Kyōgai

The kyōgai is a private experience, such that one person's kyōgai will be different from another's, and a person's kyōgai changes with time and experience. The term is also used to describe a person's behavior or attitude, for example a routine action done by a person or a person's way of doing things is described as their kyōgai.

In the Rinzai school especially, it is a person's kyōgai that is judged when being tested with kōans, as opposed to an intellectual understanding of a fixed answer to the kōan itself.

The term can also less commonly refer to a shared viewpoint, such as a Western kyōgai being used to describe the experiences and understanding of the world through the lens of a person in the Western world.