The overhead crossbeams, installed between the columns at a height of slightly over six feet, are similar to the columns in diameter and appearance. The ceiling of the rooms is roughly two feet above the crossbeams, orkamoi, with the intervening space usually filled either by a vertical open wooden latticework, theramma, or a plaster-and-board combination, thenageshi. On exterior walls of therammais ordinarily a solid extension of theshojiwhich inhibits air flow from the outside. Thekamoi,nageshi, andrammahave a structural as well as aesthetic obligation; they are the only solid lateral supports between the upright columns. The ceiling itself is a light wood latticework over which has been laid a platform of thin boards still in their natural state, as is all the woodwork.Visitors enter through thegenkanportico, where street shoes are replaced by soft-soled slippers, to prevent scratches on the exposed wooden veranda and hallways. At the entrance to atatami-carpeted room, the slippers too are relinquished, and host and guests are both in stocking feet, a state that encourages familiarity. The reception room is empty as a cell, and as it basks in the diffuse light of theshoji, it seems suspended in time—heedless of the season. The only furniture may be a small central table around which guests and host seat themselves on square cushions. Or perhaps there are lamps with rice-paper shades, one or two knee-high chests of drawers, and if the weather requires it, one or more charcoal braziers, either a small moveable hibachi for hand warming or a larger heater sunk into a center recess in the flooring, often beneath the table, or both. The purpose of these is apparently more symbolic than functional, for they do little to influence the temperature in the paper-walled rooms. Arrangements for summer cooling are equally metaphysical; theshojiare simply thrown open in hopes of snaring wayward breezes, whose meager cooling is enhanced psychologically by the tinkle of wind bells hung in the verandas.The aesthetic focus of the room is thetokonoma, or picture recess, set into one of the plaster walls, with a raised dais for its floor and an artificial, lowered ceiling. Thetokonomahas a smallshoji-covered window at one side which illuminates a hanging scroll, and there is usually an incense burner (in recognition of its original monastic function) or a simple flower arrangement on its floor. Adjacent to thetokonomais thechigai-dana, a shelved storage area hidden by sliding panels, which may be used to storekimonosor bedding rather than the writing implements of Zen monks as in the past. Thetokonomaandchigai-danaare separated by a thin dividing wall whose outer edge is fronted by a single polished post, thetoko-bashira, a natural tree trunk stripped of its bark to reveal its gnarled surface texture. Thetoko-bashirahas the quality of polished driftwood, intended to bring a touch of raw nature to the otherwise austere and monastic ambience of the room.As the guest kneels on the cushions and sips green tea, the host may slide aside a rearshojito reveal the roofless garden of the inner courtyard, his private abstraction of the natural landscape. Flowers are purposely absent, but in their placemay be tiny shaped pines, a pond, and receding, rocky pathways. The mossy stones glisten with dew (or with water from a recent dousing by the host in preparation for his guests), and the air is fresh with the scent of greenery. Only upon careful inspection does the deception evaporate and the garden reveal itself to be a tiny plot surrounded by a bamboo and plaster fence; the natural world has been extracted and encapsulated into a single view, at once as authentic as the forest and as artfully detailed as a Flemish miniature. This view—a heritage of Zenshoindesign—is vital to the aesthetic magic of the house, for it brings the works of man and nature together in a way that blurs their distinction. Exterior space is united with interior space just as Zen philosophy identifies the external world as an extension of man's inner life.Indeed, all the subjective aspects of the Japanese house are Zen-inspired. The most apparent design feature is the clean lines that mark the boundaries of space, from the geometrical delineation of floor areas, brought out by the dark bindings of the tatami, to the exposed skeletal framework of columns and horizontal beams. By deliberately excluding curved lines (whose implied sensuality would be at odds with Zen ideals of austerity) in the partitioning of space, the house achieves a geometrical formality both elegant and pure. This sense of free space is further realized by the rigorous exclusion of extraneous ornamentation (again a Zen aesthetic precept) and by placing all essential furnishings in the center of the room rather than around the sides, as in the West. Design aesthetics are also served by the emphasis on the natural texture of materials and the contrast realized when different materials (such as clay walls and exposed wood) are placed side by side. Finally, the indirect lighting provided by theshojigives daytime rooms a subjective sense of perpetual afternoon, mellowing the visual properties of the materials, softening harsh colors to pastels, and enhancing the overall feeling of naturalness in the exposed woods.The removable partitions, both internal and external, create a sense of interdependent yet fluid space so startling to Westerners that it is often the first thing they notice in a Japanese house. The concept is, of course, derived from a basic philosophical presumption inherent in all Zen art, from ink paintings to ceramics, that freedom is most keenly perceived when it is exercised within a rigorous framework of constraints and discipline. More important, and more difficult to define, is the Zen concept ofshibui, the studied restraint that might be described as knowing when to stop.Shibui, perhaps more than any other aesthetic principle, typifies the influence of Zen on Japanese ideals. It means many things, including the absence of all that is not essential; a sense of disciplined strength deliberately held in check to make what is done seem effortless; the absence of the ornate and the explicit in favor of the sober and the suggestive; and the elegance that can be realized when the purest of natural materials are integrated in a formal, balanced orchestration.3In addition to the aesthetic aspects, there is also a quality of psychological suggestion stemming from Zen in the Japanese house. Zen monks early realized that the cell-like austerity of a room could be used to manipulate the consciousness of those caught in its precincts. The impact of this was well described by the early-twentieth-century traveler Ralph Adams Cram:There is something about the great spacious apartments, airy and full of mellow light, that is curiously satisfying, and one feels the absence of furniture only with a sense of relief. Free from the rivalry of crowded furnishings, men and women take on a quite singular quality of dignity and importance.4'The "singular quality of dignity and importance" is one of the most fundamental discoveries of Zen interior designers. In the absence of decorative distractions, one must concentrate on his own mind and on the minds of others present. Host and guest find their focus on one another has been deliberately enhanced, breaking down the barriers of separateness and individual identity. Each word, each gesture is rendered richer, more significant. Heinrich Engel, who understood the source of the mysterious effects which Ralph Adams Cram could only describe in bewilderment, has explained this phenomenon:[The individual interior room] provides an environment that requires man's presence and participation to fill the void. Room in the Western residence is human without man's presence, for man's memory lingers in the multiple devices of decoration, furniture, and utility. Room in the Japanese residence becomes human only through man's presence. Without him, there is no human trace. Thus, the empty room provides the very space where man's spirit can move freely and where his thoughts can reach the very limits of their potential.5Stated differently, the Japanese room forces introspection on those who enter it alone—a function completely in keeping with the interests of Zen. Souls who have felt the weight of too much liberty (and undeserved decorator's license) will find here a solemn retreat and a heightened sense of internal awareness. Here as never before one's mind is one's own, undistracted by the prosaic implements of living with which Westerners ordinarily engulf themselves. One should be warned, however, that this liberation of the consciousness is powerful stuff. The Japanese Zen room is a concentration cell which, although it can unite the minds of those who share it, can often tell those who enter it alone more than they want to know about their own interior lives.The restraining discipline taught by Zen has both made the traditional Japanese house possible and reconciled its inhabitants to the practical difficulties of living in it. Although few Westerners would accept the inconvenience and sometime discomfort of these houses, many of the early Zen designers' ideals have begun to be seen in architecture and design in the West. It is well known that the Japanese integration of house and environment influenced Frank Lloyd Wright and that a purging of ornamentation was the credo of the Bauhaus. The Japanese principle of modular design is now influential in the West, and we have finally discovered the possibilities for multiple uses of space, with modern "efficiency" apartments that combine all living functions, from dining to entertaining to sleeping, in a single room. Interest has grown recently in the texture of interior materials, which it is now realized provide a necessary visual warmth, and there is increasing integration of living areas with gardens, patios, and the outdoors, and a blessed reduction in superfluous decoration, with the re-establishment of emphasis on clean lines, open space, and the quality of light. Perhaps most important of all, we in the West are finally taking to heart what the Japanese Zen monks knew in medieval times: that domestic architecture and interiors can and should fulfill a requirement in our lives that is ordinarily served by art.CHAPTERELEVENThe No TheaterIt is not, like our theatre, a place where every fineness and subtlety must give way; where every fineness of word or of word-cadence is sacrificed to the "broad effect"; where the paint must be put on with a broom. It is a stage where every subsidiary art is bent precisely upon upholding the faintest shade of difference; where the poet may be silent while the gestures consecrated by four centuries of usage show meaning.Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, Classic Noh Theatre of JapanNoh actor with maskNoh stage with chorusThe Ashikagaage of Zen art is remembered today not only for gardens, painting, and architecture but also for drama and poetry. The leading political figure of the era, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, was himself an accomplished poet in the short verse forms once so popular with Heian courtier-aesthetes. But the most exalted poetry of the age was that written for the No drama, a literary art form born of Zen and at once as austere as a stone garden and as suggestive as a monochrome painting. The No is performed today virtually as it was six hundred years ago, and in its ritual symbolism it seems at times a cross between the Christian Mass and an Aeschylean tragedy. The essence of Zen aesthetic theory is evoked throughout its haunting poetry, its understated but intense style of acting, its delicately carved masks, and its mournful music and songs.Like other Zen arts, the No was fashioned out of materials from distant times and places. The first Japanese dramatic arts were derived from various forms of Chinese farces and court dances. The farces, orgigaku, were popular with the Nara aristocracy, while the dances, orbugaku, came into favor with the more refined Heian court. Although thebugakuform undoubtedly influenced Japanese ideas on the blending of drama and dance, by the end of the Heian era it had become a lifeless ceremony for the emperor and his court—a role it still enjoys on occasions when performances are staged for the imperial family.The real origins of the No are traceable to a somewhat lustier Chinese import, a circus-type entertainment called by the Japanesesarugaku. In addition to the display of various physical feats of daring, thesarugakuincluded farcical playlets and suggestive, sometimes indecent dances. A common theme seems to have been the lampooning of clergy, both Buddhist and Shinto. (In this respect, the development of native drama in Japan ran parallel with the resurgence of dramatic art in Europe after the Middle Ages, as citizens on both sides of the globe taunted the theological enslavement of feudal society by burlesques and dances ridiculing hypocritical authority figures.)The studied indecency of earlysarugakuwas undoubtedly intended to parody the pomposity of Shinto rituals. But as time went by, the rustic dance-stories evolved into a more structured drama, thesarugaku-no-No, which was the thirteenth-century Japanese equivalent of the European morality play. The earlier farces were transformed into comedies known askyogen(in which wily servants repeatedly tricked their masters), which today serve as interlude pieces to relieve the gravity of a program of No plays, just as the early Greek satyr plays were performed after a trilogy of tragedies in the Athenian theater.In the early versions of the sarugaku-no-No, the performers sang and danced, but as the form matured a chorus was added to supply the verses during certain segments of the dance. By the middle of the fourteenth century, about the time of Chaucer's birth, Japanese No was already an established dramatic form, containing all the major elements it has today. It was, however, merely village drama, and so it might have remained except for a chance occurrence in the year 1374.In that year Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, already shogun at age seventeen, attended a performance of thesarugaku-no-Nofor the first time. The entertainment was a great favorite with his subjects, and he was trying to establish himself as a man of the people. A particularly well-known actor was scheduled