>Has anyone any information specifically about
>shakuhachi-playing-as-meditation, sometimes called *suizen*, "blowing zen"?
Greetings.
Much of the 684 pages of my PhD dissertation, entitled "Yearning for the
Bell: A Study of Transmission in the Shakuhachi Honkyoku Tradition", deals
with the concept of suizen. Its 32 page list of references on shakuhachi
is, to my knowledge, one of the most extensive bibliographies on the
shakuhachi in English available (though many of the references on the list
are in Japanese). Though I finished the dissertation in 1992, I've only
recently had it published by UMI. It is available through Monty Levenson.
My MA thesis, entitled "Blowing Zen; Aspects of Performance Practices of
the Chikuho Ryu Honkyoku" (1986) is also partly about the subject you are
interested in, but it has not been published. Copies of it are held in
Hamilton Library, University of Hawai'i at Manoa. I'm not sure if you could
get a copy through interlibrary loans or not. In any case, most of the best
bits were carried over to the dissertation.
As an aside, any music can be played in the spirit of 'suizen'. Conversely,
playing pieces from the traditional 'Zen" honkyoku repertoire is not
automatically doing 'suizen'. It's not the pieces; it's the practice. The
word literally means 'blowing meditation'. The overwhelming majority of Zen
Buddhist practitioners (99.99%?) do 'zazen' or 'seated meditation' rather
than bother with a bamboo flute. Even the folks who did 'suizen' pretty
much full time in the Edo period and earlier (the komuso, or priests of
nothingness), and who gave us the 'suizen' repertoire, also did 'zazen'
daily, and perhaps spent more hours doing 'zazen' than 'suizen'.
Best regards, Riley
Dr. Riley Lee
PO Box 446
Springwood NSW 2777
Australia
Tel: 61 (02) 4751 6524
Fax: 61 (02) 4751 6286
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