Tabata names him kyusei — master of Japanese archery. Kenzou Kawami's teaching, preserved as a brief primary-text passage in Book 1 of Mind Power, runs:1
To hit the target, it has to be as if the arrow heads toward the target voluntarily, regardless of your aim. You need to be mu to achieve it. When you are mu, the arrow you shoot will naturally hit the target without your aiming at it. It is not to hit but to be hit.1
The grammatical inversion at the end is the hinge: not to hit but to be hit. The shooter does not act upon the target; the shooter receives the shot. Aim is the wrong category. What is wanted is the dissolution of the shooter into a state in which the shot already exists between the bow and the target, and the shooter's job is to not interfere.
Then comes the procedure. Kawami specifies a sequence:
Keep looking at the target until it starts to blur, and then close your eyes. When you close your eyes, you feel as if the target is approaching toward you. The target and you become one. God and you become one. When these are united, they become immovable center. Then, the arrow hits the center of the target. The arrow goes out from a center and goes into a center.1
The protocol is precise: look until the target blurs, close the eyes, feel the target approach, identify with it (target-and-you-one), then identify the combined state with God (God-and-you-one), then experience the immovable center. The arrow leaves the immovable center. The arrow enters the immovable center. They are the same center.
The final instruction is the line that gives the page its name:
When you reach this state, do not aim at the target, aim at yourself. Hit both the targets of you and God at one time.1
The shooter aims at the shooter. The target is two things simultaneously — the practitioner's interior and the divine. The shot is one event that hits both targets.
Tabata preserves a final teaching from Kawami:
When you come to know who to see, what to see, and who to put in instead of you, you don't need a mentor any longer.1
This is the meta-instruction. The mentor's function is to teach who to see (the target as object of attention), what to see (the target's center), who to put in instead of you (the immovable center as the replacement for the shooter's separate self). Once these three transmissions are complete, the practitioner has internalized the apparatus and the mentor is no longer needed. The teaching delivers itself.
A clarification the page must make: Kenzou Kawami is not Awa Kenzō, the kyudo master who taught Eugen Herrigel and is the central figure of Zen in the Art of Archery (1948). The names are similar; the doctrines are similar; the identities are distinct. Awa Kenzō (1880-1939) taught from the Daishadōkyō (大射道教 — Great Way of Shooting) lineage and is widely cited in Western kyudo literature. Kenzou Kawami is a different teacher whose specific lineage Tabata does not name. Tabata calls him kyusei (master title); the bibliography does not specify the source publication for this teaching. Flag with [VERIFICATION NEEDED — identity of Kenzou Kawami kyusei not yet matched to documented kyudo lineage].
The doctrinal proximity to Awa Kenzō's teaching (the target as the practitioner's interior, the dissolution of separate-self in the shot, the it-shoots-itself transmission Herrigel received) suggests Kawami is operating in the same broad tradition. But the target-blur / eye-close / target-approaches procedure Kawami specifies is more precisely articulated than what Herrigel reports from Awa Kenzō. Either Kawami is a distinct lineage with a sharper technical apparatus, or Kawami's teaching is a later refinement, or the two are convergent practitioner-transmissions of a common kyudo realization.
The procedure is short enough to set out as a sequence:
The sequence is meditative and visual. It does not require theological commitment to the God-identification step — Kawami uses God the way many Japanese practitioner-doctrines use it (神 kami, divine principle, the Ultimate accessible through practice), not in the Western monotheistic sense. The structural move is non-dual identification with the target through the medium of the divine.
The verbatim Kawami quotation is preserved by Tabata without specifying the Japanese-language source. Practitioner-transmitted primary texts of this kind exist in kyudo literature — Sha-rai and Sha-do doctrinal collections, lineage-specific densho (transmitted writings), and biographical accounts of kyudo masters. The teaching's apparatus (target-blur / eye-close / target-approaches) is unusual enough to be identifiable if the source were located. Flag with [PRACTITIONER-TRANSMITTED PRIMARY TEXT — source not specified by Tabata; identification target for future research].
Open question on the eye-close instruction: Most kyudo doctrine emphasizes open eyes with soft gaze (haragei visual integration with the body's center). Kawami's close the eyes instruction is technically unusual. Possible readings: (a) the instruction is allegorical — close the analytical eye, keep the perceptual eye open; (b) the instruction is literal but applied only at a specific developmental stage (after years of practice with open eyes); (c) Kawami's lineage genuinely diverges from mainstream kyudo on this point. The Tabata reproduction is too brief to disambiguate.
Open question on the God-identification step: Tabata's English uses God with capital G. The Japanese is unspecified. If the original is 神 kami, the cultural meaning is Shinto / Japanese-religious "divine principle" — closer to "the sacred" than to monotheistic deity. If the original is 仏 butsu (Buddha) the meaning shifts toward Buddhist realization. Either reading works inside the practitioner's interior; the difference matters for cross-cultural transmission but not for the practice itself.
Kawami's teaching and Tabata's uchusokuga (universe = self) doctrine in Book 9 are the same operation at different scales. Kawami applies the non-dual identification to a single shot (target-and-you-and-God-one); Tabata generalizes to cosmic identification (universe-and-self-one). The handshake reveals: kyudo's technical apparatus is the minimal sufficient instance of the cosmic identification — a single shot is small enough to make the identification graspable, but the structure that produces a successful shot is identical to the structure that produces realized practice in any -dō discipline. Kawami's kyudo and Tabata's uchusokuga are the same teaching at different magnifications.
