Introduction
Albert Einstein’s view of religion and the doctrine of Shingon esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō) arose in entirely different cultural spheres, within entirely different intellectual traditions. One is the meditation of a twentieth-century theoretical physicist; the other is a lineage of Buddhism transmitted to Japan by Kūkai in the eighth century. Nevertheless, the two share a structural convergence.
That convergence is toward the proposition that the order of physical laws itself is the ultimate reality.
This essay maps that structural convergence, describes the differences between the two fairly, and then examines how this problem connects to the remarkably concrete practice of the bow.
1. Einstein’s Cosmic Religious Feeling
To understand Einstein’s view of religion, it is most accurate to begin with what he denied.
He repeatedly and explicitly rejected a personal God — one who answers prayers, performs miracles, and intervenes in individual destinies. His reply to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein in 1929, when asked whether he believed in God, is widely known:
“I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” (April 1929, telegram)
The Spinozan position referenced here is the formulation developed by the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch de Spinoza in Part I of the Ethics: “God, or Nature” (Deus sive Natura). For Spinoza, God was not a transcendent lawgiver standing outside nature, but was identical with the order of nature itself.
Einstein connected this Spinozan framework to his own physical intuition. In his 1940 essay “Science and Religion,” he distinguished three stages of religious feeling: the first, religion based on fear; the second, religion based on morality; and the third, what he called “cosmic religious feeling.”
Cosmic religious feeling is a sense of awe before the order and harmony of natural law. The famous line — “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” — expresses the core of this feeling. That the world operates according to mathematically describable laws, and that the human intellect can recognize those laws: this twofold fact was, for Einstein, the substance of religious experience.
What is crucial is that what Einstein meant by “God” was entirely different from the personal God of ordinary religion. For him, “God” designated the order of laws itself — the ultimate reality — and the act of recognizing that order was itself a religious act. In esoteric Buddhism, the position occupied by this concept is “truth” (dharma), not “God.” In this essay, I use the term “ultimate reality” to describe the structure shared by both.
2. The Dharmakāya Mahāvairocana of Esoteric Buddhism
Mahāvairocana (Dainichi Nyorai), the central Buddha of Shingon esoteric Buddhism, is not a personal savior.
In his treatise The Meaning of Attaining Buddhahood in This Body (Sokushin jōbutsu gi), Kūkai defined Mahāvairocana as the Dharmakāya — truth itself, the fundamental reality of the universe. As Dharmakāya, Mahāvairocana is constituted by the Six Great Elements (earth, water, fire, wind, space, and consciousness), and the Six Great Elements constitute all that exists. That is to say, Mahāvairocana and the universe are not separate things. Mahāvairocana is not a creator standing outside the universe; rather, the universe itself is Mahāvairocana’s self-expression.
This structure differs from exoteric Buddhism (the doctrinal traditions of Kegon, Tendai, Pure Land, and others). In exoteric Buddhism, the Dharmakāya is a being that transcends linguistic representation, and the Dharmakāya itself does not directly “preach.” What Kūkai claimed as the distinctive feature of esoteric Buddhism was precisely this point: the Dharmakāya Mahāvairocana preaches. The Six Great Elements are Mahāvairocana’s body, and all natural phenomena are Mahāvairocana’s linguistic activity (Shōji jissō gi).
Here the structural proximity to Einstein — who regarded the order of natural laws itself as the ultimate reality — becomes visible. In Kūkai’s system, the order of nature is the expressive activity of truth itself.
3. The Untranslatability of “God”: The Fault Line between Japan’s Religious Ecosystem and the Western God
Before proceeding further, there is a problem that cannot be bypassed. The Japanese word kami (神) and the Western-language word “God” do not refer to the same concept. If one proceeds without clarifying this difference, Western readers will believe they are comparing Einstein’s Spinozan “God” and esoteric Buddhism’s Dharmakāya within a single coordinate system, while in fact conflating entirely different ones.
