Ornoth

My Austin kyūdō group doesn’t have a teacher; it never has. But we fall under the distant tutelage of a Japanese archery group based in Greenville, South Carolina. The South Carolina Kyūdō Renmei (or SCKR) is run by Blackwell-sensei, one of the most senior kyūdō teachers outside Japan, and his wife Reiko-sensei.

SCKR hold kyūdō seminars a couple times a year, which are attended by local South Carolina practitioners, Austin kyudoka, as well as people from all over North America.

Given my well-documented and very fundamental beginner struggles, I never attended a seminar. I didn’t want to take sensei’s time away from his many advanced students to deal with my remedial problems, and I didn’t want to waste an expensive trip if I wasn’t going to get the attention I need.

However, sensei offered to run a seminar just for us, only open to the comparatively junior members of Austin Kyūdō. It was an irresistible opportunity to get sensei’s help in a way that didn’t feel like I was imposing on other archers. So in September I joined ten other Austinites for a three-day kyūdō intensive.

And “intense” is the right word to describe my experience, from beginning to end. There’s way too much to be able to share it all, but I’ll do my best to briefly share the important parts of where I started, what I went through, some of the things I learned, and where I go from here.

The Honda Prelude

Just two weeks before the seminar, I was ready to call off the trip and quit kyūdō entirely. After two and a half futile years enduring consistent failure in stoic silence, I had finally reached my breaking point.

While everyone around me – even complete first-timers! – demonstrated basic competence and increasing proficiency, I simply couldn’t successfully fire a bow without injuring myself or damaging equipment. My arrows would fly through the air sideways and clang off the practice target, or flop feebly to the ground only a few meters downrange. I broke strings, stripped the feathers from arrows, and bruised my forearm. And the months I’d spent trying dozens of different ways to correct it had all been for naught.

In the interest of moving on, I’ll leave it at that for now. But to get a better idea how frustrated I was, I’d encourage you to read the blogpost I wrote eight months ago, entitled “All the Gear and…”. Just take all the anguish in that post and amp it up to eleven.

Ironically, that week I had a promising insight: that I clenched the fingers of my right hand so tightly that they were interfering with my release. That didn’t solve all my problems, but it seemed like a clue: one piece of the puzzle. But I didn’t even have time to put it into practice before the seminar was upon us.

So that was my mental and emotional state going into the trip: off-the-scale frustration, extreme pessimism, and the only thing I wanted out of the seminar was for sensei to fix me… Although I was skeptical whether he would, or could.

It was – if you’ll excuse the pun – “my last shot” at being a kyūdō practitioner.

The Tyranny of Logistics

Bearing so much emotional distress, I wasn’t very tolerant of the usual discomforts of travel. Other than two trips between Pittsburgh and Austin when we were deciding where to move, I hadn’t flown in six years: since before the COVID-19 pandemic. And it was my first time flying Southwest Airlines, whose asinine unassigned seating policy makes boarding a complete free-for-all.

Things didn’t get a lot better once we arrived, either. I had to share a room with another person, which added some more stress. Not only were we going to prepare communal meals, but because no one had bothered to communicate with one another, sensei and his friends had also prepared meals for us too, which was yet another stressor for everyone.

Even the seminar provided some unexpected wrinkles. Sensei vetoed my use of the familiar bow I’d brought. I’d purchased some used zori sandals for outdoor use getting to the dojo and fetching arrows, but those promptly broke, necessitating a special trip to the store to buy replacements. And although the seminar was supposed to be for his Austin students only, we were sporadically joined by 5-10 local practitioners. Despite being able to use the dojo 365 days a year, they took shooting spaces and sensei’s time away from those of us who had traveled from far away for a precious 2½ days with him. And I have to admit I got frustrated by seeing other kyudoka improving much more rapidly than I did.

But the underlying message here is that the seminar was extremely mentally, physically, and emotionally draining. In addition to my already-charged emotional state, I was dealing with lack of sleep, poor and insufficient eating, muscle fatigue, dehydration, headaches and nausea, social stress, and of course the emotional rollercoaster of judging every shot I took.

It was, in short, an incredibly draining experience.

Nana Dan the Sensei

I’m gonna be honest: I felt a lot of trepidation going into my first experience with Blackwell-sensei. In speaking with my friends who had worked with him in the past, my preconception was of a teacher who was willfully terse, irritable, intolerant, and easily offended. But after telling their daunting stories, my friends would always add the postscript: “… but as long as you’re serious about kyūdō, he’s really great!”

During the seminar, Blackwell-sensei was actually very willing to give me the benefit of his time and instruction, and he patiently listened to my observations and needs. Despite my skepticism and obvious frustration, he was able to see the mistakes underlying my problems, and gave me clear strategies for correcting them. And he did so with patience and graciousness.

While fixing my issues will take lots more practice and reinforcement, my shooting did begin to improve by the end of the seminar, thanks to his valuable and generously-offered instruction.

Not that he isn’t surly and cantankerous and all that. But I think it shows up in his interactions with more experienced students, with whom he has higher expectations and more established relationships.

My Threefold Incompetence

So what exactly did I get out of the seminar? Well, there were lots of little, specific learnings, but those will be documented in my kyūdō notebook, rather than here. And as far as I was concerned, the only thing that really mattered was figuring out the cause of my constant misfires.

