• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I cannot think back to those days without recalling, over and over again, how difficult I found it, in the beginning, to get my breathing to work out right. Though I breathed in technically the right way, whenever I tried to keep my arm and shoulder muscles relaxed while drawing the bow the muscles of my legs stiffened all the more violently, as though my life depended on a firm foothold and secure stance, and as though, like Antaeus, I had to draw strength from the ground. Often the Master had no alternative but to pounce quick as lightning on one of my leg muscles and press it in a particularly sensitive spot. When, to excuse myself, I once remarked that I was conscientiously making an effort to keep relaxed, he replied: “That's just the trouble, you make an effort to think about it. Concentrate entirely on your breathing, as if you had nothing else to do!” It took me a considerable time before I succeeded in doing what the Master wanted. But — I succeeded. I learned to lose myself so effortlessly in the breathing that I sometimes had the feeling that I myself was not breathing but — strange as this may sound —was being breathed. And even when, in hours of thoughtful reflection, I struggled against this bold idea, I could no longer doubt that the breathing held out all that the Master had promised. Now and then, and in the course of time more and more frequently, I managed to draw the bow and keep it drawn until the moment of release while remaining completely relaxed in body, without my being able to say how it happened. The qualitative difference between these few successful shots and the innumerable failures was so convincing that I was ready to admit that now at last I understood what was meant by drawing the bow “spiritually”.

So that was it: not a technical trick I had tried in vain to pick up, but liberating breath-control with new and far-reaching possibilities. I say this not without misgivings for I well know how great is the temptation to succumb to a powerful influence and, ensnared in self-delusion, to overrate the importance of an experience merely because it is so unusual. But despite all equivocation and sober reserve, the results obtained by the new breathing — for in time I was able to draw even the strong bow of the Master with muscles relaxed—were far too definite to be denied.

In talking it over with Mr. Komachiya, I once asked him why the Master had looked on so long at my futile efforts to draw the bow “spiritually” why he had not insisted on the correct breathing right from the the start. “A great Master”, he replied, “must also be a great teacher. With us the two things go hand in hand. Had he begun the lessons with breathing exercises, he would never have been able to convince you that you owe them anything decisive. 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.”

IV

To be able to draw the bow “spiritually” after a year, that is, with a kind of effortless strength, is no very startling achievement. And yet I was well content, for I had begun to understand why the system of self-defence whereby one brings one's opponent to the ground unexpectedly giving way, with effortless resilience, to his passionately delivered attack, thus turning his own strength against him, is known as “the gentle art”. Since the remotest times its symbol has been the yielding and yet unconquerable water, so that Lao-tzu could say with profound truth that right living is like water, which “of all things the most yielding can overwhelm that which is of all things most hard”. Moreover, the saying of the Master went round in school, that “whoever makes good progress in the beginning has all the more difficulties later on”. For me the beginning had been far from easy: was I not entitled, therefore,