Effortless Resilience.

Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, 1983.

To be able to draw a bow "spiritually" after a year, that is, with a kind of effortless strength, is no very startling achievement. And yet I was well content, for I had begun to understand why the system of self-defense whereby one brings one's opponent to the ground by unexpectedly giving way, with effortless resilience, to his passionately delivered attack, thus turning his own strength against him, is known as "the gentle art". Since the remotest times its symbol has been yielding and yet unconquerable water, so that Lao-tzu could say with profound truth that right living is like water, which "of all things the most yielding can overwhelm that which is of all things most hard".

Eugen Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery, Random House, Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1953 (1989), p.25.