These are just my own thoughts and are a work in progress.
The Japanese arts are practised with great commitment and focus, and sometimes with an overtly spiritual perspective.
I really recommend reading about taiko from the perspective of my late teacher, master taiko player Kurumaya-sensei. His philosophy in playing and teaching taiko is described on his website and my own teaching and practice is very influenced by his: kurumayataiko.com
You need to practise with enthusiasm, wishing every time to put your entire self (wholly) into every single beat, whilst taking care of the partner playing with you. You need to throw the energy with all your might, putting all of your energy into that exact moment when you hit the Taiko. It is at that precise moment only that you can show the sound’s colour and tint. It is then that the sound’s echo will continue throughout eternity.
— Kurumaya Masaaki-sensei
I’ve listened to both Kurumaya-sensei and Watanabe-sensei, of legendary Tokyo taiko group Amanojaku, emphasising the value of going deeply into one thing; once you understand that profoundly, you have an insight into reality, whereas if you understand lots of things superficially, you don’t really understand anything. (They expressed this much more eloquently than I’ve been able to translate.)
I also love this quote by the famous 17th century haiku poet, Bashō:
Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise, you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one—when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.
If you just replace ‘poetry’ with ‘taiko playing’…