Sublime

far as I know he practiced za-zen, or formal sitting meditation, only occasionally, as I do myself, when the mood is on me. I prefer the more active Zen of walking meditation, archery, t’ai-chi exercises, mantra-chanting, practicing Chinese calligraphy, tea ceremony, swimming, and cooking. Too much za-zen is apt to turn one into a stone Buddha. In

There is no real difficulty in this, for we will already admit that we “know” how to move our hands, how to make a decision, or how to breathe, even though we can hardly begin to explain how we do it in words. We know how to do it because we just do it! Taoism is an extension of this kind of knowledge, an extension which gives us a very different v

access to the art—and the master archers of all times are agreed in this—is only granted to those who are “pure” in heart, untroubled by subsidiary aims.

One day he showed us a sequence of the form: three or four movements that took me about a minute when I did them as slowly as I could. He did them in twenty-five. And during those twenty-five minutes he must have breathed twice: two inhalations and two exhalations, his breath circulating with limitless scope and slowness in his body, which moved li

Shugyo has the goal of achieving a level of maturity that generates positive emotional states and controls negative ones. This is a different end than the sports objective of strengthening the body so that it can successfully perform certain movements.4 The practices of shugyo are designed so that the personal self will ultimately be absorbed into

et si je m’obstine à écrire ce livre, ma version à moi de ces livres de développement personnel qui marchent si bien en librairie, c’est pour rappeler ce que disent rarement les livres de développement personnel : que les pratiquants d’arts martiaux, les adeptes du zen, du yoga, de la méditation, de ces grandes choses lumineuses et bienfaisantes qu