So very lovely. Forgive me if some of you are expecting something more experimental, electronic, or whatever else now. Me, I just want something like this. What is this? It’s the beginning of Ryokyu Endo’s sublime form of Japanese New Age music. In 1994, Ryokyu Endo’s Song Of Pure Land, or The Song Of Pure Land (its lesser known, original title), debuted this idea of a new kind of healing music. Largely organic and deeply spiritual, Song Of Pure Land is this powerful reminder of the strength found in gentler ways. As close as Japan got to producing its own Popol Vuh, it’s a wonder to me that his music remains largely unknown.
Ryokyu Endo, now a priest, of all things, is largely known as one of the world’s leading Tao Shiatsu master and practitioner. It’s in this whole world of therapeutic study that you get glimpses of the music he would seek to make.
At a young age, Ryokyu followed his family from Tokyo to New York City, digesting early hippie and revolutionary movements circling the U.S. in the late ‘60s. Once he settled back in Japan, rather than continue his studies, Ryokyu would lead the life of many disillusioned youth and get into drugs, perform in various disco bands, do some odd jobs, and get into general debauchery. On some off day, he ran into a group of Buddhists from the Jōdo Shinshū practice better known as Pure Land, but even more widely known as practitioners who famously immolated themselves in protest during the Vietnam War, performing their active musical meditation nenbutsu. Something in that music triggered his better instincts and led him to follow the path of “Pure Land”.
Deeply engrossing himself in the oriental medicine, shiatsu specifically, Ryokyu discovered a way to help others heal physically. Then, as he dove deeper into the world of Yuzu Nembutsu, he discovered the importance music and chant can aid in helping others heal mentally and spiritually. Vowing to become a priest, he took the monastic life and attempted that great thing: to crossover the lessons into action.
Once again he’d leave Japan, this time to India, to get closer to the source of meridian and pressure point studies. Unluckily for Ryokyu, a bout of malaria nearly did him in, and forced him to return back to Japan. What time he did spend there allowed him to include these other modalities to the musical and healing world he was traversing. Musically, it was being able to adapt micro-tunings and vedantic songs to the Pure Land musical vocabulary.
By the time of this, his first CD release, Ryokyu had advanced in his practices far enough that he had achieved priesthood but went even further had started to combine many acupuncture and healing studies to create some of the first English-translated books on what he’d dub “Tao Shiatsu” a method more in tune with the modern way of human life. Accompanying his manual practice never far behind was his own original music.
On Song Of Pure Land, Ryokyu performs on electric guitar, flute, koto, plus all sorts of Japanese folk percussion/instruments and synthesizer to genuinely get you into a modern form of Yuzu Nembutsu by augmenting aeons old hymns with compositions that aim for a different kind of anticipated, divine musical weightlessness. Interested in seeing how far he could contextualize that same experience he felt when he turned into this new way, in a new way, Ryokyu Endo’s Song Of Pure Land is that fervor translated into this music. Although, this music was released on MIDI Inc. to be promoted in secular markets, its roots really are in music you’d hear in the temple he’d normally be found.
“Spiritual Sunrise” sets the tone mixing field recordings interspersed with open-hearted ambient rock that has knowing ties to the ancient musicalities of all the Silk Road. The goal of this album was to mentally detoxify the listener, to give you music that can make you better understand the clean earth where the Buddha lives. Simply wonderful music to wake up to or to fill that void you drown with so much noise, Song Of Pure Land moves very gingerly, languidly, and deeply, to cover many gradients, in its gentle way.
“Welcome To Pure Land” evokes the music of Tosha Suiho and Midori Takada, siphoning organic musical growth into a moving minimalist soundscape that’s like little else. “Kanze-On [Bodhisatva]” presents the divinity of the Bodhisattva through its tantric feeling, touching quite beautifully on the original cyclical recitation style that probably spurred Ryokyu to follow this path. “Celebrate” luxuriates on placid guitar, wave sounds, and synth pads looking for a meditation to sink into. “Whisper Of Waves” then goes even slower, scaling back all the sonics for pure atmosphere, perfect to unwind to.
Sachi Adachi who would design this album, and future book/album covers for Ryokyu, struggled in the beginning to justify drawing the Buddha (in all its forms) as distinctly human. He theorized that to do so would be to neglect the enlightened form he had achieved. On this album he began with the cocoon, the embryonic shape of unborn souls looking for a body to dwell in, acknowledging that this was just the beginning of Ryokyu’s musical practice for us. Shapeless, a being of light, the outline in its form wasn’t as important as the feelings its imparting. Song Of Pure Land, I think, has its own way of meeting you there. And would you believe there is more there to take you afterward?
I have been a demon of persistence while pursuing the Hotoke (the Buddha) idealistically and fervently. Now that I am awake to the existence of the Hotoke within my soul, the scene reflected in my inner-cosmos is full of Spring sunshine, the smell of young leaves, the twittering of little birds, and the love of people around me, overflowing with brilliance and the warmth of life, i.e. full of the Hotoke which my mind had once locked out.
– Sachi Adachi, Song Of Pure Land album painter