All the Gear and…

Feb. 16th, 2025 09:59 am

Like golf, kyūdō is supposed to be a little humbling. Part of this Japanese martial art is to provide the archer with opportunities to observe and reflect on his emotional reaction to stress, adversity, frustration, and failure.

I really don’t think it’s supposed to be this hard, tho.

But before I talk about what’s going wrong, let’s talk about what’s gone well: buying things!

Ornoth practicing kyudo at full draw

Soon after restarting my lapsed kyūdō practice in a new lineage, I purchased a basic kyūdō uniform: a dogi, kaku obi, hakama, and tabi (i.e. shirt, belt, pleated skirt-pants, and footwear). Plus my first yugake (shooting glove), custom-sized for my hand and specially crafted in Japan.

Last year I added the essential equipment. I ordered four semi-fletched arrows from respected kyūdō teacher Dan DeProspero in North Carolina for close-range indoor use with a makiwara target. Then I gained a beautiful set of six fletched arrows for long-distance shooting, which my buddies picked up for me while they were attending a workshop at Blackwell-sensei’s dojo in South Carolina. And I topped it off with a new, extra-long (yon-sun), 12kg draw weight Jikishin II composite bow in a group order from Japan’s Sambu Kyuguten.

I definitely look the part. So what’s the problem? Literally everything else!

But taking aim at the main problem: I can’t release an arrow properly. Sometimes the arrow launches feebly and bounces off the practice target. Other times it flies thru the air sideways and clangs off the target. Sometimes the string tries to rotate around the bow so violently that the bow “flips” and inverts itself, requiring a manual reset. I’ve even broken the string on one bow. And every misfire produces eye-wateringly painful abrasions and bruising on my left thumb or wrist.

This kinda thing happens to archers from time to time. With a normal problem, you would diagnose what you’re doing wrong, correct it, and move on with your practice; but it’s been more than 18 months, and I’ve tried so many things, with no success in fixing my release. In the past six months, I’ve made just 23 successful shots, against 31 misfires of various kinds. And I sat out three entire practice sessions purely out of fear of shooting. I’ve even had actual nightmares about kyūdō.

These days, I panic before every shot, anticipating the painful abrasions and bruising that accompanies yet another humiliating misfire. Obviously, my “release anxiety” isn’t helping matters at all.

Another frustration is the number of plausible fixes I’ve tried. At first I thought that the glove on my right hand wasn’t holding the string securely, causing it to slip free unexpectedly, with my other fingers impeding its release. When fixing that didn’t solve my problems, I started looking at my left wrist, which is weak and thus has a tendency to buckle inward or outward at full draw. Then we tweaked my grip on the bow, even swapping in a larger grip, because my fingers are considerably longer than those of the average Japanese archer. I tried rotating my right arm vertically on release rather than horizontally, in case that motion was interfering with my release. I tried changed where the arrow was positioned against my glove and putting less torque on my right hand, thinking my glove might be nudging the arrow out of nock. I’ve perpetually been advised to loosen my grip on the bow, but that’s something I’m pretty cognizant of, and doesn’t seem to be the main problem. Because I’ve been afraid of doing a full draw for so long, I tried altering my stance to force myself to fully extended my left arm, in case that was influencing the flight of the arrow. And most recently, I’ve tried focusing my grip on the bow with my middle finger. Out of all these things I’ve tried, nothing has worked.

A complicating factor is that our club doesn’t have an actual experienced teacher among us. Our most senior member is still pretty junior, only recently graduating from Second Dan. So although I get a ton of well-intentioned advice from other members, it’s mostly amateur guesswork and is sometimes contradictory. So many different suggestions have been piled on simultaneously that I can’t adequately test whether any of them are working. Especially when we are only able to shoot three or four arrows per weekly session!