Over the course of the weekend, we identified three specific issues with my release. I’ll distill them down as briefly as possible.

First, my grip on the bow was incorrect, which was causing the string to slap my wrist and the bow to invert itself. Fixing it requires both holding the bow more loosely, plus making small changes in how my fingers configure themselves on the grip.

My second issue was what I’d identified just before the seminar: by locking my fingers around the string, they interfered with the string when I released it, causing the arrow to fire off-kilter, with very little power, and stripping some of the fletching. Ideally, I wouldn’t lock those fingers at all during my draw, but for the time being I’m simply trying to consciously loosen those fingers before I release the string.

I developed the habit of locking those fingers because the string was prematurely coming out of the groove it’s supposed to sit in within the glove. Sensei gave me several techniques to counteract this tendency during my draw, including: keeping my right hand flat; being careful to keep my thumb level or pointed up, rather than downward; making sure my right elbow comes down and back as I draw; not drawing the arrow all the way down to the chin; and not holding my full draw for very long.

Of course, there’s an immense difference between a conceptual understanding of what one has to fix versus actually physically performing it reliably each time one steps up to shoot. And because I’ve spent two years developing muscle memory of improper techniques, my attempts to correct my form feel completely unnatural and wrong. So even though I know what I should be doing, it’s going to take time and lots of practice to learn new habits.

The Fourth Problem

As chance would have it, our kyūdō trip coincided with two Zoom calls that I wanted to attend, both organized by Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, where I practiced meditation for 12 years, and which has been an important part of my growth for more than two decades. Saturday’s call was in honor of CIMC’s founding teacher, Larry Rosenberg, who is in his nineties and in poor health; and on Sunday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of CIMC’s founding. These were intensely moving for me, and featured several of my dear old friends. A shaved-headed version of Ornoth even showed up in the background in part of the “community reflections” video they shared!

The main reason why I mention these here is because those celebrations included poignant messages about looking at how one relates to the challenges and suffering that arise in one’s life, and to pay close attention to what one is attached to, especially ego-based ideas about who one is and how one wants other people see them.

The applicability of these ideas to my kyūdō practice couldn’t have been clearer, and really put the past couple years into perspective.

To clarify further, here’s a citation from a recent article in Lion’s Roar magazine that stated things rather well:

Often a problem at home or at work isn’t just troubling because of the surface issue that the problem is about. It’s what the problem makes us feel and think about ourselves that is disturbing. Taking the time to examine those feelings and thoughts using our meditative practices often shows us that we have some internal hook by which the external challenge has grabbed us.

[…]

Try answering this self-exploratory journal question: “What is the difference between the actual problem posed by my situation and my perception of and feelings about my situation?”

A neutral observer would see that there’s really nothing objectively painful about my kyūdō practice, other than maybe an occasional abrasion. The towering mountain of anguish I’ve endured is entirely due to the meaning I’ve attached to my practice, specifically my need to be seen as a competent – if not a skilled – archer, both in my own mind as well as in the estimation of others.

My need to be a skilled kyudoka was the source of a great deal of pain: that is the fourth problem with my archery practice.

I would free myself from an immense quantity of suffering if I were able to let go of that need, or at least hold it more lightly. Like changing my shooting technique, that’s easier said than done, but just having that mind-shift cleared some space for me to relate to myself and my struggles with more ease, more compassion, and hopefully a little more freedom.

Since my early days as a tech consultant, I’ve known that I don’t thrive in my “stretch zone”; I thrive in the “comfort zone”. I want to enjoy life as it comes, in accordance with my own values, without unnecessary effort or discomfort. I don’t understand people who fixate on personal growth, always striving for something more, wanting to leave their mark on the world. To me, that sounds like living in a perpetual hamster wheel: lots and lots of effort, achieving nothing of value. Or as Devo sings: “Toil is Stupid”.

I had an exchange with one of the senior kyudoka from South Carolina which was especially discouraging. He told me that he enjoyed having the younger Austin people visit, because they reminded him that practicing kyūdō could actually be fun. If enjoying kyūdō is an alien concept to such a longtime practitioner, that raises a big question about whether I even want to continue. What’s the point, if there is no enjoyment?

Kyūdō challenges my self-image, my attachment to how I am perceived by others, and the basic values I hold toward life. Hopefully I can work through those challenges and find a better way to relate to them, so that I don’t have to suffer as much as I have for the past two years.

Seeking the Target

So where do I stand?

Sensei actually gave me both hope and a number of specific changes that I can incorporate into my shooting technique. It would be logical to make a sincere effort to adopt his suggestions, to see whether they actually improve my shooting or not. That will take time and practice to prove out, but that’s an investment I’m willing to make.

I’m also willing to work on my relationship with kyūdō. It’s important that I learn how to let go of the frustration that comes with identifying as a competent archer, while at the same time asking myself whether kyūdō’s endless self-improvement treadmill is something I am able and willing to tolerate over the long term.

As such, I am not going to quit kyūdō… yet.

But at the same time, I am only suspending judgement long enough to work with sensei’s suggestions. Those changes might not help, and I might still decide that I can’t cope with kyūdō’s perpetual challenges and frustrations.

So we’ll see. The arrow’s journey continues, for the time being.

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!