Honkyoku

Honkyoku are the original pieces of the Japanese shakuhachi tradition: a solo repertory of some 150 works transmitted by the komusō, the mendicant Zen monks of the Fuke sect, who played the bamboo flute as a form of meditation known as suizen, blowing Zen. Each piece, performed unaccompanied with pronounced breath sounds, pitch bends and long silences, is attached to a temple lineage, the Kinko school founded by Kurosawa Kinko in the eighteenth century being the most widely transmitted. Suppressed when the Fuke sect was abolished in 1871, honkyoku survived as concert and recorded art through masters such as *Yamaguchi Gorō* and *Watazumidosō*.