–Buddhist saying and Ma

“Do not speak, unless it improves on silence.”

 

Within Shakuhachi music there is silence, between notes, between phrases. This is not emptiness, it has space and relationships. It is Ma (間).
It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of vision.
Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements. Therefore ma can be defined as experiential place understood with emphasis on interval.