A distinguishing feature of practice with Santa Barbara Zen Center is experiencing the shakuhachi, which is played before services by Bob Nyosui Sedivy. Bob was certified in Japan as a Komuso monk and is an accomplished practitioner and teacher of this ancient instrument of Zen.

The Shakuhachi, a 5-holed vertical bamboo flute of Japan, has a history much veiled in mystery. Brought to Japan from China over 1200 years ago, it is the only musical instrument associated with Zen Buddhism. Monks from the Fuke Sect wandered Japan during the Edo period (1600-1868) and were called Komuso or “priests of nothingness”.

The Komuso played the shakuhachi pieces called honkyoku as a form of meditation called suizen or “blowing meditation”. They wore large woven baskets or “Tengai” over their heads symbolizing humility and anonymity.

The study of shakuhachi is similar to any of the Zen arts, such as Tea Ceremony, swordsmanship, archery or brush painting.

Nyosui says, “We should approach the austere spiritual beauty of the shakuhachi with the same mind and dedication as we do meditation”.

On Saturday, October 9th at 9 a.m. Bob presented an interactive talk on shomyo chanting. He briefly discussed the origins of Buddhist chanting, how the shakuhachi was used to imitate the vocal chants. Bob will teach our sangha how to read shakuhachi sheet music, then use that to chant a shakuhachi piece called Seiganmon, which are the four Buddhist vows and how we usually end our service.

Full Transcript

Bob Nyosui Sedivy was fumbling his way through this, but now it's gonna go smoothly. Yes. So you think. And Hanshan said, "Who can escape the tangles of this world and sit with us in the zoom dojo?" No way he didn't say that, I said that.

Okay, so the scroll behind me says "Ichion Jobutsu," which means "one sound become Buddha" or "enlightenment in a single sound." And this doesn't have to be on the shakuhachi. This could be us vocalizing. So today, the hope is that if you hit the perfect note today, you're going to reach enlightenment. So I'll provide the tune and it's up to you to do the rest.

So the question today is, has anyone here ever chanted the four vows? Okay, I have some people, good. This is great. I want to show you one way of doing it. There's so many ways of doing the four vows. And I stumbled on this shakuhachi piece which had the four vows written in on the side. So I've been interested in looking into this. But I'd also want to present an interactive talk on shomyo chanting, which is basically Buddhist sutras with a melody.

I'm going to briefly discuss the origins of the Buddhist chanting and how the shakuhachi was used to imitate the vocal chants. I'll then teach our sangha how to read shakuhachi music. And then finally to chant the shakuhachi piece called Seigonmun, which are the four Buddhist vows that we usually end our service with.

So shomyo is a kind of music that adds melodic patterns to chanted words, which are Buddhist words in Sanskrit. It uses bongo, which is using Chinese characters to phonetically transcribe Sanskrit words. It originated in India, then to China, finally to Japan in the sixth century along with Buddhism.

As far back as the year 752, there is a record of shakuhachi being used along with the Buddhist chanting for ceremonial events. This particular event in 752 was the opening of the eye ceremony in Todaiji, the temple in Nara that houses the Big Buddha. The opening of the eye ceremony was the final step to complete the Big Buddha after its casting and placement at Todaiji. There's also some early anecdotal evidence from diaries, recorded stories and myths that confirm that the shakuhachi was sometimes used to imitate the sounds of the monks chanting.

So this time, if you could share the screen, Monica, and the third one down. Let's see. That's going to be the last one. Right there. Right? Up one, down one, down, down two, right there. Okay, this is called Japanese Buddhist shomyo notation. This particular piece is called shi-chi bongo, or the song of the four wisdoms. Now, shi-chi bongo is a shomyo chant written in Sanskrit characters. The chant praises the meritorious qualities of the Buddha and awakens the Dharma dhatu, bringing the rays of pure light over all who hear it.

