Form and Emptiness: Learning the Heart Sutra by Entering a Taiko Contest
This is an article written in June 2023 and published in Young Buddhist Editorial on August 15, 2023.
Introduction - A North American Taiko Contest
On May 20th, I participated in Taiko Taikai, an odaiko solo contest at the Terasaki Budokan in Little Tokyo. I know some of the organizers, and I initially signed up to support the effort. As someone who organizes grassroots events, I know it can sometimes be a challenge to communicate the vision while also creating the structure from the ground up, so I wanted to give the kind of unconditional support that comes with trusting people in your community. I signed up without really thinking too far ahead - I figured it would be helpful to sign up either way.
As an instructor at a Buddhist temple, I did have some reservations about the competitive nature of the event, which I will outline below. But I also felt that it would be a shame to be against a project before it even began, or to turn down people on principle when they haven’t even had the chance to share their vision. My faith in the organizers quickly dispelled these reservations and was the principal motivator in signing up.
However, I admit that I also felt a perhaps not-very-Buddhist urge to represent Buddhist communities in the contest, who I worry are sometimes selectively forgotten from the evolving narrative of North American and worldwide taiko. As taiko reaches a more mainstream audience, I sometimes worry it is “deodorized” and commercially packaged to be culturally ambiguous, universally owned, and ahistorical - another trinket in the gift shop of neoliberal multiculturalism. It was illusory, and I think I knew it at the time, but I imagined that being on that stage might challenge processes of erasure. At the very least, maybe it would do some good to have philosophies and communities represented beyond just Performance Art.
What would it mean to participate in this contest? To win? To lose?
Actually, I wasn’t really expecting to be a finalist at all. I barely got my midnight video submission in - a noise complaint at the temple made me relocate to a dark parking lot, and a train slowly chugs by in the background during the filming. (I hope the judges found the industrial setting as funny as I did and not disrespectful.)
In the end, I didn’t win the contest, but I still found what I was looking for in how it impacted my own life and circle. It brought me closer to my friends and students at the temple, and I think the performance brought them some joy and a sense of connection to other things going on with taiko. I also got to spend time with family on the trip and broaden my horizons as a taiko player.
I was also curious whether a contest would be a good thing for the taiko communities of North America. In my own work, I had previously considered having a taiko competition at the festival I produce, but I didn’t see a clear shot at making something meaningful and uplifting for the community. I have to give a lot of credit to the organizer of Taiko Taikai in their thoughtful approach to making the taikai feel community-driven and uplifting, while still providing a fair competition with an excellent commissioned piece and well-rounded panel of judges. To top it off, having it at Terasaki Budokan in Little Tokyo was also a very grounding decision. They really did the work to make something like this viable, and they pulled it off very well!
The bulk of this article is a two-part reflection on the experience of participating, written during and immediately after the trip to Los Angeles. I wanted to get a personal reflection while it was still fresh, which is good because it was less than a month ago but it already feels like distant history! Before the reflection however, from this more detached vantage, I want to give a very brief summary of my thoughts on the question of taiko contests in North America.
In brief, arguments against contests include that (1) they are social processes that enforce structures of legitimacy for competitors and judges that can act against egalitarian modes of participation, (2) they impart values that reward being the best rather than being in community, and (3) they may uncritically replicate systems of oppression in minority communities by commodifying community-based projects into broader capitalist enterprises.
Similarly brief, arguments for contests include that (1) they raise the level of the art across the community by providing technical challenges that strengthen the community of players, (2) they provide increased visibility for not only the players but the communities that they represent, and (3) they provide a means for players from different groups and regions to form meaningful relationships and be in community together.
It may be helpful (and Buddhist) to not think about this as a binary decision, but rather different sides that hold each other in tension. These considerations help us decide when and how to host or subvert contests, rather than just decide if they are good or bad. From my personal experience, it did seem that the contest brought players closer together and that there was a positive and vibrant energy in Little Tokyo that day. I made new friends and got to see old friends. Participants were rooting for each other and really just trying to do their best - to be better and continue to grow. There was a sense of community.
