In Japanese culture there are all sorts of these dos [judo, kendo, chado, etc.], and they not only indicate the technique or mastery of the technique of performing the given art but also imply that the art involves a way of life. Indeed, in almost the ancient Western medieval sense, every Japanese art is a mystery. One used to speak, you see, of the mystery of being a goldsmith, the mystery of being a stonemason, the mystery of being a carpenter. Today that probably strikes us as extraordinarily peculiar terminology. But the meaning of it was that everyman's vocation in life — what the Indians call svadharma, which means approximately one's own function, one's own calling — is also a way of initiation into the mystery of life.
— Alan Watts, Zen and the Beat Way