The Structure of the Western God
In the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), God is defined as a bundle of the following attributes: singularity; being the creator of the universe; existing transcendently outside the universe; possessing personhood — that is, having will, issuing commands, and being capable of responding to prayer; being the lawgiver of moral law; and demanding exclusive worship.
What is decisive in this structure of God is the premise that an ontological fault line exists between God and nature. God created nature. God stands outside nature. Nature is not God. This fault line has shaped the axis of opposition between transcendence and immanence in Western theology and philosophy. Spinoza was deemed heretical precisely because he denied this fault line and identified God with nature.
It was in this context that Einstein invoked Spinoza. His “cosmic religious feeling” departs from a refusal of the fault line between God and nature.
The Structure of the Japanese Kami
The Japanese kami differs from the God described above in nearly every attribute.
First, kami are plural. As the expression yaoyorozu no kami (eight million gods) suggests, the Japanese concept of kami is inherently multiple.
Second, kami are not the creators of the universe. Even in the Kojiki‘s creation myth, what Izanagi and Izanami “create” is the specific land of the Japanese archipelago, not the universe brought into being from nothing.
Third, kami do not exist transcendently outside nature but exist as nature itself, or within nature. A mountain is kami; a river is kami; thunder is kami; ancestors are kami. There is no ontological fault line between kami and nature of the kind that exists between God and nature.
Fourth, kami are not lawgivers of moral law. Japanese kami do not reveal systems of good and evil. The wrathful kami (tatari-gami) and the gentle kami (nigi-mitama) are equally “kami.” Good and evil are not attributes of kami, and kami do not function as the source of morality.
Fifth, kami do not demand exclusive worship. To enshrine one kami does not mean excluding another. And this connects directly to the next point: kami coexisted with buddhas.
Why Kami and Buddhas Did Not Collide: The Structural Basis of Shinbutsu Shūgō
The point most difficult for Western readers to grasp — yet most important for this essay’s argument — is that in Japan, until the Meiji Restoration (1868), “Shinto” and “Buddhism” were not two separate religions. They coexisted within a single ecosystem for over a thousand years. This coexistence is called shinbutsu shūgō (the syncretism of kami and buddhas).
Why was this syncretism possible? Why did fusion, rather than collision, occur?
Here, the subject of this essay becomes directly relevant.
As described in the preceding section, the Japanese kami possesses an animistic structure. To see kami in a mountain, in a river, in thunder. Kami are experienced not as beings outside natural phenomena but as natural phenomena themselves, or as something manifesting within them. There is no fault line between nature and the ultimate.
Meanwhile, Buddhism — especially esoteric Buddhism — is a system that sees the order of natural laws itself as truth (dharma) and regards truth’s embodiment as the universe itself. The body of the Dharmakāya Mahāvairocana is the Six Great Elements (earth, water, fire, wind, space, and consciousness), and all natural phenomena are Mahāvairocana’s expressive activity. Here, too, there is no fault line between truth and nature.
These two systems did not collide. They shared the same structural premise: the non-separation of the ultimate and nature.
The animistic concept of kami feels “something sacred in this mountain.” Esoteric Buddhism describes “this mountain is an expression of the Six Great Elements, and the Six Great Elements are Mahāvairocana’s body, which is to say this mountain is a manifestation of truth.” What the former felt as bodily intuition, the latter articulated as systematic doctrine. No contradiction arises. The direction is the same.
The reason this kind of fusion was difficult in Western religious history becomes clear by working backward from this point. In the Abrahamic religions, God transcends nature. “This mountain is God” cannot be said. God created the mountain; the mountain is not God. This ontological fault line creates a fundamental incompatibility between animistic nature-worship and Abrahamic monotheism. The history of Christianity’s exclusion of indigenous beliefs across Europe as “paganism” is the consequence of this incompatibility.
In Japan, this fault line did not exist. Neither on the Buddhist side nor on the kami side was there an ontological wall between nature and the ultimate. So they fused.