However, I’m not sure how much this is about competition itself - what I experienced was more about ritual. This was a piece we all set out to learn as competitors from the same material. We all went through the line to play the same piece in front of judges and the audience. There were tests of character. There was uncertainty and resolution. It was time spent together, doing what we love, focused on the task at hand. It was cool seeing the different interpretations and styles, but it wasn’t a performance in the entertainment sense - you watched the same piece again and again until it took on a different kind of meaning.
Tiffany Tamaribuchi, one of the judges, once told me in a workshop that we should play taiko as if it would make the sun rise. To really believe that what you play matters is a transportive process – it lets you really connect to everything going on. Watching the others perform, I had the sense of rooting for them to complete the ritual, to make the sun rise. You’re kind of nervous for them, not because of any evaluative process, but just because you know how much it means that they complete this - that the forces of nature, our well-being as a people, somehow rests in this ritual.
In that sense, the whole competition aspect may just be a tool used in a deeper meditation, like a bell or a mudra. Perhaps the question isn’t about whether competitions are good or not, but what lies underneath. Like so many things, it’s important to not confuse the pointing finger with the moon.
Form is Emptiness
Saturday, May 20th
Don. The sound of the drum fades slowly away, creating silence in what was once the ambient sound of Little Tokyo. The city is still there, but my perception has changed, and now I don’t hear the street, the crowd, the birds. These sounds blend with the reverberation of the drum, becoming part of the music.
Don. The drum sounds beautiful and rich. The response on the head feels just right. I was unable to make practice time at the Asano studio, so this is my first introduction to the drum. There is a sense of connection.
Sound and ma (silence), each creating the other. Form and Emptiness.
In Rev. Mimatsu’s sutra tracing class, we have been discussing the meaning of “Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form.” Winding up and pantomiming throwing a ball, Rev. Mimatsu asks us what he is doing. Pitching! Baseball! Yes, maybe, but he’s also just a guy moving his arms in the reception hall. Seeing what must be a confused look on my face, Rev. Mimatsu explains it in terms of taiko. Music has form - we can recognize it, arrange it, feel it, interpret it. But it is also composed of brief, impermanent physical moments, sound and silence, vibrations of air that move past us and dissipate. The music can be understood as a composition, though no piece of it contains the whole. We, too, are like music, never the same from moment to moment, but still containing a sense of self.
Shingon Buddhism is relatively new to me - like many Japanese American Buddhists, my family comes from the Jodo Shinshu school of Shin Buddhism, a tradition of exoteric Buddhism focused more on the experiences of everyday life. Jodo Shinshu practitioners do not use omamori (fortune amulets) or write prayers for the fire ceremony. Shingon Buddhism, an esoteric branch of Buddhism, is full of such rituals, though these are arguably less about metaphysical certainty than they are artistic expressions of their underlying principles, whether psychological or ontological.
But like woodworking and tying knots, my time as a taiko player has taught me to appreciate ritual. We burn our bachi (sticks) when they break and recognize the souls of the drums. We burn incense when making a new drum. These traditions help us appreciate and recognize the life that goes into making our instruments as well as the lives they will sustain. It connects the knowledge of those who came before with the energy of those making the drum. On a deeply human level, playing music is the practice of creating shared experience from sound and motion, which itself is sort of ritual, using somatic techniques to transport us between worlds of experience.
It’s a few days before the competition and Rev. Mimatsu is showing me around the altar of the temple. I used the temple’s drums and space for an online presentation for a company’s Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Justice program about art and social justice. The main piece I performed was “Okagesama,” an original Bon song about my grandmother’s experiences farming on the Sacramento Delta. When she would listen to Japanese music in her older years, it struck me as significant that the inaka (rural area) the music recollected was a community near Stockton. When I play taiko, I want to continue Japanese music that has roots in America, of this place, living and belonging here. I used the speaking opportunity, though, to also practice the piece “Narukami” before the taikai - my second time doing so - and I have an idea forming to make the piece more authentic to my own experience. Perhaps I can include the Heart Sutra into my performance, so I ask Sensei.
