Zen in the Art of Archery

Mastering the Art of Reading

WHEN I MOST ENJOY READING, I’m not really conscious that I’m reading. It’s at those moments when I’m so wrapped up in a book, so engrossed, so moved, so obsessed, or so fascinated, that the part of my mind that is watching me read—maybe keeping track of the pages or trying to decide how much longer I should keep on reading—that part of my mind has gone away.

This is what I hope for every time I open a book. It’s something of a paradox. To love reading is to want to achieve the state where you don’t know you are reading, where your communion with what you are reading is absolute. Or at least it is for me.

In my quest to understand this and maybe even be able to cultivate it, I went in search of books on reading. But most made me more aware, not less aware. They are like books on breathing—which cause me to think so much about my breathing I almost forget to breathe.

Then I found Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel.

Long before I read Zen in the Art of Archery, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, the 1974 classic by the philosopher Robert M. Pirsig, about a father and his son and their bike journey across half of the country. So I wrongly assumed that archery came after motorcycle, when in fact the opposite is true: the book on archery, published in 1948, was the inspiration for Pirsig’s wonderfully odd title.

Zen in the Art of Archery is a small nonfiction book, originally written in German, and translated into English by R. F. C. Hull. If you give yourself an hour or two, you can start and finish it. But it’s not a book that’s going to reveal itself in an hour or two. In fact, it’s a book that may well take me the rest of my life (and then some) to figure out.

The story is simple: Herrigel, a philosophy professor from Europe, is teaching in Japan and decides to learn the art of archery from a Japanese master. What he gets in addition to this is a lesson about Zen philosophy and about life.

He quickly realizes, “Bow and arrow are only a pretext for something that could just as well happen without them, only the way to a goal, not the goal itself, only helps for the last decisive leap.”

In archery, the key skill is not aim—it’s knowing how and when to let go of the arrow; how and when to let the arrow fly. Nothing else matters as much; nothing else is harder to get right.

Much of the book revolves around Herrigel’s repeated attempts to master this one thing: letting go of the arrow. But the heart of the book is Herrigel’s struggle to become the kind of student he needs to be to learn from his teacher how to do this.

As he writes: “The Japanese pupil brings with him three things: good education, passionate love for his chosen art, and uncritical veneration of his teacher.”

Herrigel is the opposite of this kind of pupil, at least at first. He’s constantly questioning his teacher and trying to create his own systems and shortcuts.

“Archery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself; and this kind of contest is not a paltry substitute, but the foundation of all contests outwardly directed….”

The problem with trying to figure out when to let the bowstring go is that it can’t be figured out. You don’t let the arrow fly, he learns; it’s the arrow that does it. There is no you. There is only it.

When he questions the master on this, he’s given the analogy of a child clutching the hand of a parent.

“You must hold the drawn bowstring,” answered the Master, “like a little child holding the proffered finger. It grips it so firmly that one marvels at the strength of the tiny fist. And when it lets the finger go, there is not the slightest jerk. Do you know why? Because a child doesn’t think: I will now let go of the finger in order to grasp this other thing. Completely unself-consciously, without purpose, it turns from one to the other….”

The master also describes a bamboo leaf in winter that bends slowly from the weight of snow until the snow falls and the bamboo leaf springs back to where it was before it was weighted down. The snow doesn’t decide to part from the leaf and the leaf doesn’t decide that it’s time to dump the snow. It just happens.

“ ‘The right art,’ cried the Master, ‘is purposeless, aimless.’ ”

Eventually, Herrigel does manage to get it right and, even later, to hit the target. But when he congratulates himself, his master has one more admonition: “ ‘You know already that you should not grieve over bad shots; learn now not to rejoice over the good ones.’ ”

Soon it’s time for Herrigel to move back to Europe, bringing home with him what he has learned and also his bow. In a section that fascinates me, his master takes some shots with Herrigel’s bow, but urges him not to let others use it. The bow remembers.

