"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." -- Eugen Herrigel
Eugen Herrigel (20 March 1884 in Lichtenau, Baden-Württemberg - 18 April 1955 in Partenkirchen, Bavaria) was a German philosopher who taught philosophy at Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai, Japan, from 1924-1929 and introduced Zen to large parts of Europe through his writings.
While living in Japan from 1924 to 1929, he studied ky?d?, traditional Japanese archery, under Awa Kenzô (1880-1939), a prominent master of the art, in the hope of furthering his understanding of Zen. In July 1929 he returned to Germany and was given a chair for philosophy at the University of Erlangen. In 1937 Herrigel joined the Nazi Party.
"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.""Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft.""He grows daily more capable of following any inspiration without technical effort, and also of letting inspiration come to him through meticulous observation.""This means that the mind or spirit is present anywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place. And it can remain present because, even when related to this or that object, it does not cling to it by reflection and thus lose its original mobility."
In 1936 he published a 20-page article describing his experiences entitled "Die Ritterliche Kunst des Bogenschiessens" (The Knightly Art of Archery) in the journal, Zeitschrift für Japanologie. This later formed the core of his most famous work Zen in the Art of Archery. In the book, Herrigel does not mention the Master's name.
Professor Herrigel died in 1955. Among his papers were found voluminous notes on various aspects of Zen. These notes were selected and edited by Hermann Tausend in collaboration with Gusty L. Herrigel, the author's wife (who studied Japanese flower arranging) and were published in German under the title Der Zen-Weg. This version was revised and edited by Alan Watts in 1960 and published by Vintage Press as The Method of Zen.
It was discovered that Master Kenzô, although a teacher of archery, was not a teacher nor an adherent, of Zen Buddhism. What Kenzô calls the "Great Doctrine" in the book was his own original practice, the Daishakyôdô, the "Way of the Great Doctrine of Shooting" rather than Zen.
At first, Herrigel did not characterize his lessons as a form of Zen when he wrote about his experience in 1936. When he read D.T. Suzuki in 1938, he decided that Kenzô's teaching actually was Zen. Suzuki obviously endorsed this identification, since he wrote the introduction to the post-war edition of Herrigel's book. Modern scholarship on Zen has come to regard Suzuki's own reading of Zen as idiosyncratic and not grounded in traditions of Zen. What distinguishes the approach of Suzuki, Herrigel, and Master Kenzô himself is the way they developed the Taoist features of the tradition. Zen and the Art of Divebombing, or The Dark Side of the Tao