The theoretical pillar of shinbutsu shūgō was the honji suijaku theory. It held that buddhas and bodhisattvas (the honji, the original form) appeared in the guise of kami (the suijaku, “trace manifestation”) to save the people of Japan. For example, Amaterasu Ōmikami was identified as a manifestation of Mahāvairocana. In this framework, shrines and temples were not opposing institutions but sites venerating different expressions of the same ultimate reality. Jingūji — religious complexes containing both a shrine and a temple within a single site — existed throughout Japan.
This system was the foundation of Japan’s religious ecosystem for over a thousand years. What made it possible was not political compromise but the structural affinity of both systems: the shared orientation of finding the ultimate within nature itself.
Shinbutsu Bunri: An Artificially Created Fault Line
In 1868, the Meiji government issued the Shinbutsu bunri rei (Edict for the Separation of Kami and Buddhas), ordering the forced separation of Shinto and Buddhism. To establish State Shinto as the spiritual foundation of the emperor-centered state, Buddhist elements were purged from shrines and the fiction that “Shinto is not a religion but Japan’s innate national morality” was institutionalized. In this process, jingūji across the country were destroyed, Buddhist statues were burned (haibutsu kishaku), and the ecosystem of shinbutsu shūgō built over a thousand years was artificially severed.
The structure of what happened here deserves attention. Things that had been inseparable — two systems that found the ultimate within nature — were artificially separated for political reasons. And that separation was redefined as “the original state of things.” The narrative was constructed: “Shinto and Buddhism were originally separate; their mingling was the anomaly; separation is a return to normalcy.” But in fact, the thousand-year syncretism was the norm, and separation is an artificial operation with a history of only 150 years.
Without knowing this artificial severance, one falls into the illusion that the modern categories of “Shinto” and “Buddhism” existed a thousand years ago.
Implications for This Essay’s Argument
The background above bears on this essay’s argument in three ways.
First, when understanding esoteric Buddhism’s Dharmakāya Mahāvairocana, one must not apply the framework of the Western God. Mahāvairocana is not God. Mahāvairocana is not a creator, does not exist outside the universe, and is not a lawgiver of moral law. Mahāvairocana is “truth itself” (dharma), and its body is the universe itself. And this structure, in Japan, did not collide with the animistic concept of kami but rather joined with it naturally. Within the framework of Western theology, which places a fault line between God and nature, this very joining is incomprehensible.
Second, the fact that shinbutsu shūgō was maintained for over a thousand years means that the problem Einstein struggled with in the Western context — the non-separation of the ultimate reality and nature — did not even arise as a problem within Japan’s religious ecosystem. Kami were mountains and rivers. Buddhas were the Six Great Elements (the totality of matter and consciousness). A way of thinking that regards the order of natural laws itself as the ultimate reality, and an animistic intuition that finds sacredness in natural phenomena themselves, were oriented in the same direction. Non-separation was not a position won through struggle; it was a premise.
Third, the process by which kyudo was purified as a “clean way” during post-Meiji modernization structurally parallels the process by which shinbutsu shūgō was artificially severed by the Shinbutsu bunri rei. Both are operations in which things that were originally inseparable are artificially separated and that separation is redefined as “the original state.” The separation of the bow from killing was an operation with the same structure, occurring within the same dynamics of modernization, in the same era as the separation of kami from buddhas.
4. Structural Commonalities: Three Axes
The structural convergence of the two can be described along three axes.
First axis: Denial of a personal being
Einstein rejected the personal God and regarded the harmony of laws itself as the ultimate reality. Esoteric Buddhism transcended the Buddha as personal savior and regarded the dharmadhātu (the orderly totality of the universe) as the embodiment of truth. Both converge on the structure: “the ultimate reality = the order of physical laws itself.”
However, the degree of impersonality differs. Einstein’s Spinozan ultimate reality possesses neither will nor intention. Esoteric Buddhism’s Mahāvairocana, by contrast, is “a Dharmakāya that preaches,” and expressive activity is attributed to the Dharmakāya. What the two share is the “denial of a personal being”; the thoroughness of impersonality differs.
