[1][2] He is a recipient of two of the most revered lineages of shakuhachi playing, descending from the original Zen Buddhist "priests of nothingness" of the Edo period (1600-1868 CE).
The family moved to Hawaii in 1966, where as a high school student, Lee first heard the shakuhachi on an LP record that his elder brother brought home.
From 1973 through 1977, he toured internationally as a full-time performer of taiko (festival drums) and shakuhachi with Ondekoza (now called Kodo), a group of traditional Japanese musicians.
The couple left for Australia in 1986 for Lee to take up a PhD fellowship in ethnomusicology on the transmission of the Zen Buddhist repertoire of the shakuhachi at the University of Sydney.
He introduced the shakuhachi to diverse audiences as both a soloist and with other performers of instruments including harp, cello, saxophone, tabla, guitar, didgeridoo, and symphony orchestra.
He performed with the Sydney Dance Company in the 1999 Australian season of Graham Murphy's Air and Other Invisible Forces, touring the US at the end of 2000 and Europe in 2001 with the production.
On 1 January 2000, Lee was seen, with five other musicians, on an internationally televised program, ushering in the new millennium from the top of the sails of the Sydney Opera House.
[6] Lee was the artistic director and chair of the executive committee of the World Shakuhachi Festival 2008, a four-day event in 2008, at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the City Recital Hall.
Riley Lee started teaching breathing workshops in the late 1980s, at the suggestion of one of his students, the Sydney acupuncturist Ross Penman.