to perform in Kyoto, and Yoshimitsu went to see him. The actor was Kannami (1333-1384), today famous as the father of the No. Yoshimitsu was excited by Kannami, but he was even more enthralled by the actor's handsome eleven-year-old son Zeami (1363-1444), who also appeared in the play. Yoshimitsu became Kannami's patron, but young Zeami he took to his couch (a common enough occurrence insamuraicircles of the age). Zeami was devoted to the No, even as Yoshimitsu became devoted to Zeami, and thus began the long marriage of Zen culture and the No theater.Through Yoshimitsu thesarugaku-no-Nocame under the influence of the circle of Zen aesthetes surrounding him, and what had once been a broad popular entertainment became an aristocratic art. Supported by Yoshimitsu's patronage, Zeami became the Shakespeare of the No, writing the finest plays in the repertoire as well as several volumes of essays on aesthetic theories and acting technique. Although Zeami claimed to have learned everything from his father, the austere and poetic No that came to perfection during the Ashikaga was largely his own creation. His poetry has never been equaled, and his handbook of technique has remained the No actor's bible. Yet he might never have been heard of had it not been for Yoshimitsu, who, in the words of Donald Keene, found the No brick and left it marble.The classic No stage is a splendid example of Zen-influenced architecture. The stage is a platform of golden, polished woodcovered by a heavy arched roof supported by stout pillars at each of the four corners. The entire structure projects out into the audience, almost as though a wooden shrine had been reconstructed in the middle of the auditorium. The actors approach the platform along a wide entry ramp that leads off stage right to a curtained entranceway at the rear of the auditorium. The ramp has three small pine trees spaced evenly along its length, while on the backdrop of the stage proper there is a painting of a massive gnarled pine. As though to suggest Shinto origins for the drama, the stage and entrance ramp are symbolically separated from the audience by an encircling expanse of white sand, spanned at the very front of the stage by a small symbolic wooden stair. The acting platform is square, approximately twenty feet by twenty, with an additional rear area to accommodate the musicians and another area at stage left where the chorus kneels. Underneath the stage, unseen by the audience, are a number of large clay pots, a traditional acoustic device to amplify the resonance of the actors' voices. The few properties used in the plays are introduced and removed through an auxiliary entrance at the rear of the stage.The beginning of the play is signaled offstage by the high- pitched wail of a bamboo flute. Two attendants with bamboo poles lift back the variegated brocade curtain covering the doorway to the ramp, and the musicians, either three or four in number, enter single file and position themselves in the prescribed order along the rear of the stage—the flautist sitting on the floor Japanese style, and the two major drummers on stools they carry with them. (If a bass drum is required, its player must join the flautist on the floor.) The No flute is not particularly unusual, except for an exceptionally strident tone, but the two primary No drums are unlike anything in the West. Although they are of different sizes, both resemble a large hourglass with an ox hide drawn over either end and held taut by heavy leather cords. The smaller drum, whose hide surface the players must periodically soften with his breath, is held on the player's right shoulder and struck with the right hand. Its sound is a muffled, funereal boom, lower in pitch than that of the other, larger drum, the larger drum is held on the player's left knee and struck with the fingers of the left hand, which may be protected by thimbles of leather or ivory. It produces a sharp, urgent click, used to punctuate the cadence of the performance. The bass drum used in certain dramas is played with drumsticks in the Western manner. The drummers also sometimes provide rhythm by interjecting monosyllabic shouts between drumbeats.As the musicians enter, so does the chorus, eight or ten men dressed in formal Japanese "black tie" kimonos. They seat themselves Japanese style in two rows along stage left, where they must remain immobile for the duration of the play (which may be well over an hour). Since younger Japanese are less resigned to the persistent ache accompanying the traditional seating posture than their elders, the chorus usually tends to be well on in years. The chorus fills in dialogue for the actors during dance sequences; it makes no commentary on the action as does the chorus in Greek tragedy, nor does it have any special identity as part of the cast. Its members merely take up the voice of the actors from time to time like a dispassionate, heavenly choir.With chorus and orchestra present, the overture begins. The first sounds are the piercing lament of the flute and the insistent crack of the drums, against which the drummers emit deep-throated, strangled cries. This stunning eruption of sound signals the entrance of the dramatis personae as the brocade curtain is again drawn aside for the first cast member, usually awaki, or supporting actor, who enters with measured, deliberate pace onto the entrance ramp, where he advances with a sliding, mechanical tread toward the stage.Thewaki, often representing an itinerant monk dressed in subdued black robes, begins telling the story, either in his own voice or aided by the chorus, establishing the locale and circumstances of the scene about to unfold, after which he retires to a corner of the stage and seats himself to await the entrance of the protagonist, orshite. The brocade curtain parts again to reveal theshite, richly costumed and frequently masked, who approaches to sing and dance out his story before the waitingwaki. Theshite'ssplendid costume contrasts strikingly with the austerity of the stage and the other costumes.On first appearance theshiteordinarily is intended to be a human form, albeit often a troubled one, but as his tale unfolds he becomes not so much an actual being as the personification of a soul. If the play is in two parts, in the second part he may assume his real identity, often only hinted in the first, of a spirit from the dead. Prefiguring the Shakespearean soliloquy, the confessional song of theshitespeaks for the universal consciousness as he pours out his tortured inner emotions. As theshitesings, the knowingwakiserves as confessor and provides a foil for any dialogue. The play climaxes with the dance of theshite, a stiff, stylized, sculptural sequence of mannered postures and gestures which draw heavily upon traditional Shinto sacred dances. With this choreographic resolution the play closes, and all exeunt single file as they entered—to the restrained acknowledgment of the audience.The No repertoire contains five primary categories of plays. There are "god plays," in which the shite is a supernatural spirit, frequently disguised, whose divinity is made manifest during the final dance. In "warrior plays," theshitemay be a martial figure from the Kamakura era who speaks in universal terms about his own personal tragedy. "Woman plays" are lyric evocations of a beautiful woman, often a courtesan, who has been wronged in love. The fourth category includes a grab bag of dramas often focusing on an historical episode or on theshitebeing driven to madness by guilt or, in the case of a woman, jealousy. Finally, there are "demon plays," in which the shite is a vengeful ogre, often sporting a flowing red or white wig, who erupts into a frenzied dance to demonstrate his supernatural displeasure over some event.Many of the classic plays are a study of the tortured mental world of the dead. Even in warrior plays and woman plays the central character is frequently a spirit from the nether world who returns to chronicle a grievance or to exact some form of retribution from a living individual. Plot is deliberately suppressed. Instead of a story, the play explores an emotional experience or a state of mind—hatred, love, longing, fear, grief, and occasionally happiness. The traditional components of Western drama—confrontation, conflict, characterization, self-realization, development, resolution—are almost entirely absent. In their placeis the ritualized reading of an emotional state that rarely grows or resolves during the play; it is simply described.The artistic content of the No is embodied in the masks, dances, and poetry, all of which deserve to be examined. The masks carved for the No drama are the only representative sculptured art form of Zen; indeed, Zen was basically responsible for the disappearance of a several-hundred-year-old tradition of Buddhist sculpture in Japan. During the late Kamakura era, Japanese wood sculpture went through a phase of startlingrealism; but the Zen monks had no use for icons or statues of Buddhist saints, and by the beginning of the Ashikaga era Japanese statuary was essentially a thing of the past. However, the Japanese genius for wood carving had a second life in the No masks. No plays required masks for elderly men, demons, and sublime women of all ages. (The No rigidly excluded women from the stage, as did the Kabuki until recent times.)No masks, especially the female, have a quality unique in the history of theater: they are capable of more than one expression. No masks were carved in such a way that the play of light, which could be changed by the tilt of the actor's head, brought out different expressions. It was a brilliant idea, completely in keeping with the Zen concept of suggestiveness. No companies today treasure their ancient masks, which frequently have been handed down within the troupe for centuries, and certain old masks are as famous as the actors who use them.For reasons lost to history, the masks are somewhat smaller than the human face, with the unhappy result that a heavy actor's jowls are visible around the sides and bottom. They also cup over the face, muffling to some extent the actor's delivery. The guttural No songs, which are delivered from deep in the chest and sound like a curious form of tenor gargling, are rendered even more unintelligible by the mask. This specialized No diction, which entered the form after it had passed from popular entertainment to courtly art, is extremely difficult to understand; today even cognoscenti resort to libretti to follow the poetry.The slow-motion movement around the stage, which goes by the name of "dance" in the No, is one of its more enigmatic aspects for Western viewers. As R. H. Blyth has described it, "the stillness is not immobility but is a perfect balance of opposed forces."1Such movements as do transpire are subtle, reserved, and suggestive. They are to Western ballet what the guarded strokes of ahabokuink landscape are to an eighteenth-century oil canvas. They are, in fact, a perfect distillation of human movement, extracting all that is significant—much as a precious metal is taken from the impure earth. The feeling is formal, pure, and intense. As described in a volume by William Theodore de Bary:When a No actor slowly raises his hand in a play, it corresponds not only to the text he is performing, but must also suggest something behind the mere representation, something eternal—in T. S. Eliot's words, a "moment in and out of time." The gesture of an actor is beautiful in itself, as a piece of music is beautiful, but at the same time it is the gateway to something else, the hand that points to a region as profound and remote as the viewer's powers of reception will permit. It is a symbol, not of any one thing, but of an eternal region, of an eternal silence.2The evocation of an emotion beyond expression—of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"—is the special Zen aesthetic realm ofyugen. The quality, heightened to almost unendurable levels by poetry, is that of a Zen landscape: sparse, monochromatic, suggestive. Universal human emotions are cloaked in obscurity rather than set forth explicitly. The passion is open-ended, a foreboding sonnet with the last line left for the listener to complete. Zeami and other No poets believed that the deepest sentiments cannot be conveyed by language; the poetry merely sets the stage and then sends the listener's imagination spinning into the realm of pure emotion, there to discover an understanding too profound for speech. In Western terms, if King Lear were ashite, he would speak in understated terms of the darkness of the heath rather than chronicle his own anguish.The concept ofyugen, the incompleteness that triggers, poetic emotions in the listener's mind is, as has been previously noted, an extension of the Heian concept ofaware. Likeyugen,awaredescribes not only the properties of some external phenomenon but also the internal response to that phenomenon.Awareoriginally meant the emotional lift and sense of poignancy experienced in contemplating a thing of beauty and reflecting on its transience. Yugen extends this into the realm of eternal verities; not only beauty but all life fades, happiness always dissolves, the soul passes alone and desolate. In an art form that transmitsyugen, none of this is stated; one is forced to feel these truths through suggestion, the degree of feeling depending, of course, upon the sensitivity of the individual. One can find excellent examples ofyugenin almost any No drama of the fifteenth century, like the following from "The Banana Tree" (Basho), by Komparu-Zenchiku:Already the evening sun is setting in the west,Shadows deepen in the valleys,The cries of homing birds grow faint.3Here the sense of universal loneliness at nightfall, the emptiness one feels in a desolate locale, the Gothic coldness that penetrates from the physical senses into one's interior emotions, are all much more fully realized through the simple evocation of the scene than would be possible by detailing them explicitly. The mournful call of evening birds in the bleak, empty, windswept fields cuts, like the No flute, to the very core of one's feelings.The No is perhaps the most difficult Zen art for Westerners to enjoy. The restrained action transmits virtually nothing of what is occurring onstage, and the poetry does not translate well. (As Robert Frost once observed, in translations of poetry, it is the poetry that is