Trying The Dance Of Shiva

"You have to drill," the pro said. "Get a basket of balls and hit a hundred serves."

"I've done that." I said. "The first 10 are the best, then they run downhill. If I get in a match I don't want to double fault, so I don't let my serve uncork all the way."

I know what the Zen Master would say to this. He would say, "You do not serve, It serves. You are still trying to serve; when it goes in, you think you have done it yourself."

One day the Zen student of archery loosed a shot and the Master bowed and said, "Just then It shot," and the student gave a whoop of delight which made the Master angry, for this wasn't the student's achievement, and there he was taking the credit.

There are some playing pros, according to my Zen tennis teachers, who are well into these forms of concentration without articulating them. Rosewall gets mentioned a lot. Billie Jean King, it is said, meditates upon a tennis ball. And Stan Smith. I bet if you asked Stan Smith what he was thinking about during those perfect serves he would say the bagel he was going to have for breakfast the next morning. A grooved game means you can play without your head.

As for me. I haven't had a chance to play since my last yoga tennis lesson, and the path to the true game looks more difficult than crossing the razor's edge. So I can't, like the Zen archery student, finish this report with success, mindful that I have only just begun and the Zen archery student did get restless in his fourth year of instruction. Depressed, he said to the Master that he hadn't managed yet to get one single arrow off right—or It hadn't appeared to loose the arrow—and his stay in Japan was limited and after all, he had been at it for four years.

"The way to the goal is not to be measured!" said the Master. "Of what importance are weeks, months, years?"

To the teachers of Zen tennis, or Yoga tennis, or whatever it is we call it, the techniques are not to provide winning tennis necessarily but to put the player into the right frame of consciousness after which, as the Zen Master said, "You will see with other eyes and measure with other measures." Meanwhile, the Path is there, and I plan to get around to it sometime. A tennis court is a tennis court, but when you really get into it, it's a mandala, sooner or later.