Showing me the different statues of the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and the occasional Wisdom King, Sensei explains the characteristic positions that they all take are called mudras. These positions are used in meditation or ritual, and are used to help focus perception or evoke changes in mood or mindset. “You know Naruto?” he asks me, and jokingly mimics rapidly changing hand positions. “Those are mudras.” They have deeper meaning than ninja powers - though if people get happiness out of acting like a ninja, he doesn’t begrudge them. Rev. Mimatsu explained to me that these mudras were not limited in number, that we are all mudras. “For instance, taiko is your mudra.” When you play, it evokes feeling and brings people happiness.
As we continued the tour, we came to a mandala, a representational map of Buddhist cosmology, hanging on the wall. “Narukami” is the second piece I’ve played named after a god; the other is “Enma,” lord of the underworld, which is a senior graduation piece in Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan, representing the passage from one life to the next. As I began doing more protest work and community organizing, we brought “Enma” into other liminal spaces - music as prayer for the safe passage from one world to the next, for the liberation of all people. I’ve spent time with Enma, but what of Narukami, this triumphant god of rain causing thunder through the beating of the drum?
On the mandala, Rev. Mimatsu showed me the realm of gods, furthest from the center. As Buddhism spread throughout Asia, it incorporated many indigenous religions, accepting and transmitting these storied characters. Sometimes “god” doesn’t translate well - when Americans, for instance, hear “gods,” they assume a much more central role, but in reality they form the edges of the celestial map. The gods dress extravagantly and have wild and energetic positions, kind of like taiko players. Tracing from the gods inward towards the Bodhisattvas and even more towards the Buddhas, there is increasing austerity and simplification, which makes sense if the goal is the absolution of the self. Perhaps, on my journey, there is a need for simplification, to see Narukami from the vantage of the mandala, something that reflects the countless lives that I am intertwined with.
Earlier this year, my partner Lisa and I traveled to Japan during her Winter Break. It was a chance for her to visit grandparents, who she hasn’t seen in person since before COVID, and her sister who moved there recently. It was a chance for me to see old friends, too, and watch taiko groups like Amanojaku and Kodo. We also visited my great-grandmother at the family grave in Wakayama and visited Koyasan, the mountain home of Shingon Buddhism. It was a chance to return to the world after a long health-winter.
On our travels, we stopped at a lot of shrines and temples, filling a whole goshuin-cho (pilgrim’s stamp book) along the way. We chanted the Heart Sutra with monks on Koyasan and listened to drums played as part of everyday temple life in Kanto, Kansai, and Chugoku. I even got to play a temple drum in Shikoku. One nice thing about temples and shrines being part of everyday life is there are so many chances to pray and different prompts to direct your intentionality towards someone or something in your life. We prayed for the recovery of friends and family, for healing in the world, and we got to see a lot of beautiful places along the way.
Near the end of our trip, we stopped by a flea market at Toji (temple) in Kyoto upon Lisa’s grandmother's suggestion. In this busy intersection of spiritual and economic life, we found used hakama and kimono that we could use as taiko costuming. The seller was very kind and let us store our luggage as we hurried around the market and visited the temple in our short time there.
This hakama and a simple black happi would serve as a costume, along with old tabi with holes worn in the toes after many performances. I wonder where the original owner of the hakama is now and if they would be happy that it has been so useful to me, now so far away. We are connected now, worlds apart, by these literal threads.
The last few practices before the taikai, I play the piece for some of my students and friends at the temple. Some of my friends from Kongo Gumi, an advanced class of mostly post-collegiate players, stay late and give me feedback and workshop ideas. I feel very supported and on the way down the next day, the encouraging texts they send fill my heart.