As I said above, part of being a kyūdōka is learning how to manifest stoic strength, showing neither elation nor disappointment in one’s performance. So I’ve been exceptionally patient, never showing any overt emotional response. Meanwhile, I’ve helped new practitioners, who began with considerably less skill and self-awareness, advance far beyond me in skill. Although I really don’t care about rank at all, after nearly two years of incompetent struggle, I’m not improving, and I’ve finally exhausted my willingness to suffer in silent solitude.

A normal kyudoka would long ago have called on the experience of their teacher. For better or worse, our Austin group falls under the auspices of a Seventh Dan teacher who lives in South Carolina and runs his own group there. He never comes to Austin, and we can only travel to see him once or twice a year, when he holds kyūdō seminars that are well-attended and open to the public. At those seminars, he prefers to work with his advanced students, and I don’t want to show up on his doorstep asking for him to solve some aging stranger’s beginner struggles. Ideally, I’d get my problems cleared up and develop some basic competence before working with him. But until that happens, I’d be too ashamed to show up with such fundamental problems, and it would be a pointless waste of a trip if I was unable to participate in shooting.

While I expect my struggles to continue, there are two potential options for possibly getting help.

Our sensei has mentioned the possibility of hosting a weekend seminar specifically for our Austin group. This could be a way for me to meet him and get some personal instruction without taking his precious time away from his favored students. The challenge would be getting a critical number of students to schedule travel together to South Carolina to make it worth sensei’s time. And meanwhile, I’ve got an upcoming surgery that’ll prevent me from flying for six months.

Another possibility might be sending video clips to him for his critique. This has the advantage of being easier to make happen, but it would limit how much sensei can see, as well as how quickly I could test out his suggestions and get rounds of feedback. Plus it would still be an imposition, and he’s known for being terse and a poor correspondent.

At any rate, I’ll be taking the month of March off from kyūdō following my upcoming surgery. I have no idea whether that downtime will be a useful reset for my technique or an opportunity for me to atrophy and fall even further out of practice.

This is all an immense challenge to the air of competence and Buddhist stoicism I usually try to exemplify. Despite my obvious struggles over the past year and a half, I successfully remained nonchalant and kept my frustration on a low simmer. But at this point the pressure has built up and reached an explosive level where it has to come out. It’s been a very long time since anything has frustrated and humiliated me so thoroughly as kyūdō.

After two years of continuous struggle, it would be illogical to think anything is likely to change. So there’s no way to end this post optimistically. Just venting, while documenting my lengthy, painful, and ongoing struggle.

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Catching Up on My Reading

Dec. 19th, 2010 05:28 pm

Four Buddhisty book reviews. Gotta knock these four out in brief, so I can catch up on other stuff.

“The Karma of Questions”, Thanissaro Bikkhu

This was one of our dhamma book club selections. It was my first time reading Than Geoff, although his books are everywhere. He’s written (∞-1) of them, and he gives them away for free. Unfortunately, quantity doesn’t assure quality, and this book was sporadic in its usefulness. Actually, it reads more like the blog of a rant-prone idealogue than a commercially viable author, probably due to lack of editorial guidance. On the other hand, there were a few interesting nuggets that I’d like to retain.

One is the following admission: “While skillful thinking leads to no harmful actions, long bouts of it can tire the mind.” This confirms my felt sense that devoting all that meta-level thought to how one relates to everything really does consume mental energy. That helps me understand why I often feel utterly exhausted by the end of a retreat.

One of his snarkier bits is when he utterly slams the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal of staying behind in samsara to work for the enlightenment of all, rather than passing into nirvana. Mahayana practitioners often criticize vipassana practitioners as selfish, because they focus on themselves and their own enlightenment. That would make sense, he says, if nirvana was a place or a thing. But it’s not; it’s a process, something you do. “If samsara were a place, it might seem selfish for one person to look for an escape, leaving others behind. But when you realize it’s a process, there’s nothing selfish about stopping at all. It’s like giving up an addiction or an abusive habit.” So staying in samara until all beings are enlightened is kind of like vowing not to go to rehab until everyone else goes.

