Japan update

Musubi

Part 1:

In the dim light thought clouds drift in slowly. Faint vibrations of life. Soft light quiet voice. Sea and earth swimming within the depths somewhere. Luminous, floating in space. Curves and skin so wondrous. In movement with the currents, graceful and glowing in the dark.

In the land the ancient spirits still move fluid among the living. You are the land from whence I came where the stars determined I was to be placed. Bamboo, you came delivered by the gods in harmony. The land is me. Before my return I will leave part of me in the land.

Bamboo world of mysteries. I am the secert, opened to a cavern in my heart. No shadows where the light is deeper. The gift beyond society into the universal where intuition resides and logic is dissipated. Danger and chaos unbounded potential. Like a knight on a quest I encounter the Gods and bow to them in supplication. Bamboo--the grail beyond the opposites. Enter the realm of the sorcerer and shaman. The unseen world, where the soundless sound rules, giving and guiding, playing nothing.

Deep under the cold earth, the fire blazes strong. True blaze, heat intense. Looking into it blinded by its strength, beauty and danger dancing around it I am mesmerized. With the aid of spirits I touch it and hold it, protected by the dampness and earth which calms the fire and karma, burning in a ceremony of hollow sounds and change. Immersed in culms of fire a world is revealed to me. Musubi. Weeping walls, I drink from your mouth, the air of the ages. The flame engulfs, burning away body into ash; black chips as waterfalls, leaving a mark that moves metal into rainbow. Remains upon dead heaps of incense, soft ash; powder is memory now becoming a spirit returning to the center of all things.

I emerge reborn between cracks in the deep earth. Two but one. Temple bell sounds from the bamboo universe.

Part 2:

Breathing and listening to air mix magically with body and spirit and bamboo. The colors of sound like incense it floats through me like smoke through a temple. The light visible, reflecting off ghostly particles of clouds from orange points of burning sticks of cured woods. The sound of the light gentle as the kiss of a deva in a deep forest. Embraced by the sonic pollen of the bamboo flute the reaction creates a substance in my soul so sweet, the demons around me die from its overdose. From the scent I ride on a wave that takes me into transcendance. Whenever I recover from this illness it comes upon me and I am opened up to the matrix of energies which I feed off of and read.

The last quarter of my stay in Japan. I making The Sound. It's in my bones now. The circle is almost complete. This last season was characterized with thoughts about the relationship between Zen and shakuhachi and transcendence. I've come to see that there is neither a connection and it is all connected, and that I strive for the brief moment of transcendence.

The Musubi and Miyajima

Last year someone told me about an event happening in Japan where the Dalai Lama would be coming to consecrate a Sacred Music Festival. I was interested in going to this event but eventually forgot about it until a few months ago when I attended the dance performance of a friend where I came across a flier for this event again. It was called the World Festival of Sacred Music, held on Miyajima Island in Hiroshima. Hiroshima?! How am I going to get all the way there? It's too far for me. I can't go there with work and all. I checked out the website and it looked more and more enticing. I worked myself up into a kind of hot desire to go there and participate in this event so I personally visited the office in Tokyo and submitted a recording of my shakuhachi asking to be part of the roster of musicians. They said it was a little late, but they would think about it and let me know. A few weeks later, they called me back and said, "We'd love to have you play. We'll even pay for your room, food, and part of transportation." "I'm there!", I said. Interestingly enough, I was the only honkyoku player to perform there. There were a few other ethnic flautists there who played, but it was not honkyoku. The only other kind of Japanese sacred music which was represented was Shomyo chanting from the monks of the local Shingon sect of Buddhism. They chanted together with Tibetan Buddhist monks, which was quite powerful. Thinking about the sacred musical tradition of Japan, it would seem that the shakuhachi honkyoku would be strongest and most repersentative of Japan. Shamisen, koto, etc. were not really religious per se, they were more secular than anything. Taiko was sometimes used in a ceremonial fashion. Heikyoku of the biwa was more a release and entertainment for samurai warriors rather than a religious practice. But I think it was used in the early days as an accompaniment for sutra chanting. Anyways, it would've been great to have a biwa player play there. The other flute player whom I met on Miyajima who was on the play list was Clive Bell from England. It was interesting because I had never met Clive before, but my friend, Kiku Day (who is a student of Okuda Atsuya) who is a hocchiku player in England attending the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) just met Clive recently at a shamisen performance in England. I didn't know Clive would be playing at the Festival so I was very surprised to discover it was the same Clive Bell that my friend just met! He improvised on various kinds of European horns and flutes with another wind instrumentalist who played on a chanter and various sizes of recorders. These two played with a big rock band which was quite interesting. But the subtleties of their instruments were drowned out by the sheer power of the band.

