy. Getting a driver’s license, for instance — not something I wanted, but the necessity was clear and I moved through it without drama. Unpleasantness alone doesn’t stop me. Opacity does. Things where I’m supposed to want something I can’t locate in myself, where the goal exists outside me and I’m meant to retrofit the desire.

Looking back, I realize I’ve often reached things by what I can only describe as principled inertia. Not effortful pursuit — more like: the direction was set, the resistance was low, and I kept going until I arrived somewhere. From the outside, this looks like discipline. From the inside, it barely registers as action.

I think the difference lies in what I might call the yū — the grounding. When I know where I’m standing, movement is almost automatic. When I don’t, even small steps feel costly.

Freedom in the AI Era

We are told that AI is liberating us from repetitive work. Expanding freedom by handling what we used to have to do ourselves.

Maybe. But there is a subtler question underneath: what are we free from, and what are we free for?

The liberal arts reading of freedom points toward internal grounding — the capacity to act from your own center rather than from borrowed urgency. This isn’t something AI can provide. In fact, as AI becomes more capable of simulating purpose and direction, the pressure to know your own deepens.

You can outsource the thinking. You cannot outsource the yū.

Hagure-gumo didn’t need options to be free. He needed to not be owned by his own craving for them. In a world increasingly capable of doing the cognitive work, what becomes most valuable may be the capacity to know — with something like bodily certainty — what you actually want to move toward.

O-ki-raku goku-raku. A child’s phrase about easy-going paradise. Still pointing, thirty years later, at something I haven’t quite finished understanding.

Shigeru Utsunomiya is co-founder of zenschool, a seven-month program at the intersection of Zen, embodied knowledge, and contemporary life. Based in Kamakura, Japan.

If these questions resonate — about freedom, grounding, and what it means to act from your own center — zenschool’s Zen Immersion offers three days in Kamakura for leaders and reflective practitioners. Not a retreat from life, but a space to remember what kind of life you’re in.

→ zenschool Zen Immersion

The Drift That Knows — Notes from the Kyosei Era

A series exploring what moves beneath the surface of work, identity, and meaning in the age of AI.

• Part 1: The Freedom That Was Already There ← you are here
• Part 2: The Wall That Talks Back
• Part 3: After the Brain
• Part 4: The Impure Engine