Once, at a kyudo dojo in Japan, I accidentally sat in the kamiza, the place of honor.
As the archers entered, each of them bowed in my direction. I assumed they were bowing to me, so I kept bowing back. What confused me was that none of them seemed to be looking at me.
Only later did I learn that bowing toward the kamiza is part of the formal etiquette of entering and leaving the shooting area. I had simply happened to be sitting there. The bows were never meant for me.
I have remembered that small misunderstanding for years.
Courtesy usually has a recipient. We greet someone because they are there. We thank someone because they have done something for us. But this bow felt different. It did not depend on who happened to be watching. It belonged to the act of entering the space and beginning what came next.
Kyudo has a well-known phrase: seisha hitchū — 正射必中. Roughly put, if the shooting is right, the arrow will find its mark. The emphasis is not only on where the arrow lands, but on the quality of everything that leads up to it.
That is the part that interests me.
Of course an archer wants to hit the target. But before the arrow leaves the string, the target is not the part that can be controlled. What can be attended to is the shot itself: stance, breathing, raising the bow, drawing, releasing. One movement follows another, each requiring its own care.
When someone is fully absorbed in what they are doing, there is no need to keep checking whether they are focused enough.
The arrow is still in your hand. Why send your mind to the target ahead of it?
I once watched an advanced kyudo examination in Japan. Five archers entered together, their movements carefully prescribed from the moment they stepped onto the floor. One elderly man’s hands trembled badly as he raised the bow. At one point, his arrow fell to the ground.
He did not panic or rush to recover. He simply returned to position and began again. His second arrow also missed.
Nothing dramatic happened. Perhaps that is why the scene stayed with me. Things had not gone the way he wanted, but he continued with the next thing that had to be done.
Years later, in a large Japanese supermarket, I noticed something that brought me back to the same thought.
Whenever employees left the sales floor to return to the stockroom, they stopped at the doorway, turned around, bowed toward the store, and then went inside. They were not bowing to any particular customer. Sometimes there was no one nearby at all.
I watched for a while and began to notice a difference.
Some people completed the bow fully. It was not deeper, slower, or more theatrical. They simply seemed to be there for it. Others made exactly the same movement, yet somehow they had already disappeared into the stockroom before their bodies had finished bowing.
The rule was the same. The gesture was almost identical.
But the quality was not.
That may be one reason I have always been fascinated by the many Japanese practices that end in dō — tea, flowers, incense, calligraphy, archery, swordsmanship, judo. Each comes with form: how to enter, where to sit, how to hold something, how to place it down, how to begin and how to finish.
If form becomes nothing more than procedure, it can feel fussy very quickly. Why should drinking a cup of tea require so many steps?
But without form, we become casual just as easily. We pick up the cup and drink. We say whatever comes to mind. We hurry through one task so that we can get to the next. A whole day can disappear that way.
Years ago, I wrote a line that I still like:
Ritual is a hearing aid for awareness.
A hearing aid does not create sound. It makes something already present easier to hear.
Form can work in much the same way. It cannot create sincerity. It cannot guarantee that a bow is more than a habit. What it can do is keep offering a moment in which an action that could be automatic does not have to remain automatic.
This is why I do not think practice means constantly observing yourself.
When you are truly inside what you are doing, there is often less self-consciousness, not more. You set down the tea bowl properly. You complete the shot. You make the bow that belongs before you enter. The action may be ordinary, something you have done hundreds of times, but each time it comes around, it has to be done again.
Perhaps this is what continues to draw me to the idea of dō.
Tea is still tea. Archery is still archery. Work is still work.
The activity itself does not become mystical simply because we call it a “way.” What matters is that the same act can be practiced for years, even passed down across generations, and yet it cannot be completed once and for all.
Form can be inherited. Rules can be taught. Movements can be repeated until two people appear to be doing exactly the same thing.
And still, the quality is different.
It is hard to measure and not always easy to explain.
But you can see it.
You can feel it.
Perhaps the real difference is not only in how well something is done, but in what the person brings to the doing.
Form can survive for generations.
Presence has to be renewed each time.
Practice is not somewhere outside ordinary life. It is here, in the ordinary, just as it is.