The convergence with Musashi's strings-training (the sibling page in this ingest) is structurally important. Both Kawami and Musashi train against non-fleeing targets — strings that rebound without escape, targets that approach the practitioner with the eyes closed. The targets do not have fear. The practitioner's interior task is identical in both: dissolve the separate-self that would aim, become the encounter rather than acting upon it. Kawami arrives via union-with-God; Musashi arrives via no-fear-where-the-target-has-none. The destinations are the same.
The contrast with Western archery is sharp. Western archery training emphasizes aiming — sight alignment, breath control timed to the release, follow-through. The shooter is a subject acting on an object. Kawami's teaching dissolves the subject-object distinction. Western archery produces excellent shooters; Kawami's teaching produces practitioners who happen to release arrows that hit targets. The phenomenology is different even when the kinematic outcomes look similar. A vault navigation note: cross-cultural sports-comparison pages should preserve the difference rather than collapse the two practices into "archery."
The aim-at-yourself doctrine sits at the intersection of practitioner-training methodology, non-dual identification theory, and the wider question of how disciplines name their destinations. The handshakes below trace where the doctrine extends beyond kyudo.
Eastern-spirituality / non-dual identification: Trika Metaphysics Hub and Vedic Philosophy Hub. The Vedantic tat tvam asi ("thou art that") and the Trika aham idam ("I am this") name the same operation Kawami performs in micro: the practitioner identifies with the object of attention, and the identification dissolves the subject-object structure. The handshake reveals: Kawami's kyudo apparatus is a technical training protocol for what the metaphysical traditions describe as final realization. Most Vedantic and Trika practitioners receive the doctrine as philosophy and try to enact it through contemplation. Kawami's apparatus gives the practitioner a concrete physical procedure (look-blur-close-approach-unite-aim-at-self) that produces the experience in a single shot. The micro-instance is more accessible than the macro-realization; mastering the micro may be a route to the macro.
Eastern-spirituality / uchusokuga: Uchusokuga — Universe = Self. Tabata's bridge term and Kawami's God-and-you-one are the same identification at different scales. The handshake produces a generalization: kyudo, calligraphy, tea ceremony, sword work, and any other Japanese -dō discipline can be read as training apparatus for uchusokuga. The specific technical contents differ; the interior task is the same. A practitioner who has reached the immovable center in kyudo has the apparatus to reach it in any other -dō discipline, because what the apparatus trains is not the technical skill but the interior dissolution.
Cross-domain / Musashi's strings-training: Musashi's Tree-Strings. The sister page in this ingest. Both Kawami and Musashi train against non-fleeing targets, dissolve the separate-self that would act on the target, and reach a state where the encounter happens through the practitioner rather than by the practitioner. The handshake reveals the training-target selection principle: practitioners who train against ideal (non-fleeing, non-fearing) targets reach interior states that practitioners who train only against humans cannot reach, because the human's fear creates the gap the standard practitioner exploits and depends on. Remove the gap (strings, blurred target, eye-closed approach) and the practitioner must develop a different interior. The interior is the destination.
Creative-practice / writing toward the reader who already has the message: Multiple creative-practice methodologies (Whyte's body-as-membrane, Karlsson's summoning-culture, Orlean's reader-as-proxy) treat the writing process as something other than the author acting on the reader. Whyte locates voice at the body's membrane; Karlsson treats writing as summoning the culture that can hold the writer; Orlean treats the writer as fellow-traveler one step ahead. Kawami's apparatus generalizes: the writer who aims at the reader is the Western archer aiming at the target. The writer who aims at the self that the reader is approaching — the immovable center where writer and reader and the work being-written are one — is doing kyudo with a pen. The aim-at-yourself doctrine is the most precise statement of the methodology these creative-practice pages circle.
Psychology / dissolution-of-aim in flow states: The flow-state literature (Csikszentmihalyi and successors) documents the dissolution of subject-object aim during peak performance. The handshake to flow-state and mushin pages reveals: kyudo's apparatus is one of the cleanest documented protocols for inducing the flow state — not merely describing it. The look-blur-close-approach-unite-aim-at-self sequence is a stepwise procedure. Modern flow research tends to describe flow as emergent under specific conditions (skill / challenge balance, immediate feedback, clear goals). Kawami's apparatus suggests flow is also deliberately producible through a specific perceptual-meditative protocol. The two literatures should be in dialogue.
Cross-cultural / Awa Kenzō and Western reception of kyudo: The handshake to the Herrigel Zen in the Art of Archery reception. Herrigel's account has been controversial in Western kyudo studies (Yamada Shoji's Shots in the Dark documents the discrepancies between Awa Kenzō's actual teaching and Herrigel's reception). Kawami's apparatus, distinct from Awa Kenzō's lineage, provides an additional data point on what authentic kyudo doctrine actually says. The handshake produces a research target: are there other kyudo kyusei whose doctrines have not been transmitted into Western literature, and is Kawami representative of a wider tradition or an outlier?
The Sharpest Implication
The standard interpretation of "Zen in the art of X" is that Zen provides a philosophical frame for the X practice — the X is the real work, Zen is the mood music. Kawami's apparatus inverts the standard interpretation. The Zen-style operation (dissolution of separate-self, identification with target, immovable center) is the technical content of the practice; the kyudo-mechanics (bow draw, release, follow-through) are the delivery vehicle. Strip away the kyudo-mechanics and you would still have the operation, performed differently. Strip away the operation and you have Western archery — accurate, skilled, and missing the destination kyudo names. The implication: any practitioner who treats their -dō discipline as primarily about external skill is doing the surface work and missing the interior. The aim-at-yourself instruction is the entire teaching compressed to four words.
Generative Questions