Kobun Chino could split a blade of grass at 25 yards. His students had seen him do it many times.

He and one of his students were driving along the Pacific Coast Highway one day in the spring. He pulled the car over to the side of the road, opened the trunk, and pulled out a 6-foot long Japanese bow and a quiver of hand carved arrows.

They walked across the road to the cliff overlooking the surging surf and the infinite Pacific stretching to the horizon. Had he looked up, the student would have seen the equally infinite blue and cloudless Pacific sky, but his gaze was fixed on the hands of his teacher, masterfully nocking the arrow onto the bow string and, with a subtle intake of breath, drawing the string back to its limit, his own arms and back a part of the bow, his focus as razor sharp as the head of the arrow.

The world froze for a moment, and then over the sound of the surf came the sound of the arrow released, the matsu kaze, the pine wind, as the bow string returned to rest.

The arrow flew in a high, gigantic arc out over the ocean.

Kobun Chino was a Zen monk. He taught at a small Zen practice center down the Peninsula from the San Francisco Zen Center. He had been invited to come to the US from Japan by Suzuki Roshi who started and led the San Francisco center. But Kobun decided against becoming involved with a large institution. He wanted to live a simple life and sit in meditation. It was at his small village Zendo that Suzuki Roshi came and spoke each Wednesday evening for a while in the late 60’s. The talks he gave there later were published under the title “Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind,” one of the most influential books in the early years of the American Zen movement.

The arrow disappeared for a moment before the student’s eyes, against the brilliance of the California sky. It reappeared, a dash against the blue, hovered, and began its long descent, gracefully disappearing into the water.

Then the men returned the bow and the empty quiver to the trunk of their car and drove away.

Had a stranger or a beginner seen this young Japanese monk shoot arrows into the sea, he may have believed that the man was wasting arrows. But this student had seen Kobun split a blade of grass at 25 yards. This student knew Kobun as a light-hearted, but profoundly serious man. And both knew that teachers teach. Even if they do not share a common spoken language, students and teachers do share their human life. And their close karmic connection can sometimes bridge the divide between lives better than any spoken language.

What did Kobun teach that day?

Could we say this was a koan that Kobun presented his student? A koan is literally a public case, an event reported and put up for public scrutiny and consideration. In the Chinese legal tradition, it was a term used to refer to a legal precedent, used for public consideration of a question of law.

In the Zen tradition, a koan is a public case on the subject of enlightenment, on the subject of the nature of reality. They are used not as a matter of metaphysical speculation. In Buddhism it is made clear that direct insight into the nature of reality is the only way we can be free, permanently and completely, from suffering.

Was he saying “Only this moment”? Was he saying to his student, a dedicated practitioner: “Be concerned only with the method, not the target”?

Or was he saying that, in practice as in life, there is no stationary target. That no matter how perfect our aim, our karma’s trajectory goes into the infinite, our life’s trajectory goes into the infinite; that what we have is only the point on the path we are on right now; the only action we can take is the action we take right now. That once our lives begin, we go. Once we act, think or speak, our actions or our words take us directly, unimpeded, into the heart of vast reality, and we cannot get them back?

Was he saying, “It’s fun to shoot arrows into the sky and the ocean”?

I don’t know what he had in mind. Or what the student got from it. But if you are going to teach with allusions and gestures instead of ideas and action then you better have your motivation and your means clear, and understand your target perfectly. Because people can take it wrong. They can take confusion for depth and mystification for truth and language for nothing. And then they will be harmed.  Because the target matters. And a turtle might be rising to the surface while you make your point.

Maybe he was one of the rare few who could teach so scrupulously. I hope his student understood. I know students loved him and miss him.