I've had mixed feelings about this shakuhachi piece for a while. I played it at a concert once, admittedly not having much of a grasp of the piece's intent, though I had been playing it for about 15 years. At the time, I had taken it as a portrait of the various activities of night - silence, bug sounds, etc.
A man who was taking lessons from me at the time wrote to me afterward with his impressions. For Shinya, he pictured demons dancing on a distant shore, preparing mischief.
This threw me off. It wasn't what I had intended with the piece at all. Granted, these old pieces are designed to lay hearts bare, both that of the player and that of the listener. What he heard wasn't necessarily what I was playing... but his comments touched on something - there was an aspect to the piece that I still didn't get. I put it aside, and didn't play it much at all for a few years after.
I was at the World Shakuhachi Festival this year, mainly to translate for some of my own teachers who were giving lectures. I jumped at the chance to translate for Atsuya Okuda, who was leading a workshop on his version of Sanya. During the workshop, he said that we shouldn't be too literal in interpreting the title. For me, as soon as I heard this it seemed so stupidly obvious that I have no idea how I missed it all these years. It's not about bug sounds over the backdrop of a still night. It's about the dark night of the soul.
Okuda-sensei said it was about the complex condition of the heart before enlightenment - struggle, right thinking, distractions, falsehood, faith, all mixed in together.
In St. John of the Cross' poem of the same title, the dark night of the soul is a period of darkness - of struggle, or perhaps a darkening of the senses wherein God seems to be far away - that leads eventually into new depths of intimacy with God. Our senses seem to be dead and passionless, and God seems to be absent - but this is only because we are being refined, broken, and molded into something new, someone capable of containing the depths of God, the love of Christ. Love is not something we are naturally able to feel, in its true form. God is hidden in his light, which looks like darkness from where we stand - "Clouds of deep darkness surround him." Here we learn what faith and love are - a faith that holds on without seeing, a love that is faithful without being able to feel.
At the same time, this doesn't quite fit the character of Shinya... not completely, anyway. It expresses peace, but also struggle. It's not about a period of not being able to see God as it is about the complex or confused state of the soul. Jesus' words in his midnight conversation with Nicodemus come to mind:
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.
I think Shinya is about exposing your heart to the light - all the good, all the bad, all the confusion, just as it is. From Psalm 139:
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
God shines in the darkness.
Faith is the only way through. When our wrongs, our shame, our failings tempt us to despair, we turn our gaze away from ourselves to Jesus. When things are going wrong and it seems like we won't have "enough" (friends, or money, or approval, or whatever), we exercise faith in God who provides, and act as if we have plenty (because we do, actually). When our old, dead self flares up, we just keep going. When we can't see, we trust that we are seen by our Father who is good.
This is what Shinya is expressing: faith mixed with fear, goodness mixed with unwanted evil, vision mixed with blindness. This is a piece for dark nights, for laying the soul bare before God, trusting God with everything that's going on inside. As the earth turns, darkness passes and turns to light. There's nothing we can do to speed up the process, but we can be present through it, with the One who is always present to us.
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