Komusō

The Komusō (虚無僧) ("priest of nothingness" or "monk of emptiness") were wandering non-monastic lay Buddhists from the warrior-class (samurai and rōnin) who were noted for wearing straw basket hats and playing the shakuhachi bamboo flute, nowadays called suizen (吹禅, 'Zen of blowing (the flute)'). During the Edo period (1600–1868) they obtained various rights and privileges from the bakufu, the ruling elite.

The 18th and 19th century saw a popularization of shakuhachi-playing among lay-people, accompanied by the interpretation and legitimation of this laicization in spiritual and esthetical terms derived from the Zen-tradition, to which the komusō nominally belonged. In the 19th century the komusō-tradition became known as the Fuke-shū (普化宗, Fuke sect) or Fuke Zen, after the publication of the Kyotaku denki (1795), which created a fictitious Rinzai Zen lineage starting with the eccentric Zen master Puhua (J. Fuke) of Tang China. This narrative legitimized the existence and rights of the komusō, but also ushered in the "bourgeoisization" of shakuhachi-playing in the 19th century.

The rights of the komusō were abolished in 1867, like other Buddhist organisations. Interest in their music style stayed alive in secular audiences, and a number of the pieces they composed and performed, called honkyoku, are preserved, played, and interpreted in the popular imagination as a token of Zen-spirituality, continuing the narrative which developed in the 18th and 19th century.

Wandering musicians were known at first as komosō (薦僧, literally "straw-mat monks"). By the mid-17th century, different characters were used for the same pronunciation, resulting in komusō as Komusō (虚無僧) (also romanized komusou or komuso), "priest of nothingness" or "monk of emptiness". The first two characters, kyomu (虚無) (or komu) mean "nothingness, emptiness", with kyo (虚) (or ko) meaning "nothing, empty, false", and mu (無) meaning "nothing, without". The last character, sō (僧), means "priest, monk".

Fuke-shū (普化宗, Fuke sect), from Fuke (Chinese- Zhenzhou Puhua), an eccentric Zen master mentioned in the Record of Linji a Chinese Chan Buddhist and shū, meaning school or sect.

The understanding of the history of the komusō and the Fuke-shu had long been dominated by the Keichô Okite Gaki (c. 1680) and the Kyotaku denki Kokuti Kai (1795), a forged Governmental Decree and a fictional origin-narrative, respectively. Historical research by Nakazuka Chikozan in the 1930s showed the spurious nature of these texts, and a revised history has emerged since then, as set out by Sanford (1977) and Kamisango (1988).

Predecessors of the komuso's were beggar-monks with unshaved heads known as boro's, boroboro or boronji, mentioned in the Tsurezurega (c. 1330). These boro merged in the late 15th century into the komosō ("straw-mat monks", named after the straw sleeping-mats which they carried along), which played the shakuhachi, and are depicted in paintings and texts from around 1500 onwards. The komosō came to be known as komusō. There is no evidence of any earlier tradition of shakuhachi-playing monks, and it is recorded that in 1518 the shakuhachi was regarded by some as an instrument for court music (gagaku), not for religious music.

The earliest komosō, predecessors of the later "priests of nothingness", were poor beggar monks without any social status in society. The later komusō, on the other hand, had to be of samurai family, even though the practice of teaching shakuhachi to townspeople had become very popular already in the early 18th century.