 Japanese philosophers have customarily taken the view that the body and mind may be distinguished, but they have assumed from the outset that their relation is internal rather than external. That is, the mind and body cannot be completely separated without violating their essential character or function. If we envision body and mind as a single complex of two intersecting circles (call it bodymind to capture the sense of the Japanese compound term shinjin), then without the somatic conjunction, the mind is not fully the mind and without the mental conjunction, the body is not fully the body. Accordingly, Yuasa argues, Japanese philosophers have throughout history typically searched not for what constant connects the discrete mind and discrete body, but instead, how the bodymind functions such that the interrelationship between the somatic and mental aspects may increase. That is, the focus has been how disciplined study and praxis enables the two circles to overlap increasingly in the direction of unity.