Zen archers take aim in Manhattan

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Before there was Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there was the original: Zen in the Art of Archery. The 1953 book chronicled the story of Eugen Herrigel, a German who traveled to Japan to learn Kyudo, the way of the bow. But you don’t have to go that far. The World’s Alex Gallafent visits a zen archery class in the heart of Manhattan.


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JEB SHARP: During the London Olympics, venues usually associated with one sport will be used for others.  For example, a famous cricket stadium will play host to Olympic archery.  It’ll be a peaceful place for a competitive sport.  Here’s the reverse.  That’s New York City, a noisy place to find a very peaceful pursuit, as The World’s Alex Gallafent discovers.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  The first clue comes in the elevator.  Ten of us are squished together inside, all headed six floors up, but only I seem to feel any discomfort.  Everyone else is calm, motionless, like they know some essential, secret truth.  Must be imagining it.  Anyway — this is the Shambhala Center in New York, a place for meditation and, this evening, archery practice.  Now not competitive archery, with colorful target rings and gold medals, but kyudo, Japanese Zen archery, the way of the bow.  Evening practice begins with ten minutes silence.  Zen archery is meditation in action.  Hitting the target isn’t the point.  Archery is simply the physical form that the meditation takes.  After years of practice, the archer learns to kind of remove himself from the act of shooting the arrow, thereby achieving, well, Zen.  It’s hard to get a handle on that kind of thing.  But in Japan, Zen archery is very much part of the culture.  Many schools offer after-school kyudo clubs, for instance.  In the west, it’s almost a secret.  There are only about 15 small kyudo groups here in the US.  One of the first Western attempts to describe kyudo came in 1953, in a book called “Zen in the Art of Archery.”  The author, a German philosophy professor named Eugen Herrigel, studied archery in Japan for six years.  Afterwards he wrote:

READER:  ”I gradually came to realize that only the truly detached can understand what is meant by ‘detachment.’”

GALLAFENT: In other words, he could talk about Zen and he could see other people practicing Zen archery.  But if really wanted to figure it out, he had to experience kyudo himself.  That’s a lesson a handful of Americans have taken on board.

CHARLES POTTER: This is a kyudo ibah, which means a practice place.

GALLAFENT: That’s Charles Potter.  He’s in his 50s.  He sports a silver ponytail and wears a Japanese archer’s tunic.  He’s been coming here for years.

POTTER:  And we are students of Kanjuro Shibata Sensei, who is the 20th generation bow maker to the emperor of Japan.

GALLAFENT: No such luminaries here this evening, and the setting is not exactly imperial, just a room with white walls and a wooden floor.  A series of puffy cubes, the targets, are lined up along one wall, and opposite, only a few feet away– remember, accuracy’s not the point– there’s an array of bows, in three sizes.  None of them is kid-sized.

LEON: This is the smallest they have.

GALLAFENT: That’s Leon.  He’s eight, and this is his fifth time trying to work out the mysteries of Zen archery.

LEON: I did two times this year and one time the year before, and then once when I was at rites of passage.

GALLAFENT: What’s rites of passage?

LEON:  <laughs>

GALLAFENT: Leon confirms the feeling I had in the elevator, that these archers hold the secret and I’m not in on it.  Indeed, Japanese archery comes with the clichéd cautions, things like, “it takes a decade just how to learn to hold the bow.”  Charles Potter says there are stories of those who have struggled for ten years only to be told:

POTTER:  “Another ten.”

GALLAFENT: But it turns out that’s not the way of this ibah.  Everyone’s welcome, so long as they’ve completed a short introductory course.  That’s what one of the new students here in New York tonight, Jeff, in his late 20s, has come to do.

JEFF:  I actually was a competitive archer as a young person. I stopped when I was about 18, but prior to that, it was sort of part of my life in a big way.

GALLAFENT: So this will be a shift, non competitive archery.

JEFF:  Yes, it’s a very big shift, but I think that part of my movement away from it was that I was sort of overwhelmed by the competition. It got to the point where it just wasn’t meaningful for me.  And this is actually the first time that I’m ever really doing, so I’m very intrigued to see how this goes.