Another interesting bit is that one can fully understand and embrace the Buddhist concept of non-self and still not be perfected. In his words, even after the question “Who am I?” falls away, “the only question still concerning you is how to dig out the remaining roots of unskillfulness still latent in the mind.”

Perhaps the biggest revelation I took from the book has to do with where intentions come from. Intentions are vitally important in Buddhism, because they’re where karma comes from: someone who knowingly does an unwise act accumulates negative karma, while someone who performs an unwise action with wise intention does not.

According to Buddhism, the chain of conditionality goes like this: one’s intentions determine one’s actions, and one’s actions produce immediate and deferred results. So it’s pivotal to cultivate wise intentions. But what factors influence/condition one’s intentions? Than Geoff mentions two things: one’s state of mind and the results of past intentions and actions. So to produce positive intentions/actions/karma, one must cultivate a positive mind state and observe and learn from one’s previous actions.

There were also numerous interesting pointers on practice. For example, one doesn’t do breath practice in order to observe the breath, but to observe cause and effect, and especially to question your assumptions about breathing and how you relate to your perceptions. Another is thinking of concentration as two separate practices: the first skill is getting the mind settled down, and the second, completely different skill is staying there. See if you can try to keep that degree of stillness going in all situations, and examine the things that get in the way.

“The Compassionate Life”, Dalai Lama

I picked up this little book as part of my karuna practice, interested in seeing what the grand master had to say on the subject. Largely this was a discussion of two important Mahayana texts: Shantideva’s 8th century “Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” and Langri Tangpa’s 12th century “Eight Verses for Training the Mind”. I took away three interesting ideas.

The first is that patience is considered to be an antidote to both anger and hatred. This works well for me, because I consider myself a patient person, and someone not especially prone to anger and hatred. However, the times when I feel the most irritation with people are usually instances where I’m being impatient about them doing something.

On the topic of compassion, old man Gyatso asserted that it’s not necessary to actively cultivate compassion for every single person. Instead, he suggested realizing the general case: that all beings seek happiness and avoid pain, and have an equal right to do so.

He also offered this offbeat question: if human hatred exceeded human love, then why has our population grown so hugely? Yes, humanity has suffered immense self-inflicted wars and pogrommes, but that hasn’t stopped us from loving even more, as evinced by world population growth.

“Compassion: The Key to Great Awakening, Thought Training and the Bodhisattva Practices”, Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen

Ironically, while I was in the library looking for the above Dalai Lama book, I accidentally found this one. Although the title promised to further advance my karuna practice, it was (like the Dalai Lama’s book) mostly a commentary on two Mahayana base texts; in this case, Togmey Zangpo’s “Thirty-Seven Bodhisattva Practices”, as well as the “Eight Verses” that were already cited in the Dala Lama’s book.

I really didn’t gain a lot from this book. The major point I gathered echoed the Dalai Lama: that patience is greater than anger.

Other than that, the whole Tibetan cosmology thing kinda left me feeling that Mahayanans are a little bit more than cuckoo.

“The Best of Inquiring Mind: 25 Years of Dharma, Drama, and Uncommon Insight”

I was delighted to find a copy of this book in the library, as it was already on my Amazon wish list. Despite being a low-budget, seat of the pants operation, Inquiring Mind has been a key publication in American Buddhism for more than 25 years, as evinced by their list of contributors, which includes Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, S.N. Goenka, Ajahn Amaro, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Engler, Ram Dass, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and John Cage.

As such, the book was very useful to me in terms of charting the lineage of American Buddhism, especially noting the people involved in the founding of IMS and Spirit Rock.

Although it was very interesting to read, the only meaningful passage for me was in Ayya Khema’s article on jhana practice, which described the first four jhana in terms that sound a lot like my own personal experience. It’s a fascinating article which gives me an idea that it would be useful for me to sit down and have a talk with someone who has done and can teach jhana practice, so that I can confirm form myself where I’m at and where to go from there. As well as seeking out her other publications and dhamma talks, of course.

Now, after all that I can relax and read the newest Pratchett paperback before diving back into some more meaty material after the holiday!

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