THE JAPANESE ARTS AND MEDITATION-IN-ACTION with Harris Wiseman and Fraser Watts, "Spiritual Intelligence: Participating with Heart, Mind and Body"; Harris Wiseman, "Knowing Slowly: Unfolding the Depths of Meaning"; Harris Wiseman, "The Japanese Arts and Meditation-in-Action"; Harris Wiseman, "Meaning and Embodiment in Ritual Practice"; and Harris Wiseman, "Theoria to Theory (and Back Again): Integrating Masterman's Writings on Language and Religion."

The Japanese arts (do) provide a rigorous, ritual-like set of structures which involve moral and aesthetic training, as well as providing techniques for body-mind synchronization (constituting as such: meditation-in-action). The article explores the links between the Japanese arts and Zen Buddhist ideals (particularly Soto Zen) of enlightenment being nothing other than the consistent practice of one's art. Japanese archery (kyudo) will be highlighted to illustrate this, as will the Japanese lifelong learning philosophy (shugyo). The article concludes by bringing into contrast two very different notions of what spiritual development consists in, one of which is highly conservative with respect to its traditions (per the Japanese arts), and the other which explicitly characterizes spiritual development as a process of renewing one's tradition as one practices it (per Margaret Masterman and Richard Sennett). It is suggested that, for better or worse, maintaining the extreme purity of one's practices is unrealistic in today's profoundly interconnected world.