Project Two: Sound Essay

In Buddhist sensory practice, sound is often categorized by what it represents: doctrine transmitted through chant, communal identities broadcast through bells, and embodied feelings cultivated through musical practice. This tendency for framing sound around its representational function displaces a dimension of Buddhist sonic life in which representation is not the focus: sound is organized around an offering rather than a human audience. In Myōan shakuhachi practice, the most foundational piece, Honshirabe, is not performed before a crowd but offered before a Buddhist altar at ritual gatherings known as kensōkai, directed toward emptiness as its receiver. Honshirabe is the first piece taught to every new student at Itchōken, a Myōan temple school in Fukuoka, Japan; the piece is played before every lesson and practiced by some monks for their entire lives (Reehl 2026), signaling that Honshirabe is not just a vehicle for emotional cultivation but the oblational gesture itself. This essay analyzes the opening two minutes of Honshirabe in connection with the course readings to argue that the sonic architecture of the piece, composed of breath and ma, enacts Buddhist practice rather than represents it; the recording’s inability to capture Honshirabe’s intended audience of emptiness is not a methodological limitation but the precise gap that reveals the nature of sonic generosity in Buddhism: sound given without the expectation of return, to a receiver that cannot acknowledge the gift.

Honshirabe, a traditional solo honkyoku on shakuhachi, performed by master Kōhachirō Miyata. Recorded in 1976 and released in Japan: Shakuhachi — The Japanese Flute, Nonesuch H-72076, 1977. Accessed via YouTube recording. Duration: 1:59 (complete performance: 3:50).

The opening of Honshirabe establishes an offering logic from its first breath. At 0:01, the piece begins with a rushing of air; the tone emerges gradually from this breath noise, stabilizing by 0:02 into a pitch layered with overtones, the secondary resonances that give a sound its fullness and color. At 0:14, Miyata approaches the same pitch again, but the quality of the tone has shifted: it is darker and more covered, with less layered richness, yet the note itself remains the same. By 0:21, the pitch returns to the brighter quality of the opening. What unfolds across these first breaths is not two distinct notes but a single tone explored at different depths of color, each breath offering the same gesture with a different quality of attention. No melodic progression emerges; the piece returns to its opening sequence at 0:24, rehearsing an arrival that keeps deferring itself. The first thirty seconds register not as music building toward resolution but as repeated offerings of the same gesture, distinguished by the breath and effort behind each sounding. The silences between breaths, known in Japanese aesthetic tradition as ma, function not as musical rests but as generative intervals that intentionally structure the relationship between one offering and the next (Pilgrim 1986, 255). The instances of ma at 0:12 and 0:24 each last approximately two seconds; the silence at 0:36 precedes a shift where the tone audibly brightens and the layered richness returns.

After this brightening, the piece retreats inward. At 0:59, the tones lose the layered richness of the opening; they sound hollow, stripped of the resonances that gave the earlier phrases their fullness, so only the shape of the sound remains. Where the breaths at 0:01 and 0:14 filled the space with color, the breaths after 0:59 sound narrower: less of the tone's body, more of its outline. The silences at 1:10 and 1:28 participate in this retreat: while the earlier ma at 0:12 separated full, resonant breaths, these later silences sit beside tones already stripped of their richness, and the contrast between sound and silence sharpens. Each silence after 0:59 sits closer to the breath it follows, as the hollowing of the tone draws the silence nearer to its surface. The two minutes end at 1:59 as this hollowing reaches its deepest point; the piece's structural return to the opening's tonal palette falls outside what the recording contains, leaving the offering suspended rather than resolved.

The opening thirty seconds of Honshirabe demonstrate a deliberate refusal to progress melodically. Reehl distinguishes between suizen ("blown meditation," which positions sound as self-cultivation) and kenteki, the "offering flute" practice that positions sound as a gift before the altar (Reehl 2026, 128). Miyata's repetition of the same opening pitch at varying depths of tone is consistent with the latter: the piece is meant to be offered, not performed. This interpretation connects to Abe's definition of "poesis" as sacred sound that does not represent meaning but enacts presence (2005, 303). Abe argues that the capacity to convey the dharma through sound is what separates the "perfectly enlightened buddha" from the silent pratyekabuddha, who achieves enlightenment but remains a peripheral figure precisely because he does not speak (2005, 294). Miyata's breath-into-sound parallels this relational logic: Honshirabe's sound is not an expression of Miyata's interior state but a gift extended to a receiver absent in the room, and it is the giving of sound, not its content, that constitutes the offering.

