Eugen Herrigel Quotes & Sayings

You must learn to wait properly ... By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension — Eugen Herrigel

Zen Buddhism does not preach. Sermons remain words. It waits until people feel stifled and insecure, driven by a secret longing. — Eugen Herrigel

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. — Eugen Herrigel

You must act as if the goal were infinitely far off. — Eugen Herrigel

I must only warn you of one thing. You have become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of archery means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself. Perhaps you have hardly noticed it yet, but you will feel it very strongly when you meet your friends and acquaintances again in your own country: things will no longer harmonize as before. You will see with other eyes and measure with other measures. It has happened to me too, and it happens to all who are touched by the spirit of this art. — Eugen Herrigel

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. — Eugen Herrigel

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose. — Eugen Herrigel

The hand that guides the brush has already caught and executed what floated before the mind at the same moment the mind began to form it, and in the end the pupil no longer knows which of the two-mind or hand -was responsible for the work. — Eugen Herrigel

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. — Eugen Herrigel

The more one concentrates on breathing, the more the external stimuli fade into the background ... In due course one even grows immune to larger stimuli, and at the same time detachment from them becomes easier and quicker. Care has only to be taken that the body is relaxed whether standing, sitting or lying, and if one then concentrates on breathing one soon feels oneself shut in by impermeable layers of silence. One only knows and feels that one breathes. And, to detach oneself from this feeling and knowing, no fresh decision is required, for the breathing slows down of its own accord, becomes more and more economical in the use of breath, and finally, slipping by degrees into a blurred monotone, escapes one's attention altogether. — Eugen Herrigel

The spider dances her web without knowing there are flies that will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam gets caught without knowing what lies in store. But through both of them "It" dances. So, too, the archer hits the target without having aimed-more I cannot say. — Eugen Herrigel

You worry yourself unnecessarily. Put the thought of hitting right out of your mind! — Eugen Herrigel

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

The hand that stretches the bow must open like a child's hand opens. What sometimes hinders the precision of the shot is the archer's over-active will. He thinks: "What I fail to do will not be done", and that's not quite how things work. Man should always act, but he must also let other forces of the universe act in their own due time. — Eugen Herrigel

In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality. — Eugen Herrigel

The Master's warning that we should not practice anything except self-detaching immersion. — Eugen Herrigel

He grows daily more capable of following any inspiration without technical effort, and also of letting inspiration come to him through meticulous observation. — Eugen Herrigel

Being able to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension ... without continually asking yourself: Shall I be able to manage it? Wait patiently, as see what comes - and how it comes! — Eugen Herrigel

It is generally admitted that Dhyana Buddhism, which was born in India and, after undergoing profound changes, reached full development in China, to be finally adopted by Japan, where it is cultivated as a living tradition to this day, has disclosed unsuspected ways of existence which it is of the utmost importance for us to understand. — Eugen Herrigel

The effortlessness of a performance for which great strength is needed is a spectacle of whose aesthetic beauty the East has an exceedingly sensitive and grateful appreciation. — Eugen Herrigel

Put the thought of hitting right out of your mind! You can be a Master even if every shot does not hit. The hits on the target is only an outward proof and confirmation of your purposelessness at its highest, of your egolessness, your self-abandonment, or whatever you like to call this state. There are different grades of mastery, and only when you have made the last grade will you be sure of not missing the goal. — Eugen Herrigel

The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being. — Eugen Herrigel

You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies ... The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You ... brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way
like the hand of a child. — Eugen Herrigel

You must learn to wait properly. — Eugen Herrigel

The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! 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. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen. — Eugen Herrigel

And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work can be done. — Eugen Herrigel

The man, the art, the work--it is all one. — Eugen Herrigel

The preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating ... that collectedness and presence of mind ... the right frame of mind for the artist is only reached when the preparing and the creating, the technical and the artistic, the material and the spiritual, the project and the object, flow together without a break. — Eugen Herrigel

This exquisite state of unconcerned immersion in oneself is not, unfortunately, of long duration. It is liable to be disturbed from inside. As though sprung from nowhere, moods, feelings, desires, worries and even thoughts incontinently rise up, in a meaningless jumble ... The only successful way of rendering this disturbance inoperative is to keep on breathing quietly and unconcernedly, to enter into friendly relations with whatever appears on the scene, to accustom oneself to it, to look at it equably and at last grow weary of looking. — Eugen Herrigel

You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you. Believe me, I know from my own experience that the Master knows you and each of his pupils much better than we know ourselves. He reads in the souls of his pupils more than they care to admit. — Eugen Herrigel

The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfillment, but brace yourself for failure. — Eugen Herrigel

You can learn from an ordinary bamboo leaf what ought to happen. It bends lower and lower under the weight of snow. Suddenly the snow slips to the ground without the leaf having stirred. Stay like that at the point of highest tension until the shot falls from you. So, indeed, it is: when the tension is fulfilled, the shot must fall, it must fall from the archer like snow from a bamboo leaf, before he even thinks it. — Eugen Herrigel

Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise. — Eugen Herrigel

Archery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself; — Eugen Herrigel

Often nothing keeps the pupil on the move but his faith in his teacher, whose mastery is now beginning to dawn on him ... How far the pupil will go is not the concern of the teacher and master. Hardly has he shown him the right way when he must let him go on alone. There is only one thing more he can do to help him endure his loneliness: he turns him away from himself, from the Master, by exhorting him to go further than he himself has done, and to "climb on the shoulders of his teacher." — Eugen Herrigel