GALLAFENT: The experienced archers take their bows and fetch their arrows.  They line up opposite the targets, form the correct body shape, ready the bow, raise the bow, spread the arms, draw the bow full.  And then, release.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.


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Discussion

3 comments for “Zen archers take aim in Manhattan”

  • Jim Katz

    Poor Alex. How close he came, and yet, missed the target.

    First, the journalism. I appreciate that there aren’t many kyudo practitioners, but there are more than “15 small groups.” There are about 15 small groups of Shibata Sensei’s students in the US, and more in Europe. You can find out more about Sensei’s students at Zenko International, (http://zenko.org), Sensei’s international organization.

    The links posted on “The World’s” website are from wonderful Kyudo organizations who are not affiliated with Zenko.

    As a long-time student, I think that what we encourage is more a total immersion in the shot, rather than a detachment. What you get detached from is your ordinary, conventional, yada yada yada. In detaching from that, you open to precision and gentleness.

    I’m not a huge Herrigel fan – he’s so overwrought. But then again, he was there and I wasn’t.

    Thank you for this article!

  • Kyudoka

    It seems the U.S. media outlets always focus on reporting the Zenko organization – which, in comparison with the Zen Nihon Kyudo Renmei, has a small # of practitioners (the ZKNR has millions of members internationally) and teaches a niche style of kyudo not recognized in most Japanese dojos. This article (and many others) equates zenko kyudo = kyudo in Japan. They are quite different.

  • http://homepage.mac.com/aep/Seishinkan/Kyudo.html Earl Hartman

    While I am sure the reporter was sincere, he got so many things wrong it is really difficult to know where to begin. Indeed, there was hardly a single correct statement about kyudo in the entire piece.

    First of all, kyudo is not Zen, it is not a form of meditation, and, contrary to popular belief, hitting the target is of vital importance, since correct accuracy is proof that the archer has understood what it is he is doing. For example, the motto of the Heki To Ryu, a traditional school of kyudo that dates back to the late 1500s, is “Chu, Kan, Kyu”, or “Strike, Pierce, Forever”, meaning that the goal of kyudo is to strike the target and pierce it, and that these two goals should always be achieved.

    Having said that, achieving this requires instense practice and dedication, and a profound understanding of how the mind and spirit function in the process of shooting a bow. This is where the real spiritual training of kyudo takes place. Kyudo does indeed have a deep spiritual dimension and a great deal of intense soul (and gut) searching on the part of the archer is required. It is just not Zen meditatuon, that’s all.

    The myth that kyudo is a form of Zen meditation where practical skill is irrelevant is the result of a misunderstanding of the book “Zen in the Art of Archery”, which was itself a misunderstanding of kyudo on the part of its author, Eugen Herrigel. Herrigel was a self-described mystic who went to Japan to search for Zen. He learned kyudo (for 3 years, not 6) from a famous and highly skilled, yet extremely idiosyncratic, teacher named Awa Kenzo, who had created a religious cult based upon his personal understanding of kyudo. Herrigel, who could not speak Japanese, misunderstood Awa’s cryptic and abstruse teaching style and mistook Awa’s archery for Zen.

    How this myth came to be propagated is explained in the recently-published book “Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West” (University of Chicago Press), by Professor Yamada Shoji of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. I was privileged to translate this important book. Everyone who is interested in how and why the “Japanese culture and Zen are one and the same thing” meme got started should read it.

    For a good overview of real Japanese archery, I recommend “Kyudo: The Essence and Practice of Japanese Archery” by Onuma and DeProspero.

    Finally, the archers in the video are not shooting at targets, they are shooting at practice targets called “makiwara”. The actual targets in kyudo are shot at from a distance of roughly 30 yards.

    As someone commented upthread, Shibata Kanjuro teaches a niche style, his personal version of a school called the Heki Ryu Chikurin-ha (there are other branches of this school still extant in Japan that do things quite differently). There are many traditional schools that still exist in Japan, but most kyudo in Japan nowadays is practiced under the auspices of the All Nippon Kyudo Federation, and there are many groups in the US that shoot according to the ANKF style. Those who are interested should go to http://www.kyudo.com/akr.html and see if there is an organization in their area.