So this comes from an album that I have that I got from one of my three secondary teachers in America, Michael Chikusen Gould, and he shared this in a class with us. So I'm going to share a little vocal from play a little CD in the background. And if you look on this on the right hand side, it has the words "om ban za ra sa to." So you're going to hear this chant being really stretched out. And then this, these are phonetic Chinese characters. And to the left of those characters shows you how to how the monk is singing this. And the monk here is Sebastian Gierschen Seer. And he's from Montreal. And you'll kind of follow his words, but to the, like I say, to the left of it is how graphically how he's singing and you'll maybe see by there's the word za and ra and to the left of that you see something like a corkscrew and you'll hear him singing that. So I'm going to play that right now. And we can sort of follow along but you're going to get a better picture than I can by hearing him that I could possibly talk about.

[Audio plays]

So this goes on for another 10 minutes, but you get an idea of that this is pretty complex. And it would take us months to learn probably the first couple of lines. So I'm going to skip down to the next scroll down. Yeah, here's a simpler version of the Sanskrit sounds. And the Chinese Japanese characters showing you what to phonetically what you're saying and then to the left of the character so you see "yo be rule Sha Na boo" and to the left of those characters shows you graphically what you're supposed to be doing with your voice. So this is the basics of shomyo chanting.

Go down to the next scroll. And this is another way of doing it. I've seen this also, kanji and it's singing with sound shaping. So there are several different ways that it's done. And I'm going to present a much simpler way for us to learn today.

Now, if you listen to what he's just singing, it's really not a lot different than Gregorian chant, but it's kept it stretched out a lot. And when we chant, usually when we chant like the Heart Sutra or things that there's no change in pitch. Like that, there are other chants that are done. And when we do our service live, we sometimes every other week, we do the song of the jewel mirror awareness. Well, I've never heard it done as a song. Monica tells me our friend in Minnesota Ben Connelly has done this. And so it seems to me that the Minnesota people are way ahead of us in terms of chanting. But there's other there's the song of the grass hut by Shitou and other things they say song but we don't really do them on Wednesday nights. We do the three refuges in Pali and Susan sings it so beautifully. What I like about that is it has a simple melody and it changes in every one of the verse and then we sing it in Pali. So it's not just chanting in English and it makes it so much more personal to me.

Now the shakuhachi was then used by the komuso monks to imitate the vocal sounds. We don't know how they were used either as an accompaniment to the chant or in lieu of the chanting. And as you heard in the Chi Chi bongo there, they alternated the chanting was done by Sebastian and then Michael came in and played the shakuhachi part at the beginning of the piece. He kind of imitates the chanting with his shakuhachi but then he varies it and he changes a little and by the end he's off into something completely different. So the shakuhachi suddenly expresses the differences between the shakuhachi and shomyo demonstrating the divergence of the shakuhachi's own musical development.

So that's another way that it's been done. When I stumbled on these few shakuhachi pieces that included characters for chanting, I was struck like, how is this done? And so I've been asking some of the American master shakuhachi players, how should we do this? And I don't have a definitive answer. So the answer I came up with is we can do it any way we want. So these characters are for chanting. As we read the piece, we can chant along, or we can follow the one who is chanting, or just ourselves chanting inside while we're playing it, or even being it while we're playing it.

So let's move on to how the shakuhachi music looks like. Let's go to the top of the page. So this is the standard way the shakuhachi music is written. I'm going to play this first line. So you read from you see at the top, it says line one, and then you read line two, you go to the left, line three, four, and then five. If you're following at the very top of the line of line one, you see a whole lot of different things. And the notation shows the Dharma gates, and then the little z means low octave with the shakuhachi, you don't know what octave to play in because there's only four holes on the front and one on the back and we're playing two and a half octaves. So here's low octave this one. And if I played it higher, so it has to tell you that little z means Otsu or low octave. And then there's two notes that one says Sue and the next one says Rei and they're connected to so Sue is a little grace note going up to Rei.

Now let's go down to the next page. I want to show you something before we go too much further. The five basic notes on the shakuhachi going from left to right are Ro, Sue, Rei, Chi and Ha. And so Ro is with all the fingers closed. Then Sue has one finger open. Rei has two fingers open. Chi has three fingers open. And Ha has one and two closed in a row.