Second axis: Non-separation of the ultimate reality and nature
Einstein’s Spinozan position — known by the formula “God, or Nature” (Deus sive Natura), the substance of which is the claim that “the ultimate reality is the order of nature itself, and there is no transcendent being outside that order” — rejects the schema in which a transcendent being governs nature from without. The doctrine of the Six Great Elements in esoteric Buddhism holds “truth = the universe,” taking the structure that truth’s embodiment is the material world itself. In their refusal of the transcendence-immanence dichotomy, the two are in agreement.
Third axis: The knowability of order
Einstein found his deepest religious awe not in the fact that the universe obeys laws, but in the fact that the human intellect can recognize those laws. Esoteric Buddhism’s sokushin jōbutsu (the doctrine that one can attain Buddhahood in this very body) is the claim that cosmic order is recognizable through the human body and consciousness.
The structure of placing at the core of the ultimate reality not only “order exists” but the twofold fact “order exists and order is knowable” is common to both.
5. Structural Differences: Three Fault Lines That Must Not Be Overlooked
Having mapped the commonalities, I now describe the differences. To blur the differences is to fall into the facile comparative argument that casually equates the two.
First fault line: The presence or absence of bodily practice
This is the greatest difference.
Einstein’s cosmic religious feeling is an intellectual and emotional attitude; it possesses no systematized bodily practice. It is a by-product of pursuing physics, unaccompanied by any system of training or ritual form.
Esoteric Buddhism institutionalizes the Three Mysteries (sanmitsu: body-mystery, speech-mystery, and mind-mystery — that is, bodily action, speech in the form of mantra, and unification of consciousness) as a system of practice. The recovery of recognition is achieved not through intellectual understanding but through bodily practice. This difference directly concerns the problem of the bow discussed in the following section.
Second fault line: The status of consciousness
The Six Great Elements of esoteric Buddhism include “consciousness” (shiki), and matter and consciousness exist within the same framework. Consciousness is built into the constitutive elements of the universe from the outset.
Einstein’s physics does not treat consciousness as a fundamental constituent of the universe. Physical laws hold regardless of the presence or absence of consciousness. Cosmic religious feeling is an experience on the side of the recognizing subject; consciousness is never attributed to the side of the laws.
This difference is philosophically significant. Esoteric Buddhism’s system possesses a structure that avoids mind-matter dualism; in Einstein’s framework, the status of consciousness remains unresolved.
Third fault line: The historical context of practice communities
Einstein’s religious view was a matter of individual reflection and did not form a practice community. Esoteric Buddhism has a history of practice communities spanning 1,200 years (Koyasan Shingon, Tōji Shingon, and others), and that history is inseparable from problems of institutionalization, ossification, and power structures.
Structural convergence of thought does not imply convergence of institutional consequences. Without making this distinction clear, one falls into the shallow conclusion that “Einstein was saying the same thing as esoteric Buddhism.”
6. The Non-Separation of the Bow and Killing
From here, I examine how this problem connects to the concrete practice of the bow.
What I argued in my previous essay, “Kyudo Is the Outlier of Martial Arts,” was that kyudo, through the unification process from the Meiji era to the postwar period, lost its plurality of directions and can no longer recognize its own historical choices as choices. In the follow-up essay, “The Illusion of Pure Kyudo, Born of Willful Blindness,” I analyzed the contradiction this failure of recognition creates with the materiality of kyudo’s equipment — deerskin, bird feathers, animal glue.
Kyudo maintains a self-image as “a clean way, removed from killing.” Yet the equipment sustaining that self-image is made from the death of deer. The yugake is deerskin; the grip leather is deerskin; the adhesive of a traditional bamboo bow is animal-derived; the fletching is bird feather. When this contradiction is pointed out, the response is: “Connecting the bow to hunting or combat is barbaric.”
