Correct Shooting, Correct Hit

正射正中, read seisha seichū: correct shooting, correct hit. The four characters are the maxim of Japanese archery, that shooting done correctly hits, so attend to the form and the hit follows, and the English title is the English Wikipedia's 2005 rendering of these four characters. The form the kyūdō federation writes is 正射必中, seisha hitchū, correct shooting, certain hit; the scroll's form, with a second correct where the standard has certain, is a spoken variant Japanese archers also use, and it means the same thing. Both four-character forms are postwar, and the idea they compress is far older. Every Japanese archery book of the 1920s and 1930s carries it in prose, form first and hits second, a hit without form a chance hit, and grounds it in the Record of Rites and Mencius, which the federation prints among its founding texts: the will within correct, the body without straight, and only then can one speak of hitting; correct in himself, then he releases, and if he misses he seeks the cause in himself. That is why the old books call archery the way of humaneness, and why the maxim carries so easily out of the range and into a life.