Zen in the Art of Archery

I gradually came to realize that only the truly detached can understand what is meant by “detachment,” and that only the contemplative, who is completely empty and rid of the self, is ready to “become one” with the “transcendent Deity.”

What stands in your way is that you have a much too wilful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.

“right presence of mind.” This means that the mind or spirit is present everywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place.

all right doing is accomplished only in a state of true selflessness, in which the doer cannot be present any longer as “himself.”

The man, the art, the work – it is all one. The art of the inner work, which unlike the outer does not forsake the artist, which he does not “do” and can only “be,” springs from depths of which the day knows nothing.

The “Great Doctrine” of archery tells us something very different. According to it, archery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself;

The effortlessness of a performance for which great strength is needed is a spectacle of whose aesthetic beauty the East has an exceedingly sensitive and grateful appreciation.

“whoever makes good progress in the beginning has all the more difficulties later on.”

He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work