This structure connects directly to a proposition that emerges from the comparison of Einstein and esoteric Buddhism.
Einstein’s cosmic religious feeling rests on the proposition that “the order of physical laws itself is the ultimate reality.” The Dharmakāya Mahāvairocana of esoteric Buddhism rests on the proposition that “truth manifests as the universe itself.” What they share is a stance that does not sever the ultimate reality from the order of nature.
What kyudo does is the opposite of this stance. Where Einstein and esoteric Buddhism did not sever the ultimate reality from nature, kyudo secured its “purity” by severing the bow from killing. Yet the bow is materially built upon killing. To say “killing is not the essence of the bow” while wearing deerskin on one’s hand is structurally analogous to saying “a part of nature is irrelevant to reality” while acknowledging that the ultimate reality is the order of nature itself.
If esoteric Buddhism’s system serves as a valid frame of reference, it does so in the following respect. Esoteric Buddhism finds truth not outside but inside the universe. All of the Six Great Elements (earth, water, fire, wind, space, and consciousness) are Mahāvairocana’s body and expressions of truth. Within this framework, the death of a deer is not outside truth but part of the order in which truth manifests. The act of drawing a bow and the act of a deer dying are both within the same dharmadhātu.
Kyudo’s self-image of “purity” refuses this non-separation. It banishes killing to the “outside” and locates itself “inside.” But what materially sustains that “inside” is the product of the very killing it banished.
7. Recognition through the Body: The Three Mysteries of Esoteric Buddhism and the Practice of the Bow
The greatest difference identified in Section 5 — the presence or absence of bodily practice — takes on important significance when considering the connection to the bow.
Einstein’s cosmic religious feeling remains at the level of intellectual recognition. Intellectually understanding the order of physical laws, and the emotion of awe that accompanies that understanding, constitute the substance of his religious experience. Within this framework, it might appear sufficient to acquire the knowledge that “the deerskin yugake is made from the death of a deer.”
But knowledge does not dissolve structural cognitive blind spots. As I argued in the previous essay, the invisibilization of killing in kyudo is not individual ignorance but an institutionally constructed cognitive barrier. Through the market, the causal chain is dispersed, and the perception of “I’m just buying a product” naturally takes hold. This barrier cannot be breached by knowledge alone.
The Three Mysteries of esoteric Buddhism (bodily action, speech, and unification of consciousness) rest on the premise that the recovery of recognition cannot occur without passing through the body. This premise is directly applicable to the problem of the bow.
To hunt a deer with a bow, butcher it, eat the meat, use the skin. This chain of bodily experience creates a circuit in which, each time one puts on a yugake, the provenance of the material registers as bodily fact. Where Einsteinian intellectual recognition is “awe before the order of laws,” the bodily practice of esoteric Buddhism is “taking on the order of laws with the body.” The recovery of awareness toward killing in archery is likewise an act that crosses the fault line between knowing intellectually and taking on with the body.
8. “Zen in the Art of Archery”: A New Kyudo Created for the West in the Postwar Period
This essay concludes by addressing the question of how kyudo’s self-image came to be fixed in its present form.
In 1948, the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel published Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschießens (Zen in the Art of Archery). Herrigel had studied kyudo while teaching at Tōhoku Imperial University in the 1920s, and described the experience as an encounter with Zen enlightenment. The book was widely read in the postwar West and played a decisive role in establishing the perception of kyudo as “Zen-based spiritual cultivation.”
Here it is necessary to delimit precisely what this essay critiques. What is at issue is not the thought of Awa Kenzō or Herrigel’s book as such. The pursuit of spiritual deepening through the act of shooting can stand as one direction among the bow’s many. The problem is the process by which this single direction became fixed as the “true nature” of kyudo as a whole, excluding other directions (hunting, combat, competitive shooting).
To understand this process, I confirm the intellectual positions of Awa and Herrigel.
