Zen in the Art of Archery
Eugen Herrigel
A classic work on Eastern philosophy, Zen in the Art of Archery is a charming and deeply illuminating story of one man’s experience with Zen.
81 Pages • ISBN 0375705090
“You worry yourself unnecessarily. Put the thought of hitting right out of your mind!”
– Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
Eugen Herrigel, a German professor of Philosophy in Tokyo, took up the study of archery as a step toward an understanding of Zen Buddhism. This book is the account of the six years he spent as a student of one of Japan’s great kyudo (archery) masters, and of how he gradually overcame his initial inhibitions and began to feel his way toward new truths and ways of seeing.
“Don’t think of what you have to do, don’t consider how to carry it out!” he exclaimed. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.”
“And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? 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 can be done.”
“You must learn to wait properly… 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”
“What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.”
“The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfillment, but brace yourself for failure.”