Many people assume that the end of the line is the end of a phrase in koten honkyoku, especially because you often take breaths at the end of a line. This is why people often take their time in breathing in between lines.
However,it happens often that the break at the end of a line may not be the break of the phrase, which may be elsewhere. These are not always obvious when playing koten honkyoku, so the issue deserves careful consideration.
Where is the beginning and end of a musical phrase? Where is it OK to take a long,slow breath? Sometimes it can improve your understanding of a phrase to write two lines as one long line.
Even though they are written on two lines, and even though there is a breath between them, these two lines should often be treated as one long phrase. Conversely,sometimes what is written in one long line can also be written in two shorter ones, if they are actually two separate phrases.
This brings up the question of how and where to take breaths. In the example above of two lines with a breath in between them actually constituting one coherent musical phrase, how do you breathe?
In this case you should take a short, quick breath to enable you to finish the phrase, but not take your time so that you lose continuity. There are other places where you can take your breaths much more leisurely.
In this way, paying attention to how you take in your breaths can help you improve your awareness of where phrases begin and end, and vice versa.