No(h) way

In Religion and Theater, we're looking at Japanese Noh drama this week. C is interested particularly in Zeami, the son of the father-and-son team who founded this art form who was not only an actor and playwright (and banished: she especially likes embattled writers) but wrote very eloquently about the practice and meaning of being an actor. It fell to me to provide a crash course in the religious background to Noh, something I've never really had to work out before. It's not simple. In particular, I found, it's misleading to describe Noh as a Zen art form. Not only does the Noh have antecedents in quasi-ritual performances at Shinto shrines - indeed the archetypal case of someone possessed by someone else's curse is a pre-, indeed non-Buddhist idea - but the Noh plays are full of every kind of medieval Japanese Buddhism. Some invoke Amida, some feature the miracles of the Lotus Sutra, and one play that we were reading works primarily with the esoteric Shingon tradition.

So I gave a little lecturette called "Buddhism ≠ Zen ≠ Noh," which ended with a reading of the Shingonoid play, "Sotoba Komachi," written originally by Kan'ami (the father) but shortened and tightened by Zeami (the son). Two priests - one a Shingon priest - cross a river and see an old beggar woman; she sees them, and sits down on what she takes to be a tree stump. It is in fact a stupa (Japanese: sotoba) of Kongosatta Buddha, one of the bodhisattvas venerated by Shingon. The priests alert her to this infraction, but in the ensuing conversation she turns out to be much more than just an old beggar. The first priest says:

He that has once looked upon a stupa shall for all eternity
avoid the three worst catastrophes.

She responds:

One sudden thought can strike illumination.

His words are consonant with the more magical world of esoteric Buddhism, hers more Zen-like - but it's clear that "illumination" has not yet come for her; she sounds enlightened - why is she still here, and suffering so? By the time the play ends, the moment of her release has come, made possibly by this fortuitous encounter with a (Shingon) priest at a (Shingon) stupa.

The priests discover that the woman is in fact a famous old poetess, Komachi, who has been haunted by the curse of an old admirer, Shii no Shosho. While still young and beautiful, she told Shii no Shosho she would receive him if he came 100 times with his chariot, but he dies on the 99th night. His unrequited passion possesses her, and in the middle of the conversation with the priests Komachi becomes Shii no Shosho. (The actor changes costume.) And then - somehow - as the actor is both Komachi and Shii no Shosho at once, release is effected. It's as if the presence of the priests allows him (Shii) to make his 100th visit, for her (Komachi) to receive him, to break the spell. And so she returns to herself:

It was his unsatisfied love possessed me so
His anger that turned my wits.
In the face of this I will pray
For life in the worlds to come
The sands of goodness I will pile
Into a towering hill.
Before the golden, gentle Buddha I will lay
Poems as my flowers.
Entering in the Way
Entering in the Way.

What has happened here? It's not that the priest said something which led to her awakening, her satori. He's also not performed a ritual. So it's not really Zen or Shingon. It seems that the vow of the Kongosatta Buddha to save suffering beings - embodied in the stupa - has brought them together here (or you could call it karma), where their very encounter effects the transformation. Noh isn't Zen as opposed to Shingon or whatever; but it's decisively about the indispensability of the right kind of encounter - best and perhaps only grasped through theater - to releasing us suffering beings from the world of delusion and ignorance.

Funny, huh: this fictive world - and there is no theatrical tradition more intensely contrived, formalized, stylized, more self-consciously unrealistic - proves more religiously true than ours.