I realize the difficulty of capturing the essence of Zen in words for it is something that is felt through experience but the author does a remarkable job of getting the point across by simply relating his own journey and allowing the reader to find what's implied between the lines. I remember that for the whole semester after reading this, I would hold books and papers and bags with the minimal amount of force needed to keep them from falling out of my hands, just like the archer should hold the bowstring with the minimal amount of force, waiting for the moment of effortless release.

Zen in the Art of Archery | Semantic Scholar [PDF] The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery | Semantic Scholar

Herrigel's reflections may seem irrelevant or fantastical to the calculating competitive athlete or coach, but the notion of shooting or combat being a form of training of the mind has much in common with Western assumptions about the values of games and physical education; and the idea that physical activity can be a matter of entering a particular spiritual state is important in certain psychological approaches to performance such as the notions of flow and peak performance, or popular appeals to self-actualization such as the inner game. Then again both are about teaching something that is alien to the learner, there doesn't seem to be any need to go as far as Herrigel and to repeat D.Another key difference between kyudo and competition archery is the commitment to a club and practising in a group. In the end, the pupil no longer knows which of the two – mind or hand – was responsible for the work. For me from my sadly limited experience of archery the incident is a demonstration of a thoroughly practical nature. When drawn to its fullest extent, the bow encloses the “All” in itself, explained the master, and that is why it is important to learn how to draw it properly. Lately I have also become very sensitive to cultural appropriation, and I no longer enjoy reading books on Yog that are written by someone who can't read Sanskrit, or a book on Zen by someone who doesn't understand Japanese language.

Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel | Goodreads

This one can hardly learn in Herrigel's account, one must become convinced of it, but through the experience of the body not the conscious work of the brain. Although archery is the instance, the point is to focus the mind/body on the matter at hand and not to be distracted by extraneous concerns. In the Japanese archery tradition apparently, at least as it is taught, splitting your arrow is very bad simply because you've ruined your own arrow.I have read so many books about the practice of Zen Buddhism that it is difficult to choose a particular one that influenced me. After “right” shots, the breath glides effortlessly to its end, whereupon it is unhurriedly breathed in again. To put it bluntly, I was initially much more interested in the Archery than I was in the Zen, and was at least tangentially curious on how these seemingly completely unrelated disciplines would intersect. In which case this book is a German response to a Japanese response to a European fantasy of a mythic past. To loose the shot, one must release effortlessly, unconsciously, like a baby grabbing a finger only then to release and reach for something else.

Zen in the Art of Archery - Penguin Random House

In archery as in both Qi Gong and Tai Chi, if you don’t have control of the breath, you have nothing. I'd read quite a bit about Zen Buddhism by this time, including the apparently much-contested representations of it by the aforementioned Watts and Suzuki, so the general idea was clear enough.

By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).