Traditionally, the student sits opposite the master and mirrors his action. Weiss has mastered a very rustic instrument called a shakuhachi, a bamboo flute that originated in China and whose music was developed and practiced in Japan by Japanese monks during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The shakuhachi can produce 84 different notes, but to learn them all is a painstaking effort. Shakuhachi is very much associated with Zen Buddhism, since the earliest music was developed as a series of meditations. After a couple of years, the piece becomes your own.
Nothing is written down.
It's all through teaching. It was called mystery music in its beginnings, because the priests were thoroughly disguised when they played publicly. Wearing baskets with eye holes cut out over their heads, they would beg for donations for their shrines by playing the flutes. Practitioners would say it wasn't just breath but breadth of soul because of the spiritual element that the music calls forth. It was the early '70s, and he and his wife had just returned from living in a kibbutz in Israel.