Rick Sapp - The Ultimate Guide to Traditional Archery

Its all about you.

With just two sticks and one string, you can become rich and famous beyond your wildest dreams. Okay, not rich in the financial sense, or famous like a celebrity, but who knows? We live, after all, in a world of unlimited possibilities...

Whoever coined the expression about life being short, so play hard was probably trying to sell you something. Something expensive and electronic, something fragile, breakable, something that will go out of style or out of service or need up-grading next year. It will be something you dont need, but the advertising wont say that, choosing instead to stimulate your desire to be cool.

But those sticks and a string? They could hook you forever, make you a devotee, an addict, in a sense. Without trying. An addict in a good way.

If you believe it is high time you found the spot of gold at your center, these two sticksa bow, an arrowand a bowstring can take you there.

Its archery, of course. Archery in its purest form. Stripped of modern time and energyand thought-saving conveniences. Stripped of artificial. Stripped of the futility of searching endlessly for meaning and community. Many people thousands, hundreds of thousandsthink of it as traditional archery.

They think of it this way...

The long, arcing flight of an arrow cast from a bow is a useful metaphor for our lives. We experience a specific instant of conception and then birth; we also experience a final conscious instant that we call death. What happens on the great curve between those pointswhat we do, how we think, exchange, initiate, and respond in the worldultimately defines us because we have little or no power over the beginning or the ending. Launch and impact are beyond our control.

Archery represents the mindful life, the pure sweeping arc from beginning to end, the arrow buffeted by elements climactic and historic and personal, ultimately hitting or missing its thoughtful goal, but always coming to rest in a target. And it allows you to take charge.

In The Ultimate Guide to Traditional Archery, we are going to dissect the process of living a full and complete life through archery in its most elemental form. We will do so from the initiation of your arrows flight to its final resting moment. We will cover dozens of topics from gear to 3D shooting, but archery isnt about a dozen things. Its about one thing. It is all about you.

Family Life. We tend to suppose that life before the invention of writing, before the invention of history, was somehow primitive, but the men and women of 50,000 years ago surely wanted the same things from life that you want: a little love, a little laughter, a full belly, and a good nights sleep. Although we do not know when the bow was invented, it surely made providing food, clothing, and tools easier for families whose very existence depended on forces far beyond their control. (Libor Balak, Antropak, Czech Republic)

We only think we understand the universe. We feel what we cannot see. A woman walks into the room; she falls in love with you. You feel the love, but you cannot practically define it. And occasionally we see what we cannot feel. We imagine connections and consequences or their absence.

Archery is both deceptively simple and difficult to define. You can with no trouble wrap your mind around shooting the bow, pulling an arrow out of a target. And yet, archery is a multifaceted Zen puzzle of infinite variation and levels of complexity, even amusement. It is all that it appears and more. It is the sound of one hand clapping.

Look up a definition of archery and you will read that it is the art of shooting the bow and arrow. Yet that only lists an action with ingredients, artifacts. As if a cake were the act of baking flour mixed with and eggs and sugar. You may also read that archery is the art, practice, or skill of shooting the bow and arrow. Still the emphasis on the obvious, the non-explanation. As if by calling archery an art, one accepts the mystery at the center as the answer instead of the opportunity to explore. The sightless sight.

Heres what archery is and what sets it apart in the universe: Archery is an act of imaginative creation. It is the practice of exercising ones power over inanimate objects, causing them to fly through the air and arrive at a goal using little more than the effort of your will. Archery is magic. Archery is levitation and bending spoons.

We imagine an arrow and it appears. We imagine a bow and it rests in our hand, light and tense and filled with potential. But these objects, these sticks with a string, are no more than stones in a river bed until we imagine them into action.

Eugen Herrigel studied kyudo, the art of the Japanese bow, under Zen master Awa Kenzo in the 1920s. Awa convinced Herrigel that through complete inner stillness and concentration, as well as through continuing dedication to the art form, he could walk blindfolded into a dark room, pick up the bow and arrow, and extinguish a distant burning candle with his shot. Herrigels book Zen in the Art of Archery was published in 1948. If he could imagine such a shot, could you not also move mountains with your mind?

Think about it like this: Let your hand lie flat on a desk or table. Relax and tell your index finger to move. What happens? Nothing. No matter how many times you order it to move, what tone of voice you use, whether you shout or whisper, the finger is little more than a stone in the river. Order the lily in the planter to flower and it remains as still as your finger. How do you make a finger move? Certainly, it does not move of its own volition. The stone in the river bed requires force: gravity or rushing water or the scratch of a bear. The plant beside you flutters if you blow its leaves or if the vacuum rocks the pot. So where is the force, the energy and willpower that moves your hand, that picks up the rock, that animates the plant, that shoots the arrow?

When we imagine shooting the bow, it quivers with anticipation, with hidden reserves of energy waiting to be unleashed and applied by simply placing an arrow onto the string, pulling back, and setting it free. When we do that, we empower these inanimate objectsthe sticks and string, the rocks of the riverbed, even our fingertipsand bring them into conscious, willful existence. We transform the elemental structure of the universe from lifeless points of matter to vibrating strings with our mind. Nothing exists unless we first create it with our imagination.