Playing guqin as meditation - a balance of concentration and mindfulness

A professor once asked me: what's the difference between mindfulness while doing something, and doing something as meditation itself? For more than a year, I searched for an answer. Suddenly today, I was very inspired and moved after reading what Phil Nyokai James Sensei, a shakuhachi master wrote on his webpage. You can read his original writing at this link.

In the same sense, I would like to suggest that, just like playing the shakuhachi, playing the guqin also requires a balance of concentration and mindfulness.

Adapting Nyokai Sensei's valuable words of wisdom, I would like to offer that, just like playing shakuhachi, in the case of playing guqin:

Concentration refers to attention of the guqin player to the sound of the fingers interacting with the guqin's silk strings, its pitch, tone color, dynamics, sounds of the fingers sliding on the guqin's fingerboard, the moments of silence between the notes, et cetera.

Mindfulness refers to openness to whatever else is going on: to the sounds of birds, or the train on the tracks outside the window (as in my case, I live next to an MRT train station), to the sensations in one's body, the feeling of the rough texture of the silk strings, the sound of "dragon's breath" finger sliding sounds on the guqin's finger board . All of these, too, are part of the music. Guqin music should have a very open weave, full of space, never suffocating the world around you.

I used to lament that my guqin was not good enough, not loud enough, or my silk strings were not of the highest grade, that I live in a noisy environment, that I live in a humid and tropical country. But now I think different. Tonight I played with the windows in my living room completely open. Even though the sounds from my guqin were extremely soft, almost inaudible, I let the sounds of my guqin blend in together with the ongoing symphony that's already playing in the lifeworld. Suddenly I feel very contended. Perhaps this could be my Kensho. hahaha LOL

PS. Phil Nyokai James Sensei suffered a stroke in 2010. Please kindly donate generously to his family if you can at this webpage. He is married with a young child. Thank you.