Eugen Herrigel "Zen in the Art of Archery

accomplish if he is to fulfil his vocation as an artist.
The inward work, however, consists in his turning the man he
is, and the self he feels himself and perpetually finds himself to
be, into the raw material of a training and shaping whose end is
mastery. In it, the artist and the human being meet in something
higher. For mastery proves its validity as a form of life only
when it dwells in the boundless Truth and, sustained by it,
becomes the art of the origin. The Master no longer seeks, but
finds. As an artist he is the hieratic man; as a man, the artist,
into whose heart, in all his doing and not−doing, working and
waiting, being and not−being, the Buddha gazes. The man, the
art, the work ˙ it is all one. The art of the inner work, which
unlike the outer does not forsake the artist, which he does not
" do " and can only " be ", springs from depths of which the day
knows nothing.
Steep is the way to mastery. Often nothing keeps the pupil on
the move but his faith in his teacher, whose mastery is now
beginning to dawn on him. He is a living example of the inner
work, and he convinces by his mere presence.
How far the pupil will go is not the concern of the teacher and
Master. Hardly has he shown him the right way when he must
let him go on alone. There is only one thing more he can do to
help him endure his loneliness: he turns him away from himself,
from the Master, by exhorting him to go further than he himself
has done, and to " climb on the shoulders of his teacher ".
Wherever his way may take him, the pupil, though he may lose
sight of his teacher, can never forget him. With a gratitude as
great as the uncritical veneration of the beginner, as strong as
the saving faith of the artist, he now takes his Master’s place,
ready for any sacrifice. Countless examples down to the recent
past testify that this gratitude far exceeds the measure of what is
customary among mankind.