lost.) The music is harsh to the Western ear; the chorus interrupts at intervals that seem puzzling; the strange cries and dances befog the mind. Most important of all, the concept ofyugenis not a natural part of Western aesthetics. The measured cadences of the No have, for the Westerner, all the mystery of a religious ceremony wrought by a race of pious but phlegmatic Martians. Yet we can admire the taut surface beauty and the strangely twentieth-century atonality of the form.Its enigmatic remoteness notwithstanding, the No remains one of the greatest expressions of Ashikaga Zen art. Some of Zeami's texts are ranked among the most complex and subtle of all Japanese poetry. For six hundred years the No has been a secular Zen Mass, in which some of mankind's deepest aesthetic responses are explored.Part IIITHE RISE OF POPULAR ZEN CULTURE:1573 TO THE PRESENTCHAPTER TWELVEBourgeois Society and Later ZenGod has given us the Papacy; let us enjoy it.Pope Leo X, 1513The Ashikagawas the last era in Japan entirely without knowledge of Europe. In 1542 a Portuguese trading vessel bound for Macao went aground on a small island off the coast of southern Japan, and the first Europeans in history set foot on Japanese soil. Within three years the Portuguese had opened trade with Japan, and four years after that Francis Xavier, the famous Jesuit missionary, arrived to convert the heathen natives to the Church. For the eclectic Japanese, who had received half a dozen brands of Buddhism over the centuries, one additional religion more or less hardly mattered, and they listened with interest to the new preaching, far from blind to the fact that the towns with the most new Christians received the most new trade. Indeed, the Japanese appear to have first interpreted Christianity as an exotic form of Buddhism, whose priests borrowed the ancient Buddhist idea of prayer beads and venerated a goddess of mercy remarkably like the Buddhist Kannon. In addition to bringing a new faith, the Portuguese, whose armed merchant ships were capable of discouraging pirates, were soon in full command of the trade between China and Japan—a mercantile enterprise once controlled by Zen monks.Still, the direct influence of Europe was not pronounced. Although there was a brief passion for European costume among Japanese dandies (similar to the Heian passion for T'ang Chinese dress), the Japanese by and large had little use for European goods or European ideas. However, one European invention won Japanese hearts forever: the smoothbore musket. The Japanese, sensing immediately that the West had finally found a practical use for the ancient Chinese idea of gunpowder, soon made the musket their foremost instrument of social change. Overnight a thousand years of classical military tactics were swept aside, while the Japanese genius for metal-working turned to muskets rather than swords. Musket factories sprang up across the land, copying and often improving on European designs, and before long Japanese warlords were using the musket with greater effect than any European ever had. The well-meaning Jesuits, who had arrived with the mission of rescuing Japanese souls, had succeeded only in revolutionizing Japanese capacity for combat.The musket was to be an important ingredient in the final unification of Japan, the dream of so many shoguns and emperors in ages past. The process, which required several bloody decades, was presided over by three military men of unquestioned genius: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616). The character of these three men is portrayed in a Japanese allegory describing their respective attitudes toward a bird reluctant to sing. Nobunaga, the initiator of the unification movement and one of the crudest men who ever lived, ordered bluntly, "Sing or I'll wring your neck." Hideyoshi, possibly the most skillful diplomat in Japanese history, told the bird, "If you don't want to sing, I'll make you." Ieyasu, who eventually inherited the fruits of the others' labor, patiently advised the bird, "If you won't sing now, I'll wait until you will." Today the years dominated by Nobunaga and Hideyoshi are known as the Momoyama era, and the following two centuries of peace presided over by Ieyasu and his descendants are referred to as the Tokugawa.After the Onin War, which had destroyed the power of the Ashikaga shogunate and the aristocratic Zen culture of Kyoto, Japan had become a collection of feudal fiefdoms. The emperor and Ashikaga shoguns in Kyoto were titular rulers of a land they in no way governed. Into this regional balance of power came Nobunaga, who began his military career by killing his brother in a family dispute and taking control of his home province. Shortly thereafter he defeated a powerful regional warlord who had invaded the province with an army far outnumbering his own. The victory made him a national figure overnight and destroyed the balance of dynamic tension that had preserved the system of autonomousdaimyofiefs. Rivaldaimyo, covetous of their neighbors' lands, rushed to enlist his aid until, in 1568, he marched into Kyoto and installed a shogun of his own choosing.When the Buddhists on Mt. Hiei objected to Nobunaga's practices of land confiscation, he marched up the hill and sacked the premises, burning the buildings to the ground and killing every last man, woman, and child. This style of ecumenicity had been practiced often enough among the Buddhists themselves as one sect warred against the other, but never before had a secular ruler dared such a feat. This act and the program of systematic persecution that followed marked the end of genuine Buddhist influence in Japan.Nobunaga's armies of musket-wielding foot soldiers were on the verge of consolidating his authority over all Japan when he was unexpectedly murdered by one of his generals. The clique responsible for the attempted coup was dispatched in shortorder by Nobunaga's leading general, the aforementioned diplomat Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi, who later became known as the Napoleon of Japan, was not ofsamuraiblood and had in fact begun his military career as Nobunaga's sandal holder. He was soon providing the warlord with astute military advice, and it was only a matter of time until he was a trusted lieutenant. He was the first (and last) shogun of peasant stock, and his sudden rise to power caused aristocratic eyebrows to be raised all across Japan. Physically unimposing, he was one of the seminal figures in world history, widely acknowledged to have been the best military strategist in the sixteenth-century world, and he completed the process of unification. The anecdotes surrounding his life are now cherished legends in Japan. For example, a favorite military stratagem was to bring a recalcitrantdaimyoto the very brink of ruin and then fall back, offering an incredibly generous peace. However unwise such a tactic might be in the West, it had the effect in Japan of converting a desperate enemy into an indebted subordinate.With the country at peace, foreign trade flourishing, and a rigorous system of taxation in force, Hideyoshi found himself with an excess of time and money. His response was to launch the Momoyama age of Japanese art. With more power than any ruler since Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, he was in a position to direct taste, if not to dictate it. This time there were few Zen monks in attendance to advise him on expenditures (Hideyoshi continued to keep the Buddhists under close guard, a practice as pleasing to the Jesuits as his harem was displeasing), and his flamboyant taste had full reign. Momoyama art became, in many ways, the antithesis of Zen aesthetics. Hideyoshi ordered huge screens to be covered in gold leaf and decorated with explicit still-lifes painted in vibrant primary colors. Yet he was no stranger to Zen ideals; he kept a famous tea-ceremony aesthete as adviser and lavished huge sums on the special ceramics required for this ritual. In many ways, the Zen tea ceremony and tea ceramics became for Hideyoshi what Zen gardens, painting, and the No were for the Ashikaga. His patronage not only inspired a flourishing of ceramic art; the tea ceremony now became the vehicle through which Zen canons of taste and aesthetics were transmitted to the common man. The patronage of the Ashikaga had furthered Zen art among thesamuraiand the aristocracy; Hideyoshi's patronage opened it to the people at large.Ironically, the Zen arts profited from Hideyoshi's military blunders as well as from his patronage. At one point in his career he decided to invade China, but his armies, predictably, never got past Korea. The enterprise was unworthy of his military genius, and puzzled historians have speculated that it may actually have been merely a diversion for his unemployedsamurai, intended to remove them temporarily to foreign soil. The most significant booty brought back from this disastrous venture (now sometimes known as the "pottery campaign") was a group of Korean potters, whose rugged folk ceramics added new dimensions to the equipment of the tea ceremony.Having maneuvered the shogunate away from Nobunaga's heirs, Hideyoshi became increasingly nervous about succession as his health began to fail, fearing that his heirs might be similarly deprived of their birthright. The problem was particularly acute, since his only son, Hideyori, was five years old and scarcely able to defend the family interests. In 1598, as the end approached, Hideyoshi formed a council ofdaimyoheaded by Tokugawa Ieyasu to rule until his son came of age, and on his deathbed he forced them to swear they would hand over the shogunate when the time came. Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened.Tokugawa Ieyasu was no stranger to the brutal politics of the age, having once ordered his own wife's execution when Nobunaga suspected her of treason, and he spent the first five years after Hideyoshi's death consolidating his power and destroying rivaldaimyo. When Hideyoshi's son came of age, Ieyasu was ready to move. Hideyori was living in the family citadel at Osaka defended by an army of disenfranchisedsamuraiand disaffected Christians, but Ieyasu held the power. In the ensuing bloodbath Hideyoshi's line was erased from the earth, and the Christians' faulty political judgment caused their faith eventually to be forbidden to all Japanese under threat of death. Christianity continued to be practiced on a surreptitious basis, however, as the Christians found shelter in, of all places, the Zen monasteries.With the passing of Hideyoshi's line, the Tokugawa family became the only power in Japan, a land at last unified and with an imposed peace. Viewing foreign influences as a source of domestic unrest, the Tokugawa moved to bring down a curtain of isolationism around their shores: Christian Europeans were expelled and Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad. Ieyasu established a new capital at Edo (now Tokyo) and required the localdaimyoto spend a large amount of time and money in attendance. Thus he craftily legitimatised his own position while simultaneously weakening that of thedaimyo—a technique used with equal effect almost a century later by Louis XIV, when he moved his court from Paris to Versailles to contain the French aristocracy.Content with the status quo, members of the Tokugawa family felt it could best be preserved by extreme conservatism, so they sent forth a volley of decrees formalizing all social relationships. Time was brought to a stop, permitting the Tokugawa to rule unhindered until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the country was again opened to foreign trade under the guns of American warships.During the Tokugawa regime another Chinese "religion" assumed the place in the hearts of the shoguns that Buddhism had enjoyed in centuries past. This was Confucianism, more a philosophy than a religion, which in its original form had taught a respect for learning, the ready acceptance of a structured hierarchy, and unquestioning obedience to authority (that of both elders and superiors). The Tokugawa perverted Confucianism to establish a caste system among their subjects, separating them into thesamuraiclass, the peasant class, and the merchant and artisan classes—the order given here denoting their supposed status. However, as the Japanese social system began to evolve, the idea backfired, causing great difficulties for the government. The reasons for this are interesting, for they bear directly upon the eventual role of Zen culture in Japanese life.For centuries, Japan's major source of income had been agriculture. Thesamuraiwere local landholders who employed peasants to grow their rice and who were beholden to a localdaimyofor protection. Money played no large part in the economy, since most daily needs could be obtained by barter. But the sudden wealth brought into being by the European traders had nothing to do with the amount of rice asamurai'speasants could produce; it accrued instead to the merchants in port cities. Furthermore, the accommodations required to keep thedaimyoand their families in the capital city of Edo called for artisans and merchants in great number. Thus the Tokugawa government had mistakenly decreed the agriculturalsamuraiand peasants the backbone of the economy at the very moment in history when Japan was finally developing an urban, currency-based culture. Predictably, the urban merchants, who were at the bottom of the Confucianist social system, soon had their supposed social betters, thesamurai, completely in hock.The Tokugawa struggled hard to keep the townspeople, now the controllers of the economy, in their place. Merchants were forbidden to build elaborate houses or wear elaborate clothes, and they were expected to defer to the penurioussamuraiin all things. Japan had never before had a bourgeoisie—the traditional divisions were aristocracy, warriors, and peasants— and consequently popular taste had never really been reflected in the arts. Much to the dismay of the Tokugawa (and to the detriment of classical Zen culture), this was changing. While the aristocrats and warrior families in Kyoto preserved the older arts of Zen, in the bourgeois city of Edo there were new popular art forms like the Kabuki theater and the woodblock print, both eons removed from the No and the monochrome landscape. Classical Zen culture was largely confined to aristocratic Kyoto, while in boisterous Edo the