When we all arrive at the taikai, the energy is fun and it’s as if everyone is old friends. A lot of us do know each other from before, but old and new friends commingle like we are one big team. It might be a reunion as much as a competition, and everyone is so jovial. I’m the fourth one up, so the set-up time goes fast and just like that, it’s time to go on.
Don Don don don don don don don
Sharishi shiki fu i ku ku
Fu i shiki shiki soku ze ku ku
Soku ze shiki ju so gyo shiki gaku
Bu nyo ze
Don doro do do do do do don, Don doro do do do do do don
I suppose there’s a trick to playing music in that you must be rehearsed enough to know where to go, but free enough to be in the moment. Music is like meditation in that complete present-mindedness is not something that can be easily summoned; it is constant practice. Part of my mind was assessing the entrance tempo, if I got it right and how it was playing off the drum and sound space. I was thinking about lines, about stance, but then another part was just listening and gradually that took over. I felt free for a moment, not thinking about anything in particular.
And I missed a transition. Oops. I improvised and got back in the song, still enjoying the moment that passed altogether so fast. With nothing else to lose, at least there was the music.
I thought I would be more disappointed in myself, but it wasn’t so bad. It was a good journey. Watching the other competitors from the back, I got to hold Drew, my cousin’s baby - they had come up from Orange County. He’s not quite a year old yet, but he watched with fascination and gave one rather well-placed kiai (shout). I had lunch in Little Tokyo with Lisa’s family, and then watched the second half of the show. It’s fun getting to see so many styles and interpretations of the song.
When it was time to announce the winners, the judges gave thoughtful messages, placing value on how far each of us had come since our auditions and how competitions can foster improvement in the art, both in our self-betterment and community of players. As one example, Isaku Kageyama told us that though he’s won a few taikai in Japan, he’s lost more than he’s won, and that he’s learned more from losing than winning.
I did not win the competition, but I appreciated the journey. I wish I could have fully performed the piece as written, the way I practiced, but playing something else and finding peace with that was also rewarding. If I seriously look at how I practiced taiko leading up to the contest, it was much more about introspective growth and using taiko in community, so it would make sense to look for reward there as well. A member of our temple group texted me that it brought tears to her eyes, and old friends and teammates sent their support.
Perhaps another reason to have rituals like this competition are not only for the competitors, but for the communities that sustain them. I hope by competing, I brought some joy or visibility to my community.
I came to this process trying to draw a thread between my experiences and history, between the communities we are and the communities we could become, trying to find as much meaning as I could in the experience. I wanted form, but in the moment, I found emptiness.
Emptiness is Form
Sunday, May 21st
Hatsumairi is a service where children born in the last year are presented to the sangha. I watch as three of my cousins and their families are called to the front. I consider the three new, round faces that vaguely look like the ones I grew up with and a little like the partners who entered our family later in life, too. It’s a large cohort - there are nine babies being presented today. They are each given a tiny ojuzu, placed around their wrist. All smiles, Drew brings his hand to his face and puts the beads in his mouth. They are surrounded by love.
For a service with babies, the sutra we chant is quite long. Surrounded by the voices of my family, I am overcome with emotion. Here in this hondo that Grandpa helped build, where we said goodbye to Grandma, I see and hear them in my aunts and uncles around me. Descendants that they will never know laugh and cry, wriggling in their parents arms. The bareness of the cycle of life, its sorrow and joy, is clear as sunlight.
In chanting here, I realize that this is the end of my journey, not yesterday’s event. Had I not come to Los Angeles for the tournament, I would not have been here for Hatsumairi. There are no judges, no audience, just people chanting together, seeking refuge in compassion.
Later, at the house, the kids crawl around and play, like we once did. I am lucky to have so many cousins close to my age to grow up with, and here a new generation has been bestowed that blessing. It’s the same house my dad and his siblings grew up in, but with so many people now, the general operation is to eat and clear out so the next wave can sit down - it’s a constantly rotating meal, and you can always come back. While we’re eating, Mom and Dad arrive. By coincidence, my parents are also down this weekend for a memorial service, so they were not able to make the performance. But by the magic of this house, of this trip, we are brought together.