The silences dispersed throughout Honshirabe participate in this same logic. Desjarlais, in his ethnography of dying among Yolmo Buddhists in Nepal, describes "attendant rhythms" as sounds that accompany rather than address, providing "moral support, attunement, and alteration" during passage through the "lonely thusness" of death (2014, 101, 103). While Desjarlais describes sound as the vehicle of accompaniment in guiding Yolmo Buddhists through death, it is silence that performs this function in Honshirabe; rather than interrupting, the ma attends to the sounds prior and renews the practitioner's orientation before each new breath. Weiner establishes that sound's meaning is never self-contained but emerges "through the interplay of broadcaster and receiver" within specific social contexts and that communities are constituted aurally by the reach of their shared sounds (2015, 217, 221). In the context of Honshirabe, who is actually the receiver? Reehl suggests that the sound is directed to the altar—to Fuke Zenji, Kusunoki Masakatsu, and the Buddha, rather than any human audience (2026, 121). The kensōkai thus forms an acoustic community whose membership extends to nonhuman, enshrined figures. Each ma marks the boundary of a gift directed elsewhere: the silence is where I register that I was never its intended recipient.

While I can listen to sound and receive rhythm, pitch, and breath, I cannot feel the weight of a shakuhachi, smell incense, or experience blowing through bamboo. My experience also lacks a spatial element: there is no altar, shared orientation, or receiver apart from me. Thus, the central limitation of the recording is not just what it cannot capture sensorially but its loss of directionality: kenteki is organized around its offering to emptiness, and a fixed audio file delivers the sound while separating the piece from that orientation. When I focus my attention on a single breath descending into ma, the silence produces suspension rather than completion: it is the moment after a gift has been given, and I am not the one it was given to. The sound was not offered to me, but I have accessed it online; Gershon cautions that "mistaking a recording for an event is as egregious as believing a text to capture talk" because recordings systematically restructure what counts as evidence (2016). My two-minute excerpt omits Honshirabe's final resolution, withholding the return of the opening's tonal palette and restructuring the piece into something that appears self-contained in partiality. Thus, the recording does not document an offering so much as extract a fragment of one, presenting it as evidence of a practice whose meaning depends on what falls outside the sound itself.

Pink argues that sensory ethnography requires "emplaced knowing": knowledge constituted through bodily participation in a specific environment, in which the ethnographer seeks to know places and ways of knowing similar to those of others (Pink 2009, 24). My encounter with Honshirabe is mediated; I listen in my room without the ritual context, without having learned to produce the sound, and without the sustained attunement Reehl describes as the condition for perceiving aji, the "indescribable taste" of a sincere offering inaccessible to those who "listen with a musical mindset" (2026, 146). What I hear is not aji but its sonic residue: I can hear that something is being given, but not what it means to be the one giving it. However, even partial encounters can produce genuine sensory understanding, as Stewart suggests that atmospheres "pull the senses into alert" subconsciously before observation (2011, 445). The recording produces an atmosphere that I feel: a slowing of attention, an orientation toward breath, and a heightened awareness of the silences between each breath. What remains inaccessible is the directionality of the offering: the orientation of breath toward an altar that a fixed audio file cannot sustain.

Honshirabe reveals that sound in Buddhist sonic practice is not only a vehicle for expression but also an act of giving, structured by breath and ma, and offered to a receiver who cannot acknowledge the gift itself. Reehl establishes that kenteki positions sound as an offering rather than a performance, which Abe grounds by defining sound as an act of relation rather than representation; Desjarlais and Weiner further suggest that the silence between breaths attends to the offering, while confirming that its intended receiver is never human. The recording's limits, which Pink and Gershon address, are not incidental but generative: I cannot access aji because I lack the emplaced knowing the practice requires, and the two-minute excerpt withholds the piece's full structure; however, it is precisely this gap that makes sonic generosity present, by revealing a practice organized entirely around a gift the listener can hear but never receive. When sound is organized around the offering of a gift rather than its content, silence is not an absence of sound but the space of a specific receiver; the recording cannot preserve that directionality, but in failing to do so, it reveals what sonic ethnography of Buddhist ritual must account for: the most significant dimension of sound may be to whom it is given.

Works Cited

Abe, Ryūichi. “Word.” In Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr., 291–310. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Desjarlais, Robert. “Liberation upon Hearing: Voice, Morality, and Death in a Buddhist World.” Ethos 42, no. 1 (2014): 101–118.

Gershon, Walter S. “Sonic Ethnography.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Pilgrim, Richard B. “Intervals (‘Ma’) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan.” History of Religions 25, no. 3 (1986): 255–277.

Pink, Sarah. Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. London: SAGE, 2015.

Reehl, Duncan. “On Kenteki: Sonic Generosity in Myōan Shakuhachi.” Asian Music 57, no. 1 (2026): 117–159.

Stewart, Kathleen. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (2011): 445–453.

Weiner, Isaac. “Sound.” In Key Terms in Material Religion, edited by S. Brent Plate, 179–184. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.