townspeople turned to explicit, exciting arts full of color and drama.In spite of this democratic turn of events, the Zen aesthetics of Kyoto continued to be felt, largely through the tea ceremony, which had been officially encouraged in the Momoyama age of Hideyoshi. Later in the Tokugawa era the poetic form of Haiku developed, and it too was highly influenced by the Zen idea of suggestiveness. Domestic architecture also maintained the ideals of Zen, as did Ikebana, or flower arranging, and the Japanese cuisine, which employed Zen ceramics. Thus Zen aesthetics seeped into middle-class culture in many forms, tempering taste and providing rigid rules for much of what are today thought of as the traditional arts and crafts of the Japanese.Traditional Buddhism did not fare well during the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages: the militaristic Buddhist strongholds were either put to rout or destroyed entirely during the Momoyama, and Confucianism had considerably more influence under the Tokugawa than did Buddhism. The great upsurge of Buddhism with its fiery teachers and believing shoguns was over, as the faith settled into empty ritual and a decidedly secondary station in a basically secular state. The only Buddhist sect demonstrating any vigor at all was Zen.The brief flourishing of Zen during the Tokugawa era was actually a revival, for the faith had become static and uninspired during the years of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. The formalized practice of Zen at the end of the seventeenth century was described by a visiting Jesuit Father:The solitary philosophers of the Zenshu sect, who dwell in their retreats in the wilderness, [do not] philosophize with the help of books and treatises written by illustrious masters and philosophers as do the members of the other sects of the Indian gymnosophists. Instead they give themselves up to contemplating the things of nature, despising and abandoning worldly things; they mortify their passions by certain enigmatic and figurative meditations and considerations [koan] which guide them on their way at the beginning. . . . [s]o the vocation of these philosophers is not to contend or dispute with another with arguments, but they leave everything to the contemplation of each one so that by himself he may attain the goal by using these principles, and thus they do not teach disciples.1The good Father was describing a Zen faith that had become a set piece, devoid of controversy but also devoid of life.The man who brought Zen out of its slumber and restored its vigor was the mystic Hakuin (1685-1768), who revived thekoanschool of Rinzai and produced the most famouskoanof all times: "You know the sound of two hands clapping; what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Hakuin gave a new, mystical dimension to the Rinzai school of Zen, even as Hui-neng created nonintellectual Chinese Ch'an Buddhism out of the founding ideas of Bodhidharma. Hakuin was also a poet, a painter, and the author of many commentaries on thesutras. Yet even when he enjoyed national fame, he never lost his modesty or his desire for enlightenment.Hakuin lived the greater part of his life in the small rural village of his birth. A sensitive, impressionable child, he was early tormented by an irrational fear of the fires of the Buddhist hell as dwelt upon by the priests of his mother's sect, the Nichiren. For relief he turned to the Lotus Sutra, but nothing he read seemed to ease his mind. Finally he became a wandering Zen monk, searching from temple to temple for a master who could give him enlightenment. He studied under various famous teachers and gradually achieved higher and higher levels of awareness. At the age of thirty-two he returned to his home village and assumed control of the ramshackle local Zen temple, which he eventually made the center of Rinzai Zen in Japan. Word of his spiritual intensity spread and soon novices were flocking to him. His humility and humanity were a shining light in the spiritual dark age of the Tokugawa, and he breathed life and understanding back into Zen.Despite Hakuin, official Zen never regained its influence in Japan. Someday perhaps the modern-day Western interest in Zen will give it new life somewhere outside Japan, but this life will almost certainly be largely secular. Indeed, the influence of Zen in the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages was already more pronounced in the secular world than in the spiritual. The bourgeois arts of these later years were notably less profound than those of the Ashikaga, but the spirit of Zen spread to become infused into the very essence of Japanese life, making the everyday business of living an expression of popular Zen culture.CHAPTER THIRTEENThe Tea CeremonyChazen ichimi(Zen and tea are one.) Traditional Japanese expressionThe “dewy path” to teahouseThe tea ceremonycombines all the faces of Zen—art, tranquility, aesthetics. It is in a sense the essence of Zen culture. Yet this Zen ritual has been explained to the West in so many volumes of wordy gush that almost any description, including the above, deserves to be met with skepticism. There has to be more to the tea ceremony than meets the eye—and there is. But before unraveling the unseen threads of this Zen fabric, let us pause for a moment to consider the beverage itself.The drinking of tea seems almost to have been the world's second oldest profession. One legend claims that tea was discovered in the year 2737b.c.,when leaves from a tea bushaccidentally dropped into the campfire cauldron of a Chinese emperor-aesthete. Early Chinese texts are sometimes vague about the identity of medicinal plants, but it is clear that by the time of Confucius (around 500b.c.)tea was a well-known drink. During the Tang dynasty (618-907), tea leaves were treated with smoke and compressed into a semimoist cake, slices of which would subsequently be boiled to produce a beverage—a method that was perpetuated for many centuries in Russia. The Chinese spiced this boiled tea with salt, a holdover from even earlier times when a variety of unexpected condiments were added, including orange peel, ginger, and onions.The refined courtiers of the Sung dynasty (960-1279) apparently found brick tea out of keeping with their delicate tastes, for they replaced it with a drink in which finely ground tea leaves were blended with boiling water directly in the cup. Whipped with a bamboo whisk, this mixture superficially resembled shaving lather in texture, although the color could be a fine jade green if fresh leaves were used. (This green powdered tea was the drink one day to become enshrined in the Zen tea ceremony.) The Chinese chronicle of tea ends with the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), which saw the rise of the familiar steeping process, now the commonly accepted practice worldwide. Our ignorance of the earlier methods of tea preparation may be attributed to the West's discovery of China after the older methods had been discarded.Unlike its misty origins in China, the use of tea in Japan is well authenticated. In the year 792 the Japanese emperor surprised the court by holding a large tea party at which Buddhist monks and other notables were invited to sample a curious beverage discovered by his emissaries to the T'ang court. Tea drinking soon became a fashionable pastime, occupying a position comparable to taking coffee in eighteenth-century Europe, but tea remained an expensive import and little thought was given to cultivation in Japan. This changed early in the ninth century when tea drinking came to be associated with the new Buddhist sects of Tendai and Shingon. Under the supervision of the court, tea growing was begun near Kyoto, where the emperor blessed the bushes with a specialsutrain the spring and autumn. Tea remained an aristocratic habit for several centuries thereafter and did not become really popular until the late twelfth century, when the famous Zen teacher Eisai "reintroduced" the beverage upon his return from China. Eisai also brought back new seeds for planting, the progeny of which are still growing.Chinese Ch'an monks had long been devoted to tea. In fact, a famous but apocryphal legend attributes the tea bush to Bodhidharma, relating that during his nine years of meditation outside Shao-lin monastery he found himself nodding and in anger tore off his eyelids and flung them to the ground, whereupon tea plants sprang forth. There was a reason for the legend. Tea had long been used to forestall drowsiness during long periods of meditation. (A cup of modern steeped tea contains an average three-quarters of a grain of caffeine, about half the amount in a cup of coffee.) The drinking of tea became ritualized in Ch'an monasteries, where the monks would congregate before an image of Bodhidharma and take a sacrament of tea from a single shared bowl in his memory. This ritual was gradually adopted by Japanese Zen monasteries, providing the forerunner of the solemn moment of shared tea which became the basis of the tea ceremony.The Japanese aristocracy and the warrior class also took up tea, and borrowing a custom from the Sung court, gave tea-tasting parties, similar to modern wine-tasting affairs. From the time of Ashikaga Takauji to Ashikaga Yoshimasa, these parties were an accompaniment to many of the courtly evenings spent admiring Sung ceramics and discussing Sung art theories. Although Zen monks played a prominent role in these aesthetic gatherings, the drinking of tea in monasteries seems to have been a separate activity. Thus the ceremonial drinking of tea developed in two parallel schools: the aristocracy used it in refined entertainments while the Zen monks drank tea as a pious celebration of their faith.These two schools were eventually merged into the Zen-inspired gathering known simply as the tea ceremony,cha-no-yu. But first there was the period when each influenced the other. Zen aesthetic theory gradually crept into the aristocratic tea parties, as taste turned away from the polished Sung ceramic cups toward ordinary pottery. This was the beginning of the tradition of deliberate understatement later to be so important in the tea ceremony. Zen ideals took over the warrior tea parties. During his reign, Yoshimasa was persuaded by a famous Zen monk-aesthetician to construct a small room for drinking tea monastery-style. The mood in this room was all Zen, from the calligraphic scroll hanging in the tokonoma art alcove to the ceremonial flower arrangements and the single cup shared in a sober ritual. After this, those who would serve tea had first to study the tea rituals of the Zen monastery. Furthermore, warriors came to believe that the Zen tea ritual would help their fighting discipline.By the sixteenth century the discipline and tranquility of the ceremony had become fixed, but the full development ofcha-no-yuas a vehicle for preserving Zen aesthetic theory was yet to come. Gradually, one by one, the ornate aspects of the earlier Sung tea parties were purged. The idea took hold that tea should be drunk not in a room partitioned off from the rest of the house, but in a special thatch-roofed hut constructed specifically for the purpose, giving tea drinking an air of conspicuous poverty. The elaborate vessels and interior appointments favored in the fifteenth century were supplanted in the sixteenth by rugged, folk-style pottery and an interior decor as restrained as a monastery. By stressing an artificial poverty, the ceremony became a living embodiment of Zen with its distaste for materialism and the world of getting and spending.It remained for a sixteenth-century Zen teacher to bring all the aesthetic ideas in the tea ceremony together in a rigid system. He was Sen no Rikyu (1521-1591), who began as the tea instructor of Nobunaga and continued to play the same role for Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi was devoted to the tea ceremony, and under his patronage Rikyu formalized the classic rules under whichcha-no-yuis practiced today.The most famous anecdote from Rikyu's life is the incident remembered as the "tea party of the morning glory." As the son of a merchant in a port city, Rikyu developed a taste for the new and exotic. At one time he began the cultivation of imported European morning glories, a novel flower to the Japanese, which he sometimes used for the floral display accompanying the tea ceremony. Hideyoshi, learning of these new flowers, informed Rikyu that he wished to take morning tea with him in order to see the blossoms at their finest. On the selected date, Hideyoshi arrived to find that all the flowers in the garden had been plucked; not a single petal was to be seen. Understandably out of temper, he proceeded to the tea hut—there to discover a single morning glory, still wet with the dews of dawn, standing in thetokonomaalcove, a perfect illustration of the Zen precept of sufficiency in restraint.Tea ceremonies today are held in special backyard gardens, equipped for the purpose with a waiting shelter at the entrance and a tiny teahouse at the far end. When one arrives at the appointed time, one joins the two or three other guests in the garden shed for a waiting period designed to encourage a relaxed state of mind and the requisite Zen tranquility. The tea garden, known as theroji, or "dewy path," differs from conventional Japanese temple gardens in that it is merely a passageway between the waiting shelter and the teahouse. Since the feeling is meant to be that of a mountain path, there are no ponds or elaborate stone arrangements. The only natural rocks in evidence are the stepping stones themselves, but along the path are a carved stone in the shape of a water basin and a bamboo dipper, so that one can rinse one's mouth before taking tea, and a stone lantern to provide illumination for evening gatherings. The unpretentious stones of the walkway, set deep in natural mossy beds, divide the garden into two parts, winding through it like a curving, natural path. Dotted about the garden are carefully pruned pine trees, azalea bushes clipped into huge globes, or perhaps a towering cryptomeria whose arching branches protect guests against the afternoon sun. Although the garden floor is swept clean, it may still have a vagrant leaf or pine needle strewn here and there. As one waits for the host's appearance, the garden slowly begins to impose a kind of magic, drawing one away from the outside world.
