One shot, one life: freeing your mind to target (yourself).
There is an ancient Japanese discipline, kyūdō (弓道 lit. "way of the bow"), which since time immemorial has constituted a true philosophy of life that can initiate the archer into knowledge of the deep nature of things, improve himself and achieve Zen.
In 1924, Eugen Herrigel, a professor of philosophy in Heidelberg, Germany, was sent to Japan to teach courses and hold a professorship. This is the opportunity he had been waiting for a long time to finally approach and understand the mystical experience of Zen. His meeting with Japanese bow master Awa Kenzo will be enlightening and will be the episode destined to change his life forever. From that experience will come the famous book Zen and Archery, a source of inspiration for several generations to come.
The Master's approach immediately generates a certain astonishment and bewilderment in Herrigel, who is eager to learn that art as soon as possible.
"What shall I do, then? " asked Herrigel thoughtfully.
"Learn proper waiting."
"And how does one learn it?"
"By detaching yourself from yourself, leaving behind so definitely yourself and all that is yours...."
In the course of archery lessons, Herrigel finds himself happily forced to turn his ideas, and especially his way of life, upside down. At first with great pain and bewilderment: for he recognizes first of all that his gestures are wrong, then that his intentions are wrong (to hit the target), and finally that the very things he relies on are the greatest obstacles: the will, the clear distinction between means and ends, the desire to succeed, to get to the goal. But the Master's skillful touch helps Herrigel to shake it all off, to remain "empty" in order to welcome, almost without realizing it, the one right gesture that hits the target: the one that Zen archers call, "One shot, one life." In such a shot, bow, arrow, target and 'I' are intertwined in such a way that it is not possible to separate them: the arrow shot puts the archer's whole life on the line, and the target to be hit, Herrigel discovers, is himself.
Archery, in the Japanese exception of kyūdō, is a discipline whose characteristics allow those who approach it to truly understand what it means to recover one's spirituality by eliminating all that is, in fact, superfluous and misleading with respect to the reality of living. Zen is much more than a philosophy: it is a spiritual state, where soul and body merge into one's authentic nature. To learn and make Zen one's own means to assume, toward life, an attitude completely devoid of 'superfluous exteriority, because it distances one from one's true self.
It is therefore necessary to rediscover the childlike state of spontaneity, freeing ourselves from the superstructures that impose volitional thoughts before actions. When children move, play, perform any action they do it spontaneously, instinctively and not necessarily what they do is the result of premeditation. When man becomes a child again and learns to "forget himself," he learns to think without thinking, to act without acting, to will without wanting. The 'spiritual' development that Zen teaches is one that allows one to accept that things happen simply because they happen and cannot be otherwise.
This state, in which one no longer thinks, proposes, pursues, desires or expects anything definite, which does not tend toward any particular direction, but which by its undivided strength knows that it is capable of the possible as well as the impossible-this state entirely free from intentions, from the ego, the Master calls it properly 'spiritual.'
Sources:
E. Herrigel - Lo zen e il tiro con l’arco, Adelphi, 1987
J. Stevens - Lo zen, l'arco, la freccia. Vita e insegnamenti di Awa Kenzo, Edizioni Mediterranee, 2011
Cos’è il Kyudo - www.accademiaprocesi.it/kyudo/
Associazione Italiana per il Kyudo (A.I.K.) - www.associazioneitalianakyudo.it/
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