Taisho Kosho — The View from a Broad and Elevated Place 大所高所

From a high enough vantage point, the things that loom over us at ground level reveal themselves for what they are: temporary, and far smaller than they seemed.

Taisho Kosho 大所高所 [pronounced “tye-show koh-show”] is built from two pairs of kanji that say nearly the same thing twice, for emphasis: 大所 (taisho, a big, broad place) and 高所 (kosho, a high, elevated place). Together they name a single idea: a vantage point both broad and high, from which we gain perspective and see from a great distance. To look at one’s situation taisho kosho kara — from the big, high place — is to see it whole.

We know the value of this instinctively. In warfare, every commander wants the high ground, the better to look down on the field. When a person makes a fortune and buys an apartment, they do not ask for the third floor — they want the ninetieth, the hundred-and-tenth, the view that takes in the whole city in one sweep. Go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York City and look out: you see Queens, Brooklyn, Westchester, the Atlantic Ocean stretching south, the whole of this astonishing city that is New York laid before you at once. From that height your understanding of the city changes, because for the first time you see how all its parts fit together. That is Taisho Kosho 大所高所 — and the same elevation is available to the mind.

Higher Perspective, Better Purposes

The first use of this elevation is in how we choose our purposes. It is easy to get caught in the trench of today. A man works in the office assembling widgets, and from down in the trench the largest purpose he can imagine is to become a better widget-assembler. But that is no purpose worth having. Climb a little higher and the view opens: perhaps he knows a better way to make the widget; perhaps it could serve people it does not yet reach; perhaps there is an entirely different use for it, or a way to make it more accessible, serve more customers, do more good.

The higher our perspective rises, the more possibility we see — and the further into the future we can look. This is what makes a purpose future-proof: a purpose chosen from a broad, high place is still a good purpose six months from now, a year from now, even ten years from now. The trench gives you goals that expire by Friday. The high place gives you purposes that endure.

Goals, Obstacles, and the Corn Maze

Perspective does the same work for goals. Recall how to build a goal: first we visualize the outcome we want to accomplish, and then we walk ourselves backward. What had to happen just before the outcome? And before that? And before that — step by step, back to where we stand today. The higher and longer your vision, the more clearly you can trace that path in reverse, so that you can then walk it forward.

And walking it forward, what are we watching for? The obstacles. A high vantage lets us see, three months out, that the component we need will cost more by the time we order it — and so we can plan around it rather than be ambushed by it. The longer our view and the higher our perspective, the better our decisions, the sooner we spot the obstacles, and the more easily we find the path around them.

Think of one of those corn-field mazes. Walked from the inside, at ground level, a good maze can take thirty minutes of dead ends and backtracking to complete. But at the exit, once the maze has been solved, maze-goers are often handed a printed diagram of the whole maze seen from above — and from that height a child could solve it in thirty seconds.

The maze did not change. What changed was perspective.

Down inside it, those attempting to solve the maze are blind to all but the wall in front of them; from above, the whole solution is obvious at a glance. So much of life is a maze we are trying to solve from the inside. Taisho Kosho 大所高所 is the climb to the view from above.

Seeing Things in Context

But there is a more important idea contained within Taisho Kosho 大所高所 and it speaks to the heart of the matter: a broad, high view lets us see things in context. Here karatedō meets an old current of Western thought.

Those who study philosophy carefully often note how closely Stoicism and karatedō run together — very nearly in step. The Greek Stoics spoke of the kataskopos, the scout who climbs to a height to observe — the view from above, taking in what is happening to you within the whole landscape around it.

Consider an ordinary day. You take a call from an angry customer: your product is garbage, he says, a waste of money — and he hangs up. It stings. You are proud of your work; you try to do right by your customers always. It nags at you all afternoon. You go home without appetite. The next morning you are almost afraid to pick up the phone, in case it happens again. The feeling spreads and feeds itself. But step back and gain altitude. It was one caller, perhaps a man having a bad day. You sold this product to eight hundred customers this year, and exactly one of them called to complain. Seen from the high place — one unhappy voice among seven hundred and ninety-nine satisfied ones — the thing shrinks to its true size. It was never as large as it felt.

Today’s Tragedy, Tomorrow’s Funny Story

This is why nearly every honest business memoir reads the same way: "I started a venture and it failed; I started another and it failed; and another; and then one succeeded." No one writes, “I launched a company, made a fortune, the end.” Life does not work that way. We succeed largely by failing, repeatedly — and perspective is what lets us see each failure in context rather than as the end of the world.

Perhaps today you lost your job. Maybe today went badly. From the high place, here is the truth: it does not matter as much as it seems. You will hold many jobs across your life. You will stumble more than once, and then one day something will click and you will find the work that excites you. Will you even remember this particular bad day? Perhaps — but you will not feel it as a tragedy, because in the larger frame it is not one.

The same is true of the heart. You are looking for a partner in life. The first few do not work out, and each time — especially when we are young — it feels like the end of everything. The third was perfect, except that they stopped texting back. The end, again. And the fifth, the tenth, the twentieth. Then, one day, you find the person. Did the others, in the end, matter? You may remember them, but emotionally you know the answer. Remember the perspective of Taisho Kosho 大所高所.

Today’s tragedy is tomorrow’s funny story.

The romance that broke your heart a year ago — when you really liked her, and she ended up not reciprocating, and that was that — is the very story that has your friends laughing tonight, and that you love to tell. The pain was real, certainly. But it was also temporary.

This, in part, is what we mean by wisdom, and why it tends to arrive with age. Maturity is, among other things, accumulated perspective. After the eighth disappointment, the second or third no longer levels you. You have stood at the high place enough times to trust what it shows: the setbacks, the failures, the things that did not work out — they are temporary. They do not look temporary when you are standing in the middle of them. But they all evaporate, every single one.

Context, Not Detachment

Keep in mind, however, a key idea: Taisho Kosho 大所高所 is not detachment. Detachment is a different and also useful tool — the mental movement we make in three-moment meditation, where we identify the difficult feeling, separate ourselves from it, and observe it from the outside as though it belonged to someone else: “look at that fellow, he is angry just now.” That is stepping away from the thing, severing the connection to it.

This is the opposite movement. We do not detach from the trouble; we gain the context that surrounds it. We keep our eyes on the very thing that pains us, and we widen the frame until we can see it among everything else — and in that wider frame it takes its proper, often modest, place. It is exactly like standing atop the Empire State Building and looking down: the cars and the people and even many of the buildings are tiny, not because they are small, but because we finally see them in the context of a vast city.Taisho Kosho 大所高所 does not ask us to feel less. Rather, it asks us to see more accurately.

The high place is always available to us. When the trench closes in, when one angry voice drowns out the hundreds of grateful ones, when today’s loss feels like the end — we can climb. We can also choose purposes that outlast the season, trace the path back from our goals, spot the obstacles early, and set our troubles down in their true and smaller context.

Taisho Kosho 大所高所: climb high, look broad, and see the whole of it.