The overhead crossbeams, installed between the columns at a height of slightly over six feet, are similar to the columns in diameter and appearance. The ceiling of the rooms is roughly two feet above the crossbeams, orkamoi, with the intervening space usually filled either by a vertical open wooden latticework, theramma, or a plaster-and-board combination, thenageshi. On exterior walls of therammais ordinarily a solid extension of theshojiwhich inhibits air flow from the outside. Thekamoi,nageshi, andrammahave a structural as well as aesthetic obligation; they are the only solid lateral supports between the upright columns. The ceiling itself is a light wood latticework over which has been laid a platform of thin boards still in their natural state, as is all the woodwork.
Visitors enter through thegenkanportico, where street shoes are replaced by soft-soled slippers, to prevent scratches on the exposed wooden veranda and hallways. At the entrance to atatami-carpeted room, the slippers too are relinquished, and host and guests are both in stocking feet, a state that encourages familiarity. The reception room is empty as a cell, and as it basks in the diffuse light of theshoji, it seems suspended in time—heedless of the season. The only furniture may be a small central table around which guests and host seat themselves on square cushions. Or perhaps there are lamps with rice-paper shades, one or two knee-high chests of drawers, and if the weather requires it, one or more charcoal braziers, either a small moveable hibachi for hand warming or a larger heater sunk into a center recess in the flooring, often beneath the table, or both. The purpose of these is apparently more symbolic than functional, for they do little to influence the temperature in the paper-walled rooms. Arrangements for summer cooling are equally metaphysical; theshojiare simply thrown open in hopes of snaring wayward breezes, whose meager cooling is enhanced psychologically by the tinkle of wind bells hung in the verandas.
The aesthetic focus of the room is thetokonoma, or picture recess, set into one of the plaster walls, with a raised dais for its floor and an artificial, lowered ceiling. Thetokonomahas a smallshoji-covered window at one side which illuminates a hanging scroll, and there is usually an incense burner (in recognition of its original monastic function) or a simple flower arrangement on its floor. Adjacent to thetokonomais thechigai-dana, a shelved storage area hidden by sliding panels, which may be used to storekimonosor bedding rather than the writing implements of Zen monks as in the past. Thetokonomaandchigai-danaare separated by a thin dividing wall whose outer edge is fronted by a single polished post, thetoko-bashira, a natural tree trunk stripped of its bark to reveal its gnarled surface texture. Thetoko-bashirahas the quality of polished driftwood, intended to bring a touch of raw nature to the otherwise austere and monastic ambience of the room.
As the guest kneels on the cushions and sips green tea, the host may slide aside a rearshojito reveal the roofless garden of the inner courtyard, his private abstraction of the natural landscape. Flowers are purposely absent, but in their placemay be tiny shaped pines, a pond, and receding, rocky pathways. The mossy stones glisten with dew (or with water from a recent dousing by the host in preparation for his guests), and the air is fresh with the scent of greenery. Only upon careful inspection does the deception evaporate and the garden reveal itself to be a tiny plot surrounded by a bamboo and plaster fence; the natural world has been extracted and encapsulated into a single view, at once as authentic as the forest and as artfully detailed as a Flemish miniature. This view—a heritage of Zenshoindesign—is vital to the aesthetic magic of the house, for it brings the works of man and nature together in a way that blurs their distinction. Exterior space is united with interior space just as Zen philosophy identifies the external world as an extension of man's inner life.
Indeed, all the subjective aspects of the Japanese house are Zen-inspired. The most apparent design feature is the clean lines that mark the boundaries of space, from the geometrical delineation of floor areas, brought out by the dark bindings of the tatami, to the exposed skeletal framework of columns and horizontal beams. By deliberately excluding curved lines (whose implied sensuality would be at odds with Zen ideals of austerity) in the partitioning of space, the house achieves a geometrical formality both elegant and pure. This sense of free space is further realized by the rigorous exclusion of extraneous ornamentation (again a Zen aesthetic precept) and by placing all essential furnishings in the center of the room rather than around the sides, as in the West. Design aesthetics are also served by the emphasis on the natural texture of materials and the contrast realized when different materials (such as clay walls and exposed wood) are placed side by side. Finally, the indirect lighting provided by theshojigives daytime rooms a subjective sense of perpetual afternoon, mellowing the visual properties of the materials, softening harsh colors to pastels, and enhancing the overall feeling of naturalness in the exposed woods.
The removable partitions, both internal and external, create a sense of interdependent yet fluid space so startling to Westerners that it is often the first thing they notice in a Japanese house. The concept is, of course, derived from a basic philosophical presumption inherent in all Zen art, from ink paintings to ceramics, that freedom is most keenly perceived when it is exercised within a rigorous framework of constraints and discipline. More important, and more difficult to define, is the Zen concept ofshibui, the studied restraint that might be described as knowing when to stop.Shibui, perhaps more than any other aesthetic principle, typifies the influence of Zen on Japanese ideals. It means many things, including the absence of all that is not essential; a sense of disciplined strength deliberately held in check to make what is done seem effortless; the absence of the ornate and the explicit in favor of the sober and the suggestive; and the elegance that can be realized when the purest of natural materials are integrated in a formal, balanced orchestration.3
In addition to the aesthetic aspects, there is also a quality of psychological suggestion stemming from Zen in the Japanese house. Zen monks early realized that the cell-like austerity of a room could be used to manipulate the consciousness of those caught in its precincts. The impact of this was well described by the early-twentieth-century traveler Ralph Adams Cram:
There is something about the great spacious apartments, airy and full of mellow light, that is curiously satisfying, and one feels the absence of furniture only with a sense of relief. Free from the rivalry of crowded furnishings, men and women take on a quite singular quality of dignity and importance.4
'The "singular quality of dignity and importance" is one of the most fundamental discoveries of Zen interior designers. In the absence of decorative distractions, one must concentrate on his own mind and on the minds of others present. Host and guest find their focus on one another has been deliberately enhanced, breaking down the barriers of separateness and individual identity. Each word, each gesture is rendered richer, more significant. Heinrich Engel, who understood the source of the mysterious effects which Ralph Adams Cram could only describe in bewilderment, has explained this phenomenon:
[The individual interior room] provides an environment that requires man's presence and participation to fill the void. Room in the Western residence is human without man's presence, for man's memory lingers in the multiple devices of decoration, furniture, and utility. Room in the Japanese residence becomes human only through man's presence. Without him, there is no human trace. Thus, the empty room provides the very space where man's spirit can move freely and where his thoughts can reach the very limits of their potential.5
Stated differently, the Japanese room forces introspection on those who enter it alone—a function completely in keeping with the interests of Zen. Souls who have felt the weight of too much liberty (and undeserved decorator's license) will find here a solemn retreat and a heightened sense of internal awareness. Here as never before one's mind is one's own, undistracted by the prosaic implements of living with which Westerners ordinarily engulf themselves. One should be warned, however, that this liberation of the consciousness is powerful stuff. The Japanese Zen room is a concentration cell which, although it can unite the minds of those who share it, can often tell those who enter it alone more than they want to know about their own interior lives.
The restraining discipline taught by Zen has both made the traditional Japanese house possible and reconciled its inhabitants to the practical difficulties of living in it. Although few Westerners would accept the inconvenience and sometime discomfort of these houses, many of the early Zen designers' ideals have begun to be seen in architecture and design in the West. It is well known that the Japanese integration of house and environment influenced Frank Lloyd Wright and that a purging of ornamentation was the credo of the Bauhaus. The Japanese principle of modular design is now influential in the West, and we have finally discovered the possibilities for multiple uses of space, with modern "efficiency" apartments that combine all living functions, from dining to entertaining to sleeping, in a single room. Interest has grown recently in the texture of interior materials, which it is now realized provide a necessary visual warmth, and there is increasing integration of living areas with gardens, patios, and the outdoors, and a blessed reduction in superfluous decoration, with the re-establishment of emphasis on clean lines, open space, and the quality of light. Perhaps most important of all, we in the West are finally taking to heart what the Japanese Zen monks knew in medieval times: that domestic architecture and interiors can and should fulfill a requirement in our lives that is ordinarily served by art.
The No Theater
It is not, like our theatre, a place where every fineness and subtlety must give way; where every fineness of word or of word-cadence is sacrificed to the "broad effect"; where the paint must be put on with a broom. It is a stage where every subsidiary art is bent precisely upon upholding the faintest shade of difference; where the poet may be silent while the gestures consecrated by four centuries of usage show meaning.
Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, Classic Noh Theatre of Japan
Noh actor with mask
Noh stage with chorus
The Ashikagaage of Zen art is remembered today not only for gardens, painting, and architecture but also for drama and poetry. The leading political figure of the era, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, was himself an accomplished poet in the short verse forms once so popular with Heian courtier-aesthetes. But the most exalted poetry of the age was that written for the No drama, a literary art form born of Zen and at once as austere as a stone garden and as suggestive as a monochrome painting. The No is performed today virtually as it was six hundred years ago, and in its ritual symbolism it seems at times a cross between the Christian Mass and an Aeschylean tragedy. The essence of Zen aesthetic theory is evoked throughout its haunting poetry, its understated but intense style of acting, its delicately carved masks, and its mournful music and songs.
Like other Zen arts, the No was fashioned out of materials from distant times and places. The first Japanese dramatic arts were derived from various forms of Chinese farces and court dances. The farces, orgigaku, were popular with the Nara aristocracy, while the dances, orbugaku, came into favor with the more refined Heian court. Although thebugakuform undoubtedly influenced Japanese ideas on the blending of drama and dance, by the end of the Heian era it had become a lifeless ceremony for the emperor and his court—a role it still enjoys on occasions when performances are staged for the imperial family.
The real origins of the No are traceable to a somewhat lustier Chinese import, a circus-type entertainment called by the Japanesesarugaku. In addition to the display of various physical feats of daring, thesarugakuincluded farcical playlets and suggestive, sometimes indecent dances. A common theme seems to have been the lampooning of clergy, both Buddhist and Shinto. (In this respect, the development of native drama in Japan ran parallel with the resurgence of dramatic art in Europe after the Middle Ages, as citizens on both sides of the globe taunted the theological enslavement of feudal society by burlesques and dances ridiculing hypocritical authority figures.)
The studied indecency of earlysarugakuwas undoubtedly intended to parody the pomposity of Shinto rituals. But as time went by, the rustic dance-stories evolved into a more structured drama, thesarugaku-no-No, which was the thirteenth-century Japanese equivalent of the European morality play. The earlier farces were transformed into comedies known askyogen(in which wily servants repeatedly tricked their masters), which today serve as interlude pieces to relieve the gravity of a program of No plays, just as the early Greek satyr plays were performed after a trilogy of tragedies in the Athenian theater.
In the early versions of the sarugaku-no-No, the performers sang and danced, but as the form matured a chorus was added to supply the verses during certain segments of the dance. By the middle of the fourteenth century, about the time of Chaucer's birth, Japanese No was already an established dramatic form, containing all the major elements it has today. It was, however, merely village drama, and so it might have remained except for a chance occurrence in the year 1374.
In that year Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, already shogun at age seventeen, attended a performance of thesarugaku-no-Nofor the first time. The entertainment was a great favorite with his subjects, and he was trying to establish himself as a man of the people. A particularly well-known actor was scheduled to perform in Kyoto, and Yoshimitsu went to see him. The actor was Kannami (1333-1384), today famous as the father of the No. Yoshimitsu was excited by Kannami, but he was even more enthralled by the actor's handsome eleven-year-old son Zeami (1363-1444), who also appeared in the play. Yoshimitsu became Kannami's patron, but young Zeami he took to his couch (a common enough occurrence insamuraicircles of the age). Zeami was devoted to the No, even as Yoshimitsu became devoted to Zeami, and thus began the long marriage of Zen culture and the No theater.
Through Yoshimitsu thesarugaku-no-Nocame under the influence of the circle of Zen aesthetes surrounding him, and what had once been a broad popular entertainment became an aristocratic art. Supported by Yoshimitsu's patronage, Zeami became the Shakespeare of the No, writing the finest plays in the repertoire as well as several volumes of essays on aesthetic theories and acting technique. Although Zeami claimed to have learned everything from his father, the austere and poetic No that came to perfection during the Ashikaga was largely his own creation. His poetry has never been equaled, and his handbook of technique has remained the No actor's bible. Yet he might never have been heard of had it not been for Yoshimitsu, who, in the words of Donald Keene, found the No brick and left it marble.
The classic No stage is a splendid example of Zen-influenced architecture. The stage is a platform of golden, polished wood
covered by a heavy arched roof supported by stout pillars at each of the four corners. The entire structure projects out into the audience, almost as though a wooden shrine had been reconstructed in the middle of the auditorium. The actors approach the platform along a wide entry ramp that leads off stage right to a curtained entranceway at the rear of the auditorium. The ramp has three small pine trees spaced evenly along its length, while on the backdrop of the stage proper there is a painting of a massive gnarled pine. As though to suggest Shinto origins for the drama, the stage and entrance ramp are symbolically separated from the audience by an encircling expanse of white sand, spanned at the very front of the stage by a small symbolic wooden stair. The acting platform is square, approximately twenty feet by twenty, with an additional rear area to accommodate the musicians and another area at stage left where the chorus kneels. Underneath the stage, unseen by the audience, are a number of large clay pots, a traditional acoustic device to amplify the resonance of the actors' voices. The few properties used in the plays are introduced and removed through an auxiliary entrance at the rear of the stage.
The beginning of the play is signaled offstage by the high- pitched wail of a bamboo flute. Two attendants with bamboo poles lift back the variegated brocade curtain covering the doorway to the ramp, and the musicians, either three or four in number, enter single file and position themselves in the prescribed order along the rear of the stage—the flautist sitting on the floor Japanese style, and the two major drummers on stools they carry with them. (If a bass drum is required, its player must join the flautist on the floor.) The No flute is not particularly unusual, except for an exceptionally strident tone, but the two primary No drums are unlike anything in the West. Although they are of different sizes, both resemble a large hourglass with an ox hide drawn over either end and held taut by heavy leather cords. The smaller drum, whose hide surface the players must periodically soften with his breath, is held on the player's right shoulder and struck with the right hand. Its sound is a muffled, funereal boom, lower in pitch than that of the other, larger drum, the larger drum is held on the player's left knee and struck with the fingers of the left hand, which may be protected by thimbles of leather or ivory. It produces a sharp, urgent click, used to punctuate the cadence of the performance. The bass drum used in certain dramas is played with drumsticks in the Western manner. The drummers also sometimes provide rhythm by interjecting monosyllabic shouts between drumbeats.
As the musicians enter, so does the chorus, eight or ten men dressed in formal Japanese "black tie" kimonos. They seat themselves Japanese style in two rows along stage left, where they must remain immobile for the duration of the play (which may be well over an hour). Since younger Japanese are less resigned to the persistent ache accompanying the traditional seating posture than their elders, the chorus usually tends to be well on in years. The chorus fills in dialogue for the actors during dance sequences; it makes no commentary on the action as does the chorus in Greek tragedy, nor does it have any special identity as part of the cast. Its members merely take up the voice of the actors from time to time like a dispassionate, heavenly choir.
With chorus and orchestra present, the overture begins. The first sounds are the piercing lament of the flute and the insistent crack of the drums, against which the drummers emit deep-throated, strangled cries. This stunning eruption of sound signals the entrance of the dramatis personae as the brocade curtain is again drawn aside for the first cast member, usually awaki, or supporting actor, who enters with measured, deliberate pace onto the entrance ramp, where he advances with a sliding, mechanical tread toward the stage.
Thewaki, often representing an itinerant monk dressed in subdued black robes, begins telling the story, either in his own voice or aided by the chorus, establishing the locale and circumstances of the scene about to unfold, after which he retires to a corner of the stage and seats himself to await the entrance of the protagonist, orshite. The brocade curtain parts again to reveal theshite, richly costumed and frequently masked, who approaches to sing and dance out his story before the waitingwaki. Theshite'ssplendid costume contrasts strikingly with the austerity of the stage and the other costumes.
On first appearance theshiteordinarily is intended to be a human form, albeit often a troubled one, but as his tale unfolds he becomes not so much an actual being as the personification of a soul. If the play is in two parts, in the second part he may assume his real identity, often only hinted in the first, of a spirit from the dead. Prefiguring the Shakespearean soliloquy, the confessional song of theshitespeaks for the universal consciousness as he pours out his tortured inner emotions. As theshitesings, the knowingwakiserves as confessor and provides a foil for any dialogue. The play climaxes with the dance of theshite, a stiff, stylized, sculptural sequence of mannered postures and gestures which draw heavily upon traditional Shinto sacred dances. With this choreographic resolution the play closes, and all exeunt single file as they entered—to the restrained acknowledgment of the audience.
The No repertoire contains five primary categories of plays. There are "god plays," in which the shite is a supernatural spirit, frequently disguised, whose divinity is made manifest during the final dance. In "warrior plays," theshitemay be a martial figure from the Kamakura era who speaks in universal terms about his own personal tragedy. "Woman plays" are lyric evocations of a beautiful woman, often a courtesan, who has been wronged in love. The fourth category includes a grab bag of dramas often focusing on an historical episode or on theshitebeing driven to madness by guilt or, in the case of a woman, jealousy. Finally, there are "demon plays," in which the shite is a vengeful ogre, often sporting a flowing red or white wig, who erupts into a frenzied dance to demonstrate his supernatural displeasure over some event.
Many of the classic plays are a study of the tortured mental world of the dead. Even in warrior plays and woman plays the central character is frequently a spirit from the nether world who returns to chronicle a grievance or to exact some form of retribution from a living individual. Plot is deliberately suppressed. Instead of a story, the play explores an emotional experience or a state of mind—hatred, love, longing, fear, grief, and occasionally happiness. The traditional components of Western drama—confrontation, conflict, characterization, self-realization, development, resolution—are almost entirely absent. In their placeis the ritualized reading of an emotional state that rarely grows or resolves during the play; it is simply described.
The artistic content of the No is embodied in the masks, dances, and poetry, all of which deserve to be examined. The masks carved for the No drama are the only representative sculptured art form of Zen; indeed, Zen was basically responsible for the disappearance of a several-hundred-year-old tradition of Buddhist sculpture in Japan. During the late Kamakura era, Japanese wood sculpture went through a phase of startling
realism; but the Zen monks had no use for icons or statues of Buddhist saints, and by the beginning of the Ashikaga era Japanese statuary was essentially a thing of the past. However, the Japanese genius for wood carving had a second life in the No masks. No plays required masks for elderly men, demons, and sublime women of all ages. (The No rigidly excluded women from the stage, as did the Kabuki until recent times.)
No masks, especially the female, have a quality unique in the history of theater: they are capable of more than one expression. No masks were carved in such a way that the play of light, which could be changed by the tilt of the actor's head, brought out different expressions. It was a brilliant idea, completely in keeping with the Zen concept of suggestiveness. No companies today treasure their ancient masks, which frequently have been handed down within the troupe for centuries, and certain old masks are as famous as the actors who use them.
