Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Hi Al,

What's the prize?!?!?!?!?!? besides better embouchure, sound, stamina etc.

And is it OK to blow for a while on 2.9 then 1.8 then 1.3 or is it best to stick with one flute while you're doing it? I never heard if it matters.

Zakarius wrote:

Tairaku wrote:

And is it OK to blow for a while on 2.9 then 1.8 then 1.3 or is it best to stick with one flute while you're doing it? I never heard if it matters.

Good question -- in my first two sessions of the challenge, I started with 3.3, then switched to 2.8 and finished with my 3.6. About 5 minutes each...

I don't know about this particular challenge but I try to stick to one flute during ro-buki sessions. I find that swapping flutes or doing something else in the middle interrupts your concentration. After this you need to do it all over again to get back to the state of mind you were in earlier. It's kind of like doing 30 minute zazen sessions by sitting for one minute, talking a walk and sitting for another. Although technically you are doing 30 minutes of zazen, it doesn't really amount to doing it the right way for 30 minutes. In my case, and this may or may not be common, doing anything for the first couple of times just doesn't work well. It can take up to 5 minutes for me to finally get the sound going the way I want. If I would swap flutes every 15 minutes I'd spend over one third of the time doing poorly. To me, that doesn't make any sense.

Of course, it's entirely possible that you guys have a better concentration than I do and thus swapping flutes happens without any effort or loss of focus on the task itself. I doubt that is very common, however, so in case there is any doubt, stick to one flute for whatever period of time you aim for.

Zakarius wrote:

I have a feeling your lack of getting the 'feeling' of the Ro for the first few minutes of your sessions is not due to a lack of concentration. My guess is that it's too much concentration!

I understand your point, but that's not exactly it. When I sit down and start playing, I'm often thinking of something else. As I start playing, it often takes a moment to warm up, find the correct position and generally get comfortable. For me this can take anywhere between few seconds or up to a minute or two. It is not so much about concentration, although I used that term due to lack of better one. Once you start playing you basically forget about those things and you simply start to play the music. Getting from the point where you feel that you are not sitting right or something doesn't feel good to the point where you forget about yourself and just play doesn't necessarily happen instantly. I feel that if I stop playing at some point I can easily lose that feeling and I need to find it again. Try to do ro-buki for an hour or any time you consider to be pretty long and you will most likely notice that eventually you can move past thinking about every little thing and it all starts to feel really natural. Of course the goal is to find that feeling right away but I'm not really there yet and don't expect to be for years.

I believe the japanese have a term 'mushin no shin' or mushin for short for this. Basically, if you are good enough at what you do you can stop thinking about it and rely purely on intuition. You no longer think how to act but rather act based on intuition that comes from endless amount of practice and experience. Although I'm not expecting to get to that level during my lifetime, I'm hoping to practice this sort of thing at the best of my ability to hopefully feel that even for a brief moment. Diverting my attention from what I'm doing to switch to another flute - or to do anything else whatsoever - takes me further away from playing intuitively rather than intellectually.

Naturally this is just how I feel about it. Like said, it is perfectly possible that other people are not distracted by such things. Ultimately it only speaks of my lack of focus.

Zakarius wrote:

I think this type of 'focused' relaxation is critical in shakuhachi. I'm guessing this is also the case in meditation but I wouldn't know. So try to not concentrate   Also, though I agree that it would certainly be valuable to practive Ro-buki for 15 minutes on each of my 3 flutes, I don't want to spend that much time doing it.

To me, the mushin concept is rather close to 'focused' relaxation. That is roughly what I'm aiming for. Ultimately it should all happen intuitively rather than through some sort of thought process. However, while you want to be relaxed, you should also make sure that you aren't thinking about today's lunch or - like in my case - which flute to pick next. This is why I try to eliminate any unnecessary complications. Again, this is just my lack of being able to keep my focus on things and thus it may be different for others.

Zakarius wrote:

Besides, switching flutes presents you with the challenge of learning to quickly acclimate to other flutes (as all flutes take a bit of adjustment to play well).

Usually I do my ro-buki using just one flute. I do, however, occasionally do it with different flutes on different days. Unfortunately I'm nowhere near happy with my sound on any particular flute and so I don't really need to make the exercise any tougher than it already is.

This is an interesting conversation. I'll try to find more time a bit later today as I need to rush to work in a moment.

Zakarius wrote:

I don't speak Japanese, unfortunately, but I speak Chinese and hopefully someone can post the characters for the term 'mushin no shin' -- I'm guessing it's --> 無心的心... that third character being the Chinese equiv. of the Japanese 'no' (which I don't know how to write with my Chinese system). This would be a similar principle in the martials arts (or any other art, for that matter) where your 'intuition' takes precedence over your analytical thought processes.