At some point or other, everyone asks me about the taikai - they estimate that they made up half of the people watching online for my performance. But it’s also grounding that it’s just another part of the family news cycle, between little league games and work updates, stories and revelry, births and passings. And then, of course, there are babies to capture our attention and imaginations.
I feel a growing restlessness at one point in the afternoon, a desire to be productive - to practice or prepare for upcoming events, maybe to better myself in my shortcomings. But, I am able to accept these thoughts and let them go - maybe I’ve lived long enough where this becomes easier. With my little cousins, we crawl around the house, pick weeds in the backyard, and even attempt to learn the basics of sounding a membranophone.
It’s these little moments in this family that make up so much of who I am. Take any moment, and it might not be structured or working towards some grand goal, but when you string them together, there is meaning in a life. We don’t ask to be born or for the need to eat, but we inherit the happy accident of life just the same. There is grace in the vulgar - or perhaps they are one and the same. A serious look passes over Drew’s face and then his natural smile returns in a wide grin. “Oh, I think he pooped,” his dad comments and then sniffs the air. “Yes, he definitely pooped.”
It gets late enough for dinner, and I go with my dad and aunt to get more food for people. As we spread out to different restaurants, I end up on the street corner alone, near where my grandpa’s market used to stand. I never knew the place - it was gone before I could remember. As cars whizz past on Beach Boulevard, I reflect that I’ve only known this place as urban sprawl. I used to assume that’s how it’s always been, concrete everywhere. Only later in life did I realize that the city grew around my family - these parking lots and shopping centers used to be fields, and people used to grow oranges in Orange County. The city came to these country folk.
I didn’t really sign up for the taikai to win. It started with faith in the people who had a dream to bring a community event to Little Tokyo. Then it progressed as a journey of discovery, following the contours of life as they presented themselves, spending time learning sutra with Rev. Mimatsu at the temple where I teach youth classes. I believed before coming that I didn’t care about winning, and I committed to donating any winnings to the temple if I did.
But there was a part of my ego that wanted to represent a community that I feel sometimes is a little like my Grandpa’s shop on Beach Boulevard - suddenly swept out of memory by a society that is much larger and fast-paced. Upon reflection, maybe prompted by the MC saying that a “Haole Boy” could be Japanese American if they played the shamisen well, there was a little part of me that wished a descendant of the camps or martial law islands could win on that stage - to show the world that we’re still here. However, wishes like this are probably specifically why some Buddhist taiko players have warned about these kinds of competitions.
Instead, Buddhism found me on a dirty corner of Beach Boulevard, reflecting on the impermanence of things. Nothing in nature stays the same, it cycles through growth and decline. We, ourselves, are never the same from moment to moment. A title gets me no closer to being with my grandmother again, and any time I spend worrying about it takes me further away from moments with my loved ones. Buddhists are here because they get together as a sangha, through acts of community, big and small. Japanese Americans persist here and these experiences cannot be won in a contest.
At its heart, competition, perhaps, is not good or bad. It may be more about what you learn from it and the challenges you set for yourself. Structural issues can persist beyond the intrapersonal journey, but sometimes you also need to have faith in others and the community of practitioners. When I look at the journey getting here, maybe I should not be surprised to have found this realization as my reward.
Enlightenment is like a mountain, Rev. Mimatsu told me, in that there are many ways you can get to the top.
We visit for a bit more and slowly people make their leave from the house as the sky begins to show signs of evening. When it’s time for Lisa and I to go, we are given abundant leftovers and snacks for the drive back to Sacramento. As we drive away, everyone is standing on the porch waving, an old tradition that Grandma would do whenever we had to leave. I see my parents, aunts and uncles, as she was then, and push back tears. But I know I’ll be back soon. It’s a beautiful evening, and the world still feels like a big place.
