Text / In search of ichion jôbutsu: shakuhachi honkyoku, breath, body, no-mind.

While many scholars and musicians associate the shakuhachi and specifically the instrument’s solo Zen honkyoku repertoire with meditative states, any psychophysical mechanism connecting shakuhachi performance with a religious or meditative consciousness is often vague, ill-defined or totally absent.

In the author’s experience, this issue is not clarified within mainstream contemporary shakuhachi pedagogy. Exactly how the practice of playing shakuhachi may lead to any particular psychophysical state is seldom explained and any connection between the instrument, honkyoku literature and meditation left abstract and potentially unclear. This raises variety of questions such as, why did the instrument historically come to be used by komusō 1. and their precursors as a meditation tool (why not use some other instrument) and is there actually any inherent connection between honkyoku works in particular and a no-mind meditational state?

Drawing upon ‘flow’2. studies, Zen theories on meditation and the author’s primary research as a professional musician and shakuhachi scholar in Japan, this paper will present a somatic framework through which the mechanism allowing shakuhachi performance to act as a catalyst for a meditative or no-mind consciousness can be understood and reproduced.

It is the author’s contention that this system enables an objective understanding of how both komusō and other individuals who sought to utilise the shakuhachi as a meditative tool achieved a state of nothingness; a state of ichion jôbutsu or ‘in a single sound, Buddha-hood’.

1. The shakuhachi was historically played by Buddhist monks known as komusō (priests of nothingness) who practiced the instrument as suizen or ‘blowing Zen’.

2. Developed in the 1970s by psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi to describe an immersive state of mind in which an agent becomes completely involved in an activity for its own sake.