For reasons lost to history, the masks are somewhat smaller than the human face, with the unhappy result that a heavy actor's jowls are visible around the sides and bottom. They also cup over the face, muffling to some extent the actor's delivery. The guttural No songs, which are delivered from deep in the chest and sound like a curious form of tenor gargling, are rendered even more unintelligible by the mask. This specialized No diction, which entered the form after it had passed from popular entertainment to courtly art, is extremely difficult to understand; today even cognoscenti resort to libretti to follow the poetry.
The slow-motion movement around the stage, which goes by the name of "dance" in the No, is one of its more enigmatic aspects for Western viewers. As R. H. Blyth has described it, "the stillness is not immobility but is a perfect balance of opposed forces."1Such movements as do transpire are subtle, reserved, and suggestive. They are to Western ballet what the guarded strokes of ahabokuink landscape are to an eighteenth-century oil canvas. They are, in fact, a perfect distillation of human movement, extracting all that is significant—much as a precious metal is taken from the impure earth. The feeling is formal, pure, and intense. As described in a volume by William Theodore de Bary:
When a No actor slowly raises his hand in a play, it corresponds not only to the text he is performing, but must also suggest something behind the mere representation, something eternal—in T. S. Eliot's words, a "moment in and out of time." The gesture of an actor is beautiful in itself, as a piece of music is beautiful, but at the same time it is the gateway to something else, the hand that points to a region as profound and remote as the viewer's powers of reception will permit. It is a symbol, not of any one thing, but of an eternal region, of an eternal silence.2
The evocation of an emotion beyond expression—of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"—is the special Zen aesthetic realm ofyugen. The quality, heightened to almost unendurable levels by poetry, is that of a Zen landscape: sparse, monochromatic, suggestive. Universal human emotions are cloaked in obscurity rather than set forth explicitly. The passion is open-ended, a foreboding sonnet with the last line left for the listener to complete. Zeami and other No poets believed that the deepest sentiments cannot be conveyed by language; the poetry merely sets the stage and then sends the listener's imagination spinning into the realm of pure emotion, there to discover an understanding too profound for speech. In Western terms, if King Lear were ashite, he would speak in understated terms of the darkness of the heath rather than chronicle his own anguish.
The concept ofyugen, the incompleteness that triggers, poetic emotions in the listener's mind is, as has been previously noted, an extension of the Heian concept ofaware. Likeyugen,awaredescribes not only the properties of some external phenomenon but also the internal response to that phenomenon.Awareoriginally meant the emotional lift and sense of poignancy experienced in contemplating a thing of beauty and reflecting on its transience. Yugen extends this into the realm of eternal verities; not only beauty but all life fades, happiness always dissolves, the soul passes alone and desolate. In an art form that transmitsyugen, none of this is stated; one is forced to feel these truths through suggestion, the degree of feeling depending, of course, upon the sensitivity of the individual. One can find excellent examples ofyugenin almost any No drama of the fifteenth century, like the following from "The Banana Tree" (Basho), by Komparu-Zenchiku:
Already the evening sun is setting in the west,
Shadows deepen in the valleys,
The cries of homing birds grow faint.3
Here the sense of universal loneliness at nightfall, the emptiness one feels in a desolate locale, the Gothic coldness that penetrates from the physical senses into one's interior emotions, are all much more fully realized through the simple evocation of the scene than would be possible by detailing them explicitly. The mournful call of evening birds in the bleak, empty, windswept fields cuts, like the No flute, to the very core of one's feelings.
The No is perhaps the most difficult Zen art for Westerners to enjoy. The restrained action transmits virtually nothing of what is occurring onstage, and the poetry does not translate well. (As Robert Frost once observed, in translations of poetry, it is the poetry that is lost.) The music is harsh to the Western ear; the chorus interrupts at intervals that seem puzzling; the strange cries and dances befog the mind. Most important of all, the concept ofyugenis not a natural part of Western aesthetics. The measured cadences of the No have, for the Westerner, all the mystery of a religious ceremony wrought by a race of pious but phlegmatic Martians. Yet we can admire the taut surface beauty and the strangely twentieth-century atonality of the form.
Its enigmatic remoteness notwithstanding, the No remains one of the greatest expressions of Ashikaga Zen art. Some of Zeami's texts are ranked among the most complex and subtle of all Japanese poetry. For six hundred years the No has been a secular Zen Mass, in which some of mankind's deepest aesthetic responses are explored.
Part III
THE RISE OF POPULAR ZEN CULTURE:
1573 TO THE PRESENT
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bourgeois Society and Later Zen
God has given us the Papacy; let us enjoy it.
Pope Leo X, 1513
The Ashikagawas the last era in Japan entirely without knowledge of Europe. In 1542 a Portuguese trading vessel bound for Macao went aground on a small island off the coast of southern Japan, and the first Europeans in history set foot on Japanese soil. Within three years the Portuguese had opened trade with Japan, and four years after that Francis Xavier, the famous Jesuit missionary, arrived to convert the heathen natives to the Church. For the eclectic Japanese, who had received half a dozen brands of Buddhism over the centuries, one additional religion more or less hardly mattered, and they listened with interest to the new preaching, far from blind to the fact that the towns with the most new Christians received the most new trade. Indeed, the Japanese appear to have first interpreted Christianity as an exotic form of Buddhism, whose priests borrowed the ancient Buddhist idea of prayer beads and venerated a goddess of mercy remarkably like the Buddhist Kannon. In addition to bringing a new faith, the Portuguese, whose armed merchant ships were capable of discouraging pirates, were soon in full command of the trade between China and Japan—a mercantile enterprise once controlled by Zen monks.
Still, the direct influence of Europe was not pronounced. Although there was a brief passion for European costume among Japanese dandies (similar to the Heian passion for T'ang Chinese dress), the Japanese by and large had little use for European goods or European ideas. However, one European invention won Japanese hearts forever: the smoothbore musket. The Japanese, sensing immediately that the West had finally found a practical use for the ancient Chinese idea of gunpowder, soon made the musket their foremost instrument of social change. Overnight a thousand years of classical military tactics were swept aside, while the Japanese genius for metal-working turned to muskets rather than swords. Musket factories sprang up across the land, copying and often improving on European designs, and before long Japanese warlords were using the musket with greater effect than any European ever had. The well-meaning Jesuits, who had arrived with the mission of rescuing Japanese souls, had succeeded only in revolutionizing Japanese capacity for combat.
The musket was to be an important ingredient in the final unification of Japan, the dream of so many shoguns and emperors in ages past. The process, which required several bloody decades, was presided over by three military men of unquestioned genius: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616). The character of these three men is portrayed in a Japanese allegory describing their respective attitudes toward a bird reluctant to sing. Nobunaga, the initiator of the unification movement and one of the crudest men who ever lived, ordered bluntly, "Sing or I'll wring your neck." Hideyoshi, possibly the most skillful diplomat in Japanese history, told the bird, "If you don't want to sing, I'll make you." Ieyasu, who eventually inherited the fruits of the others' labor, patiently advised the bird, "If you won't sing now, I'll wait until you will." Today the years dominated by Nobunaga and Hideyoshi are known as the Momoyama era, and the following two centuries of peace presided over by Ieyasu and his descendants are referred to as the Tokugawa.
After the Onin War, which had destroyed the power of the Ashikaga shogunate and the aristocratic Zen culture of Kyoto, Japan had become a collection of feudal fiefdoms. The emperor and Ashikaga shoguns in Kyoto were titular rulers of a land they in no way governed. Into this regional balance of power came Nobunaga, who began his military career by killing his brother in a family dispute and taking control of his home province. Shortly thereafter he defeated a powerful regional warlord who had invaded the province with an army far outnumbering his own. The victory made him a national figure overnight and destroyed the balance of dynamic tension that had preserved the system of autonomousdaimyofiefs. Rivaldaimyo, covetous of their neighbors' lands, rushed to enlist his aid until, in 1568, he marched into Kyoto and installed a shogun of his own choosing.
When the Buddhists on Mt. Hiei objected to Nobunaga's practices of land confiscation, he marched up the hill and sacked the premises, burning the buildings to the ground and killing every last man, woman, and child. This style of ecumenicity had been practiced often enough among the Buddhists themselves as one sect warred against the other, but never before had a secular ruler dared such a feat. This act and the program of systematic persecution that followed marked the end of genuine Buddhist influence in Japan.
Nobunaga's armies of musket-wielding foot soldiers were on the verge of consolidating his authority over all Japan when he was unexpectedly murdered by one of his generals. The clique responsible for the attempted coup was dispatched in short
order by Nobunaga's leading general, the aforementioned diplomat Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi, who later became known as the Napoleon of Japan, was not ofsamuraiblood and had in fact begun his military career as Nobunaga's sandal holder. He was soon providing the warlord with astute military advice, and it was only a matter of time until he was a trusted lieutenant. He was the first (and last) shogun of peasant stock, and his sudden rise to power caused aristocratic eyebrows to be raised all across Japan. Physically unimposing, he was one of the seminal figures in world history, widely acknowledged to have been the best military strategist in the sixteenth-century world, and he completed the process of unification. The anecdotes surrounding his life are now cherished legends in Japan. For example, a favorite military stratagem was to bring a recalcitrantdaimyoto the very brink of ruin and then fall back, offering an incredibly generous peace. However unwise such a tactic might be in the West, it had the effect in Japan of converting a desperate enemy into an indebted subordinate.
With the country at peace, foreign trade flourishing, and a rigorous system of taxation in force, Hideyoshi found himself with an excess of time and money. His response was to launch the Momoyama age of Japanese art. With more power than any ruler since Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, he was in a position to direct taste, if not to dictate it. This time there were few Zen monks in attendance to advise him on expenditures (Hideyoshi continued to keep the Buddhists under close guard, a practice as pleasing to the Jesuits as his harem was displeasing), and his flamboyant taste had full reign. Momoyama art became, in many ways, the antithesis of Zen aesthetics. Hideyoshi ordered huge screens to be covered in gold leaf and decorated with explicit still-lifes painted in vibrant primary colors. Yet he was no stranger to Zen ideals; he kept a famous tea-ceremony aesthete as adviser and lavished huge sums on the special ceramics required for this ritual. In many ways, the Zen tea ceremony and tea ceramics became for Hideyoshi what Zen gardens, painting, and the No were for the Ashikaga. His patronage not only inspired a flourishing of ceramic art; the tea ceremony now became the vehicle through which Zen canons of taste and aesthetics were transmitted to the common man. The patronage of the Ashikaga had furthered Zen art among thesamuraiand the aristocracy; Hideyoshi's patronage opened it to the people at large.
Ironically, the Zen arts profited from Hideyoshi's military blunders as well as from his patronage. At one point in his career he decided to invade China, but his armies, predictably, never got past Korea. The enterprise was unworthy of his military genius, and puzzled historians have speculated that it may actually have been merely a diversion for his unemployedsamurai, intended to remove them temporarily to foreign soil. The most significant booty brought back from this disastrous venture (now sometimes known as the "pottery campaign") was a group of Korean potters, whose rugged folk ceramics added new dimensions to the equipment of the tea ceremony.