Awa Kenzō’s “great enlightenment concerning shooting” (sha ni tsuite no daigokaku) occupied a distinctive position among kyudo’s diverse lineages. Awa’s deep insight into shooting holds intrinsic value as an exploration of the bow’s spiritual dimension. However, the awakening experience Awa claimed to have reached must be distinguished from the traditional practice of Zen Buddhism. The Zen of the Rinzai and Sōtō schools is built around the transmission of dharma lineage from master to disciple, and possesses a rigorously institutionalized system of practice: seated meditation (zazen), kōan study, and formal practice interviews (sanzen). Awa was not a figure who trained within this dharma lineage. His “great enlightenment” was a distinctive awakening experience arising from the repetitive bodily experience of shooting, and in his later years he organized it as the “Great Way of Shooting” (Daishadōkyō). Awa’s experience holds significance as a spiritual inquiry through the bow, but calling it “Zen” involves the operation of giving the name “Zen” to an experience that differs from the Zen Buddhist tradition.
Herrigel, through lessons conducted via an interpreter, further reinterpreted Awa’s distinctive thought within the framework of German mysticism (the tradition of Meister Eckhart), with which he was familiar. As kyudo scholar Yamada Shōji demonstrated in detail (Zen to iu na no Nihon-maru, 2005), much of what Herrigel described as “Zen” was Herrigel’s own mystical projection. There are two stages of translation here: the stage at which Awa captured his shooting experience in the word “Zen,” and the stage at which Herrigel redescribed it in the vocabulary of German mysticism. The world depicted in Zen in the Art of Archery has passed through these two stages of translation and stands at a distance from both the Zen Buddhist tradition and Awa’s original experience.
What matters most for this essay’s argument is that the kyudo depicted in this book contains no bow-as-weapon. Whether the arrow hits the target is unimportant. The act of drawing the bow is itself the relinquishment of ego, a path to enlightenment. This narrative does not include in its field of vision the history the bow has carried for tens of thousands of years — as a hunting tool, as a weapon of war, as an instrument of survival. As described below, samurai hunted deer with the bow, conducted military exercises through large-scale hunting drives, and honed battlefield technique through mounted archery disciplines. The bow was the central instrument running through the samurai’s physical training, military affairs, ritual, and hunting. Herrigel’s “Zen in the Art of Archery” does not address this multidimensionality of the bow.
To repeat: that in itself is a limitation of a single book, not the crux of the critique. The problem is that this book held the power to rewrite kyudo’s self-image.
The background to this book’s wide reception in the West lies in the particular circumstances of the postwar era. For Western readers who had experienced Japanese militarism in the Second World War, there was great demand for the redefinition of Japanese martial arts as “spiritual paths to peace.” Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery supplied a narrative that met this demand.
And this narrative was re-imported into Japan. The self-definitions “kyudo is Zen” and “kyudo is spiritual cultivation” became the dominant self-image of kyudo. As discussed in Section 3, the Japanese before Meiji lived within the worldview of shinbutsu shūgō. Two systems — one finding kami in nature, the other finding truth in the order of nature itself — formed a single ecosystem without a fault line between them. The warrior’s bow existed within this worldview. Hunting deer with the bow carried a consciousness of pollution (kegare). The concept of death-pollution (shie) is an ancient stratum traceable to the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and the very fact that a yaguchi-sai was performed after the Fuji makigari attests to the perceived need for ritual purification following a kill. But the critical point is that pollution was not a reason to exclude killing; it was something to be processed through ritual purification. Killing and purification existed within the same system. Shooting enemies on the battlefield and taking up the bow in ritual coexisted in the same body. Killing and purity were not opposing terms to be separated but different phases of the same order, managed within a dynamic cycle of pollution and purification. Pursuing the bow as spiritual cultivation stands as one of these many directions. But when it excludes other directions as the “true nature” of the bow, the bow’s plurality is lost. The equation “kyudo = Zen = spiritual cultivation” is a relatively new self-image that became dominant through postwar redefinition and Herrigel’s international circulation, after this worldview had been dismantled by the Shinbutsu bunri and modernization.
