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🦋 Zen, Archery

I read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was a freshman in college, and Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery a year or so later. I don't have much of a strong memory of either of them anymore, but I remember getting a general sense from them that a way of attaining enlightenment was through mastery of a technique; and I think this sense had a pretty strong formative influence on me.

It was interesting to read Yamada Shōji's beautifully written paper on Herrigel, The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery, in which he argues quite convincingly that Herrigel's understanding of the art of archery was mistaken: that Herrigel's archery teacher Awa Kenzō was wildly eccentric and non-mainstream and that furthermore, Herrigel did not understand Japanese well enough to understand what Awa was telling him. Along the way Yamada lays out a terse, informative history of Japanese archery. (Although his listing of the lineages of the various schools of archery is slightly less readable than the Old Testament listings of Hebrew patriarchs.) Interesting, convincing reflections on the shortcomings of Herrigel's work as a study of Japanese culture and on what role it has played in Western understanding of Japanese culture.

posted evening of Friday, January 21st, 2011
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This is interesting! Back in University I took archery lessons and our teacher made us read Zen in the Art of Archery. Can't remember much besides I pretty much hated it, not for the book itself, but because we wouldn't even grab the bow if we didn't finish it.
I always thought it was a rather obscure/unknown piece of text!

posted evening of February 10th, 2011 by Jorge López

That's great! I am laughing at the thought of you students sweating your way through Herrigel before you are allowed to shoot...

I don't really know how popularly known the book is. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an extremely popular book among a certain class of college-age hippie (or was when I was that age, I imagine it still is but maybe not), and it was not difficult to find out about the Herrigel text if you asked around.

posted morning of February 11th, 2011 by Jeremy

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