Bowmen and swordsmen, trained by quite other methods, can equal the feats of Zen-inspired
 samurai.
 But so far as Zen is concerned, the end results have nothing to do with it.
 For as we have seen all along, Zen has no goal.
 It is a traveling without point, with nowhere to go.
 To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.
 For as our own proverb says, "To travel well is better than to arrive."
 A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which
 values only getting somewhere as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance.
 One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere
 and everywhere worth getting to.
 And it is all very much like eating the precise ends of a banana without getting what lies
 in between.
 The point, therefore, of these arts is the doing of them, rather than the accomplishment.
 But more than this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course
 of practice.
 Planned surprises are as much of a contradiction as intentional satori, and whoever aims at
 satori is, after all, like a person who sends himself Christmas presents for fear that others
 will forget him.
 One must simply face the fact that Zen is all that side of life which is completely
 beyond our control and which will not come to us by any amount of forcing or wangling
 or cunning stratagems which produce only fakes of the real thing.
 But the last word of Zen is not an absolute dualism, the rather barren world of controlled
 action on the one side and the spontaneous world of uncontrolled surprise on the other,
 for who controls the controller?
 There was, for example, a great Zen monk who lived shortly after 1000 A.D. who had a very
 peculiar way of painting.
 He had long hair and he would soak it, he'd get very drunk on riced wine, then he'd soak
 his hair in ink and slosh it all over the paper.
 Then he would do a Rorschach test on it and decide what kind of a landscape it actually
 was, and then put in the finishing touches.
 And suddenly, out of this apparent mess, a great landscape would be evoked.
 But the whole art of the thing lay in putting in the finishing touches.
 And also, there's a very curious thing.
 If a person who is untrained in painting makes a mess with a brush, it's liable to be just
 a mess.
 Whereas if a person who has the feeling of painting in them for a long time, and they
 make a mess with a brush or just do anything, it looks interesting.
 When you get a piece of jade and look at its markings, you don't think of them as chaotic.
 When you see a dirty old ashtray with cigarette butts in it and rolled up bits of paper and
 pieces of Kleenex and things that everybody's throw away, you know that that's a mess.
 You don't want that kind of a mess around, you get rid of it.
 But when you look at the patterns on rocks, or the shapes of clouds, or the outlines of
 trees, you've got something which isn't orderly in the sense of being symmetrical.
 It doesn't form fours, you know, but you know it's beautiful.
 Blue mountains are spontaneously blue mountains, white clouds are spontaneously white clouds.
 They just do that, you see, that's their game.
 But they are definitely something that we recognize as having an order and not being
 chaos.
 But we can't quite pin down where in that order consists.
 So there is this always ungraspable, indefinable principle of order in things, which is Li.
 And that explains why Chinese art appreciates in all that it does a certain element of the
 uncontrolled.
 Now you see, when you use, for example, a brush, the brush runs a little dry, and you're
 at the mercy of the hairs of this brush.
 Now some painters like to let everything go wild, but what the ideal that they're aiming
 at is, and which you have to be a tremendous master to accomplish, is to let it go wild
 within limits.
 To create a situation which overall is orderly, but allows for the unexpected random surprises.
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