What puts the hon in honkyoku?

Honkyoku is not a fixed artefact but a situated event: an emergent process shaped by one’s knowledge and experience, present conditions (physical, mental, spiritual, and so on), and circumstances (including musical, pedagogical, and relational contexts). Every performance/enactment manifests from within these entangled conditions.

The common notion that honkyoku must be made “one’s own” often carries an unspoken dualism: a “not one’s own.” This can branch off into two further implications: first, that the individual’s understanding is somehow insufficient, and second, that legitimacy must be granted by a higher authority (teacher, lineage, or tradition) to authorise their honkyoku as “authentic”. In the first case, the player must jump through hoops to earn adequacy. In the second, authenticity is treated as something bestowed.

I’m not dismissing these implications outright, because they can both be valid and relevant in certain contexts. However, if this represents the entirety of your engagement, your honkyoku becomes trapped in binary logic (mine or not mine, right or wrong, good or bad, authentic or inauthentic, enough or not enough, etc.).

In his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire presents what he calls the ‘banking concept’, in which authority defines value and the learner’s insufficiency is continually reinforced:

“… the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. … [But] it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.” (p.45)

Although typical honkyoku transmission frameworks don’t always map directly onto Freire’s banking concept, they often run parallel to the pedagogical dynamic he describes. One outcome of the banking model is a non-critical acceptance of the values and hierarchies being deposited, an outcome that has clear parallels in how legitimacy, sufficiency, and authenticity can be framed within honkyoku transmission.

Some of the most compelling aspects of honkyoku lie in the spiritual and philosophical dimensions it enables one to explore. For me, this includes the potential for a dissolution of self, even if only for a moment. When authenticity is treated as something that can be possessed or bestowed, spoken of as “the genuine article”, that exploratory potential is hobbled, particularly when engagement is confined within rigid, dualistic frameworks.

One might ask, “What about lineage? And doesn’t rejecting teacher authority undermine tradition?” Well, I’m not saying that anything played on a shakuhachi automatically becomes honkyoku. Honkyoku emerges within particular cultural, traditional, and embodied conditions. There is lineage, transmission, structure, and sensibility involved in cultivating musical discernment and coherence. Without those foundations, the result may be expressive and musical, but it is not honkyoku. In the same way that building a chair requires more than simply arranging pieces of wood, honkyoku requires certain conditions to be in place for something coherent to emerge. I say this as someone who has undergone formal transmission and lives inside shakuhachi practice.

Saying that honkyoku is not authorised externally does not mean that anything labelled ‘honkyoku’ automatically is; it means that recognition rests in whether the conditions for honkyoku are actually present. If the conditions that historically and musically constitute honkyoku are absent, then what emerges may be something else.

The way you play a given honkyoku piece is the result of the conditions you are entangled with - your experience, knowledge, body, mind, spirit, instrument, as well as the traditions and culture that shape your practice - but it is not categorically or prescriptively determined by them. Honkyoku is not some object waiting to be authorised, or a personal possession to be claimed. Honkyoku is not an essence, but a phenomenon that appears when culturally grounded practices, embodied knowledge, and present conditions converge.

And when they converge, honkyoku can fully manifest.