Zen in the Art of Archery

I am really glad I read this! I have never really understood what "Zen" is, and this helped sum it up. A German philosopher, Eugen Herrigel, went to Japan and learned archery from a Japanese master and wrote about it. 

Eastern philosophy is so different from Western! We could learn a ton from them, and I can do it without compromising any of my faith! So here are so quotes that were perfectly timed as I was contemplating a certain method that looks at strategy and statistics which I cannot help but think leads to ego gratification. It is when we are indifferent (Ignatian concept here) to success that we can proceed. 

I also could not help but think about the movie, Karate Kid, the whole time I was reading this! 

Great Quotes:

"The right art ", cried the Master, `is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. 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. " p. 31

Assuming that his talent can survive the increasing strain, there is one scarcely avoidable danger that lies ahead of the pupil on his road to mastery. Not the danger of wasting himself in idle self−gratification ˙ for the East has no aptitude for this cult of the ego but rather the danger of getting stuck in his achievement, which is confirmed by his success and magnified by his renown: in other words, of behaving as if the artistic existence were a form of life that bore witness to its own validity.

The teacher foresees this danger. Carefully and with the adroitness of a psychopomp he seeks to head the pupil off in time and to detach him from himself. This he does by pointing out, casually and as though it were scarcely worth a mention in view of all that the pupil has already learned, that all right doing is accomplished only in a state of true selflessness, in which the doer cannot be present any longer as " himself ". Only the spirit is present, a kind of awareness which shows no trace of ego− hood and for that reason ranges without limit through all the distances and depths, with " eyes that hear and with ears that see ". p.43-44

How does skill become " spiritual ", and how does sovereign control of technique turn into master swordplay? Only, so we are informed, by the pupil becoming purposeless and egoless. He must be taught to be detached not only from his opponent but from himself. He must pass through the stage he is still at and leave it behind him for good, even at the risk of irretrievable failure. Does not this sound as nonsensical as the demand that the archer should hit without taking aim, that he should completely lose sight of the goal and his intention to hit it? p. 73

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die:

When Eugen Herrigel, a German professor of philosophy, went to Tokyo in the 1940s, he studied ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arranging), apprenticed to a master of archery, and spent six years studying Zen Buddhism through those activities. Zen in the Art of Archery is his distillation of that experience, an attempt to make the purpose of Zen practice understandable to those outside of its native culture. Despite the wide dissemination of Zen ideas in the ensuing years, Herrigel’s book remains an illuminating, graceful, and inspiriting introduction, through Western eyes, to the meditative insight of Eastern philosophy.