All of us are archers of divine will. And, so, it is indispensable to know which instruments we have at our disposal. The bow is your life: all energy comes from it. The arrow will part one day. The target is far away.
But your life will always remain with you. It is necessary to know. to care for it. It needs periods of inaction — a bow that is always set, in the state of tension, loses its potency. So, accept the repose to recover your firmness: that way, when you stretch the string, you’ll have your strength intact.
The bow doesn’t have conscience: it is an extension of the archer’s hand and desire. It serves to kill or to meditate. So, always be clear about your intentions.
A bow has flexibility, but it also has a limit. Straining it beyond its capacity will break it or exhaust the hand that holds it. The same way, don’t demand more from your body than it can give you. And understand that old age will arrive one day — and that’s a blessing and not a curse.
In order to keep the bow open with elegance, make sure each part gives only the necessary and do not disperse your energies. That way you will be able to shoot many arrows without getting tired.
The arrow is your intention. It is what unites the strength of the bow and the centre of the target. The human being’s intention has to be crystalline, straight and well balanced. Once it is broken, it won’t come back, so it is better to interrupt an ongoing process — if the movements weren’t precise and correct — than to act anyhow, just because the bow was already tightened and the target was waiting.
The target is the goal to be reached. It was chosen by you. That’s where the beauty of the path resides: you can never apologise saying your adversary was stronger. Because it was you who chose your target. If you look at the aim as an enemy, you may even hit your target, but you won’t be able to improve anything within yourself. You will spend your life just trying to hit an arrow in the centre of something made of paper or wood, which is absolutely useless. And when you are with other people, you will keep complaining that you don’t do anything interesting. That is why you need to choose your goal, give your best to reach it, looking at it with respect and dignity: you need to know what it means, how much it cost of your effort, of your training and of your intuition. When you look at the target, don’t concentrate on it alone, but on everything taking place around you. The arrow will encounter factors which you were unable to factor — the wind, the weight, the distance.
A goal only exists to the same extension a man is able to dream — to reach it. What justifies your existence is desire, or it would be a dead thing. So, the same way an intention seeks its goal, the goal also seeks the intention of man, because it is what gives sense to its existence: it is no longer an idea, but the centre of the world of an archer.
Translated by Bettina Dungs
