From The Honolulu Advertiser, Feb. 9, 1997
Author Finds Zen in Music Making
By Wanda A. Adams
The message of Philip Toshio Sudo's Zen Guitar might be expressed this way: Open your mind, shut your mouth, and do what you do.
But that would be too brutal a distillation of this simple, lyrical work.
On the surface, Zen Guitar, written by a Maui guitarist and writer, is about applying the principles of Zen--calming and opening your mind, narrowing your focus, exercising discipline and such--to playing the guitar.
But the book is not about the guitar at all. As Sudo writes: "There are no chords or tunings or music theory . . . . You won't find lessons on how to read music, play the blues, fingerpick, or copy 'Stairway to Heaven.'"
The book is about a way to life your life. Guitar is the medium because it happens to be the instrument through which Sudo's own inner voice is expressed. But a perceptive reader will see that the book could just as well have been "Zen Quilting" or "Zen Auto Mechanics."
"Guitar is just a metaphor here," said Sudo in a telephone conversation from his home. "That is a key point about this book."
He got the idea for the book while reading "The Book of Five Rings," a treatise on strategy by the 16th-century samurai Miyamoto Musashi. It was the 1980s and there was quite a vogue among American business leaders to read this book as a way of better understanding Japanese business strategy.
"It sort of came to me in an epiphany when I was playing with these two guys I regularly played with, and we were just jamming and the music got to the point where it broke through to a transcendental moment, wherethe whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The divisions fell away and we became a solid unit. And I said, 'Hey! Zen guitar,' " he recalled.
Afterward, Sudo began keeping a notebook on his amp, and jotting down notes between takes.
Sudo emphasizes that he does not consider himself a Zen master. "I'm a student. I'm just imparting certain lessons that I've learned," he said.
He doesn't agree with a view expressed by a Japanese cousin of his, that writing about Zen is the province of monks on mountaintops. "My understanding of Zen doesn't place a lot of importance on mystical language. What I'm trying to say is that doing and participating with the right frame of mind is enough."
That means sitting down to work with a mind free of distraction and self-doubt, working every day, doing your best and doing it again and knowing that the journey is not about the destination. "Talk," he says in the words of a Chinese proverb, "does not cook rice."
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