Here the threads of this essay converge.
What this essay has discussed is the proposition at which Einstein and esoteric Buddhism independently arrived: the order of physical laws itself is the ultimate reality, and the ultimate reality cannot be severed from nature. In Section 3, I argued that the animistic concept of kami and esoteric Buddhism’s Dharmakāya thought did not collide but fused precisely because they shared this non-separation.
The warrior’s bow existed within this non-separation. The bow was a tool for killing; killing was its premise; technical excellence in killing was the bow’s value. Through the bow, samurai hunted deer, shot enemies on the battlefield, conducted rituals, and competed in archery. The bow held all its functions — killing, combat, ritual, competition — within a single instrument. Killing was not external to the bow; it was internal to it.
This fact is clearly attested in the sources.
In the fourth year of Kenkyū (1193), Minamoto no Yoritomo held a large-scale hunting drive (makigari) at the foot of Mt. Fuji in Suruga Province. The Azuma Kagami records this hunt in detail. Yoritomo’s heir Yoriie, at the age of twelve, shot a deer with his bow for the first time; Yoritomo rejoiced, and that evening a yaguchi-sai (ritual of thanks to the mountain deity) was held. The makigari was not mere entertainment. Thousands of retainers were mobilized to encircle mountains and forests and drive game. It was a military exercise in all but name. Indeed, Shōwa-era kyudo texts in the Kindai Kyūdōsho Senshū (Collection of Modern Kyudo Texts) state explicitly that boar and deer hunting served as “rehearsal for moving an army.” Yoritomo’s Fuji makigari was simultaneously a political event demonstrating the Kamakura shogunate’s military power to the realm and a site for the practical training of bow and horse technique.
From the Kamakura through the Muromachi periods, samurai archery training was systematized as the kisha sanmono (three mounted archery disciplines): yabusame, kasagake, and inuōmono. Among these, inuōmono (dog-chasing) trained the skill of shooting a moving target from horseback, and Ogasawara Sadamune positioned it in his archery manuals as the foundation of a warrior’s training. The inuōmono manuals were passed down through generations of the Ogasawara house, and in 1881, the Shimazu house performed inuōmono for Emperor Meiji. Also, regarding the utsubo (quiver worn on the back), the fourth volume of the Kindai Kyūdōsho Senshū records that “the prevailing view is that it was originally used for hunting before being adapted for military use.” The awareness that the provenance of archery equipment lay in hunting existed among modern kyudo scholars themselves.
This non-separation is inscribed in the typology of arrows as well. The Kindai Kyūdōsho Senshū lists the classification of arrows as soya (war arrows), noya (hunting arrows), and matoya (target arrows). The three uses — war, hunting, target shooting — were differentiated within the same system of a single tool, not separated from one another. The text Yanohanasi records that “arrow dimensions became fixed, uses became fixed, and in war, hunting, and ritual, range and penetrating power were pursued,” adding that “with the introduction of firearms in the sixteenth century, the use of the bow for war and hunting declined, and it became an instrument of ritual, martial training, and discipline.” That is, the stripping of hunting and combat functions from the bow was not a conscious choice by kyudo practitioners but occurred due to the external factor of the appearance of firearms.
The bond between the bow and hunting continued through the Sengoku period. Oda Nobunaga hunted deer in Gifu and was known to have shot deer with his own bow. Ōta Gyūichi, Nobunaga’s retainer and author of Shinchō kōki, was a yūshū — a military archer in Nobunaga’s direct service. Tokugawa Ieyasu was a lifelong devotee of falconry, citing three benefits: military training, inspection of his domains, and maintenance of health. Ieyasu himself stated, “through deer hunts and falconry, both lord and vassal keep their bodies trained,” making it clear that hunting was institutionally positioned as physical training for the warrior class.