That would be the correct interpretation. It basically translates literally to "mind of no mind". The same concept exists in most martial arts and, as far as I know, in Zen. You just basically train your intuition until you can do something without putting any analytical thought into it and then just let your intuition take over, so to speak. It goes further than that but I'm not a scholar on the topic and I find that being analytical on this topic would miss the point entirely.

Zakarius wrote:

Since I'm such a logically-oriented (instead of emotionally-oriented) person, this type of thing ought to be tough for me. I'm also something of a perfectionist which obviously creates frustration when I don't feel I'm doing something well. I just tell myself: know that I'm better now than I was two years ago... or two weeks ago... or days. Jump starting the 'intuition' is all a matter of psychology. Don't tell yourself that you can't do it or you'll end up proving yourself right.

I am also very logic-oriented. I can and do analyze things to death and could write a long essay on just about any topic regardless of what I know about it. When I started playing shakuhachi a few years ago I tried to think about things logically. Soon enough it got tough because a lot of it didn't really make sense.

Even earlier than that I had put some thought into the idea of letting your intuition guide you. Despite being a logical person I have always felt that intuition is often a better tool than pure logic. For instance, something as common as walking is nearly impossible if we try to think about what we are doing. Once we stop thinking and start walking it all starts to make sense and eventually everyone learns to walk. With more practice you can do such amazingly complicated things as jumping, dancing and running. All of this is based on intuitively knowing how to do it. If you tried to figure out how it happens, odds are that you'd spend a long time doing so and it wouldn't get anywhere.

For the last year or so I've approached shakuhachi from a more intuitive angle. I often just play whatever I feel like with no plans as to what notes to play. I'm hoping to learn to control the sound the way one would control his legs while walking. I still have a long way to go, of course, but I think that ever since I started to approach playing this way I've been making progress in a more meaningful way. Occasionally the rational thought tries to take over for various reasons. One of the more common causes for this is thinking about something and getting lost in your thoughts. Thus, whenever I practice, be it a piece from notes or just repeated blowing, I make sure to first ensure that nothing will disturb my concentration. I don't mean concentration in the traditional sense where you stare intensively at something or hold your breath. I simply shut out any thought process that would compete for my attention and focus solely on what I'm doing but yet make sure not to think about the playing itself either. This, to me, is the first step in working towards being able to attain the state of Mushin.

Lorka wrote:

Your idea about intuition was well put, and I agree with it.  You got me thinking, and have the feeling that the shakuhachi forces both discipline and intuition.

During one lesson with my teacher I asked him something about how to keep your lips with some note. He kind of looked at me as if I asked something really weird. There was a total silence for a few seconds. Then he stood up, walked to a mirror and started playing. After a moment he told me, "you know, I think I do it something like this...". In other words, he most likely didn't really know how he does it but intuitively could do it right when necessary. Furthermore, it was highly likely that when he learned from his teacher, the topic was never brought up in a verbal or intellectual level. That somewhat amusing scenario taught me a lot more than just a few details about blowing.

Ultimately all of this comes down to muscle memory and other related concepts. I prefer to talk about intuition or concepts like Mushin because even though it boils down to all sorts of perfectly natural things, there is so much to this that calling it muscle memory or whatever would seem to devalue the process.

Another somewhat related topic has to do with various sound patterns in music. I find it interesting that playing traditional pieces over and over teaches you to play in certain way and utilize certain patterns. For instance, when playing without thinking at all, I'm very likely going to play Re after Tsu. Things like this make most anything I play sound distinctly Japanese to a point where I can just pick arbitrary note and just start randomly playing something. Odds are that most people will find that it sounds Japanese even though I didn't intend to do that. I feel that this sort of thing is also related to intuition. Your mind, for the lack of better word, intuitively knows what it takes to play certain type of music because you've gone through countless pieces which have had structure. At intellectual level I cannot explain why a piece sounds or doesn't sound Japanese but my mind can easily repeat that effect in various contexts.

This intuitive learning is an interesting concept because it is hard to discuss about it in intellectual terms and yet it is so obvious when it happens. There are countless things I can do simply because I intuitively know how to do them and yet I couldn't really explain what I'm doing even in the most vague level. This is why I appreciate shakuhachi teachers a lot. They have to take something that they intuitively know and put it into words and intellectual terms. Knowing all that, it's not surprising that teachers occasionally just ask you to repeat some seemingly pointless exercise fifty times.

Indeed thia ie true.

After 35 years of teaching full-time, not a week goes by that I don't learn something new from my students!
How marvelous!

Ronnie