When it’s time to leave for good, Herrigel is anxious that he will forget all he has learned.

“When I asked the Master how we could get on without him on our return to Europe, he said: ‘Your question is already answered by the fact that I made you take a test. You have now reached a stage where teacher and pupil are no longer two persons, but one. You can separate from me any time you wish. Even if broad seas lie between us, I shall always be with you when you practice what you have learned.’ ”

Herrigel realizes that the lessons apply to other areas of life.

“What is true of archery and swordsmanship also applies to all the other arts. Thus, mastery in ink-painting is only attained when the hand, exercising perfect control over technique, executes what hovers before the mind’s eye at the same moment when the mind begins to form it, without there being a hair’s breadth between. Painting then becomes spontaneous calligraphy. Here again the painter’s instructions might be: spend ten years observing bamboos, become a bamboo yourself, then forget everything and—paint.”

I’ve tried archery. I am dismal at it. The only time I ever hit a bull’s-eye, it was the wrong one; I actually missed my target by such a wide margin that I hit a fellow archer’s target with a perfect bull’s-eye. It’s a wonder I didn’t kill anyone. I put down my bow before I did and have never taken it up again.

So I decided to take the author at his word and attempt to apply what I learned in this book to my favorite endeavor: reading. And in doing so, I’ve come to believe that reading most certainly is an art. Schools often tend, however, to teach it as a skill, drumming into little heads the alphabet and getting kids addicted to phonics. We acknowledge different speeds and different levels of comprehension and different types of reading—shallow versus deep. But essentially, reading is regarded as something dichotomous. If people ask you if you can read, they are expecting a yes or no answer.

But I believe it’s far more complicated and simple than that: every time you read, you are learning how to read. Reading is an art we practice our whole lives. It’s not like tying a shoe—it’s like ink painting or flower arranging or, yes, archery. Some writers make it easier for us to practice this art, and some more difficult. Every writer teaches us how to read; every book teaches us how to read; we teach ourselves how to read. The more we read, the better at reading we become. At the end of each page I’m a better reader than I was at the start.

All of which is to say, there is only one way to practice the art of reading—and that’s to read.

Lin Yutang also believed that reading is an art. One chapter of The Importance of Living is devoted to “The Art of Reading.” Lin writes that “The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood.”

On the practical side, Lin believed that reading gives us “charm and flavor,” but he was careful to caution against reading for our own good. “Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.”

He quotes the ancient scholar Yüan Chunglang, “You can leave the books that you don’t like alone, and let other people read them.”

And he follows with this admonition: “There can be, therefore, no books that one absolutely must read. For our intellectual interests grow like a tree or flow like a river. So long as there is proper sap, the tree will grow anyhow, and so long as there is fresh current from the spring, the water will flow.”

Near the end of The Importance of Living comes a section where Lin presents the wisdom of Chang Ch’ao, a mid-seventeenth-century writer, beloved for his literary maxims. Here is Chang Ch’ao on reading at different times in your life: “Reading books in one’s youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depth of one’s own experience.”

For Lin, reading is an act “consisting of two sides, the author and the reader.” And Lin believed that choosing a favorite author is no small thing—it’s epic, as epic as finding the right master to teach you the art of archery.

“I regard the discovery of one’s favorite author,” Lin writes, “as the most critical event in one’s intellectual development….One has to be independent and search out his masters. Who is one’s favorite author, no one can tell, probably not even the man himself. It is like love at first sight. The reader cannot be told to love this one or that one, but when he has found the author he loves, he knows it himself by a kind of instinct.”

Finally, Lin turns to the appropriate time and place for reading: “There is no proper place and time for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere. If one knows the enjoyment of reading, he will read in school or out of school, and in spite of all schools…

“What, then, is the true art of reading? The simple answer is to just take up a book and read when the mood comes. To be thoroughly enjoyed, reading must be entirely spontaneous.”

And that’s how you master archery.