What these sources demonstrate is that the bond between the bow and hunting was not an exceptional circumstance but the institutional norm of warrior society. The bow was simultaneously a battlefield weapon and a hunting tool; hunting was military training; and military training was inseparable from ritual. The bow existed within this continuum.
That kyudo chose to center itself on spiritual cultivation is respected as one of the bow’s many directions. But in the process by which this direction became fixed as kyudo’s dominant self-image, the killing that had been internal to the bow was banished to its exterior. The bow became an instrument of spiritual cultivation; killing ceased to be the essence of the bow; the bow, like the God of the Abrahamic religions, stepped outside nature — outside killing. This structure is isomorphic with the Shinbutsu bunri discussed in Section 3. Things that were originally inseparable are separated, and that separation is redefined as “the original state.”
But the yugake is still deerskin, and the fletching is still bird feather. The separation holds only within the self-image; materially, it does not hold.
The narrative of “Zen in the Art of Archery” stands as one expression among the bow’s many directions. But when this narrative functions as the “true nature” of kyudo, the bow’s historical multidimensionality — hunting, combat, competitive shooting — is placed outside the field of vision. When kyudo practitioners who have accepted this narrative as the bow’s “true nature” call hunting or combat “barbaric,” they are judging the bow’s tens-of-thousands-of-years-long, multidirectional history from inside a single direction formed in the postwar period.
Here, something must be made clear. What this essay takes issue with is not the fact that kyudo departed from the warrior’s bow. As I argued in “Kyudo Is the Outlier of Martial Arts,” the problem is the inability to recognize that departure as a choice.
That kyudo relinquished combat effectiveness and killing and pursued a path centering on the cultivation of body and mind before the target: this is respected as a historical choice. But when it is perceived not as a “choice” but as “the true nature of the bow,” a structural problem arises. A community that believes its position is not “chosen” but “original” comes to judge the state before the choice as “immature” or “barbaric.” When kyudo views hunting and combat as “the degradation of the bow,” it has lost sight of the fact that it occupies a distinctive position within the lineage of the warrior’s bow.
This essay’s argument offers one explanation for why this loss of awareness occurred. The worldview of non-separation was dismantled by Shinbutsu bunri; during modernization, killing was separated from the bow; in the postwar period, the narrative of “Zen in the Art of Archery” fixed that separation as “the original state.” Through this three-stage process, the very memory that the separation was a choice was erased. The absence of awareness is not the negligence of individual kyudo practitioners but the consequence of institutional forgetting.
Conclusion
Einstein’s cosmic religious feeling and esoteric Buddhism’s Dharmakāya Mahāvairocana arrived independently at the conclusion that “the ultimate reality is order itself.” The structural convergence is real, but so are the differences — above all, the presence or absence of bodily practice and the status of consciousness. Facile equation damages the distinctiveness of both.
The problem of the bow serves as a concrete site where the practical consequences of this structural convergence become visible. The stance of not severing the ultimate reality from the order of nature corresponds to the stance of not severing the bow from killing. Just as esoteric Buddhism’s Three Mysteries describe recognition through the body, the awareness of killing in archery is recovered not through knowledge but through bodily experience.
The personal God that Einstein rejected was a being who governed nature from outside. The exoteric Dharmakāya that esoteric Buddhism transcended was a being that transcended language and matter. The “pure bow” that kyudo constructed was a self-image that had banished killing to its exterior. In their respective domains, all three refuse — or demonstrate the need to refuse — the operation of locating the ultimate reality, truth, or purity in the “outside.”
That kyudo departed from the warrior’s bow is respected as a historical choice. But until that choice is recognized as a choice, kyudo cannot know what it relinquished. And what cannot be known cannot be reclaimed.
This essay stands on the side of that awareness.
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This essay is the third in a series following “Kyudo Is the Outlier of Martial Arts” and “The Illusion of Pure Kyudo, Born of Willful Blindness,” and attempts to connect the problem of kyudo’s recognition structure to a broader intellectual context.
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