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Tanouye Roshi then pointed me in the direction of the kyudo dojo and told me to go there for practice. Disoriented and embarrassed by my entrance to Chozen-Ji, I walked to the kyudo dojo for my first lesson in the Zen art of archery. Over the entrance of the dojo were four Japanese characters. Later I learned that their English translation is "One arrow, one life."

Like most Westerners, until that day what I knew of kyudo came from the book Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. Herrigel was a German philosophy professor who spent five years in Japan during the 1930s. Wanting to study Zen, he was advised by friends to take up one of the Zen arts. Because of his previous experience with pistol shooting, Herrigel chose kyudo.

I first read Herrigel's book in 1967 as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. It was the first book that I read in college, assigned by my English composition teacher for reasons I no longer remember. In spite of its popularity, I was disdainful of the book. I had no interest in spiritual matters and was impatient with what I considered to be vague mysticism.