My performance was on a beautiful temple, called Daishoin, overlooking the ocean. I played Honshirabe, Yamagoe, Tamuke, Tsuru no Sugomori, Shika no Tone, Daha, and Reibo. Just exactly an hour. I met a few students and friends of Uwe Walter, a German Shakuhachi player living in the mountains of Kobe. One guy even knew Okuda-san. Some Tozan players, and Dan Ribble, from Kochi, who plays Kinko style. I first heard about him in 1992 when I was living in Yamaguchi perfecture from a newspaper article I saw of a foreign shakuhachi player living in Kochi. Then I met Dan for the first time at the first International Shakuhachi Festival in Okayama in 1994, then in Boulder again in 1998 WSF. Now again on Miyajima at WFSM. It was nice to talk to him again and think about our chronological connection with shakuhachi. If I had more time I would have visited the Atomic Bomb Dome again and visited shakuhachi friends around Hiroshima, but I had to get back to Tokyo right after the last show. I made some new friends and had some ecstatic experiences and saw again how we are all tied together as bamboo brothers and sisters. Musubi. Whatever you desire the most, it will come to be.

Ignorance is Bambooless

I'm contantly missing it. To try to place importance on things is a sign of the ego at work. It's a vessel for learning, of focus, of controlling the ego with a wild thing. Wisdom in the animal. Hearing and seeing with skin, tasting with the hands. Mind and spirit create our sound and life. Our sounds, our music are closely related to our attitude towards life. Essentially we don't need bamboo to develop ourselves. Inner meditation is all we need. Reduction of breath and stillness and silence is speaking of the essence reality. It takes a lot of effort to play shakuhachi. Perhaps a lot of wasted energy. It's better not to play! Just sit and meditate, and pray. But as humans living on the earth, we can't help but be subject to the illusions of surface thinking. There is a need to harmonize with surface life and to go deeper into life, and bamboo flute is perhaps one starting point. Bamboo is a living substance. When it is harvested from the ground it doesn't die, it takes on new life and new meaning in the one who plays it as a flute. The changes in temparture, body, mood and atmosphere all effect the sound of the flute. Changing constantly, like subatomic paricles. It's a Kyotaku, a bell that's not there. And the more you play the better your sound gets, naturally. Living life with a purpose, with integrity. Moving the soul. Extending beyond technique to live within the spirit, thoughts and heart. This is the real basis of creating life. A tender heart which reveals life and emotion and have a feeling of strength will be conveyed when you play and this is what really moves me. Usually it is very simple and not overdone for effect with excess decoration and fancy techniques. This excess hides the true heart of the player. In honkyoku one can see the heart of the player. When you can abandon desires and greed, your true spirit shows through in your honkyoku and this is when it becomes real. Playing emptiness, illusion. Too much effort. But we keep going because we are on the surface. Until we can abandon our material attachments, can we get deeper and become empty.
T" Know then," said he, " that existence is a theory, and that man is incapable of demonstrating that he

"Bamboo Aripana": The symbolic representation of the cosmos as a bamboo grove--an image of fertility and of family life, which grows up round an ancestor like a clump of bamboo round the first shoot--demonstrates that everyone must find that aspect of divinity most appropriate to him/herself. Some plants--the bamboo, for example--most particularly manifest one or another aspect of the Supreme Being, whom the Bhagavad Gita has say: 'When one of my faithful desires with all his faith to worship me in a particular form, I take that form.'