Having maneuvered the shogunate away from Nobunaga's heirs, Hideyoshi became increasingly nervous about succession as his health began to fail, fearing that his heirs might be similarly deprived of their birthright. The problem was particularly acute, since his only son, Hideyori, was five years old and scarcely able to defend the family interests. In 1598, as the end approached, Hideyoshi formed a council ofdaimyoheaded by Tokugawa Ieyasu to rule until his son came of age, and on his deathbed he forced them to swear they would hand over the shogunate when the time came. Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened.
Tokugawa Ieyasu was no stranger to the brutal politics of the age, having once ordered his own wife's execution when Nobunaga suspected her of treason, and he spent the first five years after Hideyoshi's death consolidating his power and destroying rivaldaimyo. When Hideyoshi's son came of age, Ieyasu was ready to move. Hideyori was living in the family citadel at Osaka defended by an army of disenfranchisedsamuraiand disaffected Christians, but Ieyasu held the power. In the ensuing bloodbath Hideyoshi's line was erased from the earth, and the Christians' faulty political judgment caused their faith eventually to be forbidden to all Japanese under threat of death. Christianity continued to be practiced on a surreptitious basis, however, as the Christians found shelter in, of all places, the Zen monasteries.
With the passing of Hideyoshi's line, the Tokugawa family became the only power in Japan, a land at last unified and with an imposed peace. Viewing foreign influences as a source of domestic unrest, the Tokugawa moved to bring down a curtain of isolationism around their shores: Christian Europeans were expelled and Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad. Ieyasu established a new capital at Edo (now Tokyo) and required the localdaimyoto spend a large amount of time and money in attendance. Thus he craftily legitimatised his own position while simultaneously weakening that of thedaimyo—a technique used with equal effect almost a century later by Louis XIV, when he moved his court from Paris to Versailles to contain the French aristocracy.
Content with the status quo, members of the Tokugawa family felt it could best be preserved by extreme conservatism, so they sent forth a volley of decrees formalizing all social relationships. Time was brought to a stop, permitting the Tokugawa to rule unhindered until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the country was again opened to foreign trade under the guns of American warships.
During the Tokugawa regime another Chinese "religion" assumed the place in the hearts of the shoguns that Buddhism had enjoyed in centuries past. This was Confucianism, more a philosophy than a religion, which in its original form had taught a respect for learning, the ready acceptance of a structured hierarchy, and unquestioning obedience to authority (that of both elders and superiors). The Tokugawa perverted Confucianism to establish a caste system among their subjects, separating them into thesamuraiclass, the peasant class, and the merchant and artisan classes—the order given here denoting their supposed status. However, as the Japanese social system began to evolve, the idea backfired, causing great difficulties for the government. The reasons for this are interesting, for they bear directly upon the eventual role of Zen culture in Japanese life.
For centuries, Japan's major source of income had been agriculture. Thesamuraiwere local landholders who employed peasants to grow their rice and who were beholden to a localdaimyofor protection. Money played no large part in the economy, since most daily needs could be obtained by barter. But the sudden wealth brought into being by the European traders had nothing to do with the amount of rice asamurai'speasants could produce; it accrued instead to the merchants in port cities. Furthermore, the accommodations required to keep thedaimyoand their families in the capital city of Edo called for artisans and merchants in great number. Thus the Tokugawa government had mistakenly decreed the agriculturalsamuraiand peasants the backbone of the economy at the very moment in history when Japan was finally developing an urban, currency-based culture. Predictably, the urban merchants, who were at the bottom of the Confucianist social system, soon had their supposed social betters, thesamurai, completely in hock.
The Tokugawa struggled hard to keep the townspeople, now the controllers of the economy, in their place. Merchants were forbidden to build elaborate houses or wear elaborate clothes, and they were expected to defer to the penurioussamuraiin all things. Japan had never before had a bourgeoisie—the traditional divisions were aristocracy, warriors, and peasants— and consequently popular taste had never really been reflected in the arts. Much to the dismay of the Tokugawa (and to the detriment of classical Zen culture), this was changing. While the aristocrats and warrior families in Kyoto preserved the older arts of Zen, in the bourgeois city of Edo there were new popular art forms like the Kabuki theater and the woodblock print, both eons removed from the No and the monochrome landscape. Classical Zen culture was largely confined to aristocratic Kyoto, while in boisterous Edo the townspeople turned to explicit, exciting arts full of color and drama.
In spite of this democratic turn of events, the Zen aesthetics of Kyoto continued to be felt, largely through the tea ceremony, which had been officially encouraged in the Momoyama age of Hideyoshi. Later in the Tokugawa era the poetic form of Haiku developed, and it too was highly influenced by the Zen idea of suggestiveness. Domestic architecture also maintained the ideals of Zen, as did Ikebana, or flower arranging, and the Japanese cuisine, which employed Zen ceramics. Thus Zen aesthetics seeped into middle-class culture in many forms, tempering taste and providing rigid rules for much of what are today thought of as the traditional arts and crafts of the Japanese.
Traditional Buddhism did not fare well during the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages: the militaristic Buddhist strongholds were either put to rout or destroyed entirely during the Momoyama, and Confucianism had considerably more influence under the Tokugawa than did Buddhism. The great upsurge of Buddhism with its fiery teachers and believing shoguns was over, as the faith settled into empty ritual and a decidedly secondary station in a basically secular state. The only Buddhist sect demonstrating any vigor at all was Zen.
The brief flourishing of Zen during the Tokugawa era was actually a revival, for the faith had become static and uninspired during the years of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. The formalized practice of Zen at the end of the seventeenth century was described by a visiting Jesuit Father:
The solitary philosophers of the Zenshu sect, who dwell in their retreats in the wilderness, [do not] philosophize with the help of books and treatises written by illustrious masters and philosophers as do the members of the other sects of the Indian gymnosophists. Instead they give themselves up to contemplating the things of nature, despising and abandoning worldly things; they mortify their passions by certain enigmatic and figurative meditations and considerations [koan] which guide them on their way at the beginning. . . . [s]o the vocation of these philosophers is not to contend or dispute with another with arguments, but they leave everything to the contemplation of each one so that by himself he may attain the goal by using these principles, and thus they do not teach disciples.1
The good Father was describing a Zen faith that had become a set piece, devoid of controversy but also devoid of life.
The man who brought Zen out of its slumber and restored its vigor was the mystic Hakuin (1685-1768), who revived thekoanschool of Rinzai and produced the most famouskoanof all times: "You know the sound of two hands clapping; what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Hakuin gave a new, mystical dimension to the Rinzai school of Zen, even as Hui-neng created nonintellectual Chinese Ch'an Buddhism out of the founding ideas of Bodhidharma. Hakuin was also a poet, a painter, and the author of many commentaries on thesutras. Yet even when he enjoyed national fame, he never lost his modesty or his desire for enlightenment.
Hakuin lived the greater part of his life in the small rural village of his birth. A sensitive, impressionable child, he was early tormented by an irrational fear of the fires of the Buddhist hell as dwelt upon by the priests of his mother's sect, the Nichiren. For relief he turned to the Lotus Sutra, but nothing he read seemed to ease his mind. Finally he became a wandering Zen monk, searching from temple to temple for a master who could give him enlightenment. He studied under various famous teachers and gradually achieved higher and higher levels of awareness. At the age of thirty-two he returned to his home village and assumed control of the ramshackle local Zen temple, which he eventually made the center of Rinzai Zen in Japan. Word of his spiritual intensity spread and soon novices were flocking to him. His humility and humanity were a shining light in the spiritual dark age of the Tokugawa, and he breathed life and understanding back into Zen.
Despite Hakuin, official Zen never regained its influence in Japan. Someday perhaps the modern-day Western interest in Zen will give it new life somewhere outside Japan, but this life will almost certainly be largely secular. Indeed, the influence of Zen in the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages was already more pronounced in the secular world than in the spiritual. The bourgeois arts of these later years were notably less profound than those of the Ashikaga, but the spirit of Zen spread to become infused into the very essence of Japanese life, making the everyday business of living an expression of popular Zen culture.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Tea Ceremony
Chazen ichimi(Zen and tea are one.) Traditional Japanese expression
The “dewy path” to teahouse
The tea ceremonycombines all the faces of Zen—art, tranquility, aesthetics. It is in a sense the essence of Zen culture. Yet this Zen ritual has been explained to the West in so many volumes of wordy gush that almost any description, including the above, deserves to be met with skepticism. There has to be more to the tea ceremony than meets the eye—and there is. But before unraveling the unseen threads of this Zen fabric, let us pause for a moment to consider the beverage itself.
The drinking of tea seems almost to have been the world's second oldest profession. One legend claims that tea was discovered in the year 2737b.c.,when leaves from a tea bush
accidentally dropped into the campfire cauldron of a Chinese emperor-aesthete. Early Chinese texts are sometimes vague about the identity of medicinal plants, but it is clear that by the time of Confucius (around 500b.c.)tea was a well-known drink. During the Tang dynasty (618-907), tea leaves were treated with smoke and compressed into a semimoist cake, slices of which would subsequently be boiled to produce a beverage—a method that was perpetuated for many centuries in Russia. The Chinese spiced this boiled tea with salt, a holdover from even earlier times when a variety of unexpected condiments were added, including orange peel, ginger, and onions.
The refined courtiers of the Sung dynasty (960-1279) apparently found brick tea out of keeping with their delicate tastes, for they replaced it with a drink in which finely ground tea leaves were blended with boiling water directly in the cup. Whipped with a bamboo whisk, this mixture superficially resembled shaving lather in texture, although the color could be a fine jade green if fresh leaves were used. (This green powdered tea was the drink one day to become enshrined in the Zen tea ceremony.) The Chinese chronicle of tea ends with the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), which saw the rise of the familiar steeping process, now the commonly accepted practice worldwide. Our ignorance of the earlier methods of tea preparation may be attributed to the West's discovery of China after the older methods had been discarded.
Unlike its misty origins in China, the use of tea in Japan is well authenticated. In the year 792 the Japanese emperor surprised the court by holding a large tea party at which Buddhist monks and other notables were invited to sample a curious beverage discovered by his emissaries to the T'ang court. Tea drinking soon became a fashionable pastime, occupying a position comparable to taking coffee in eighteenth-century Europe, but tea remained an expensive import and little thought was given to cultivation in Japan. This changed early in the ninth century when tea drinking came to be associated with the new Buddhist sects of Tendai and Shingon. Under the supervision of the court, tea growing was begun near Kyoto, where the emperor blessed the bushes with a specialsutrain the spring and autumn. Tea remained an aristocratic habit for several centuries thereafter and did not become really popular until the late twelfth century, when the famous Zen teacher Eisai "reintroduced" the beverage upon his return from China. Eisai also brought back new seeds for planting, the progeny of which are still growing.
Chinese Ch'an monks had long been devoted to tea. In fact, a famous but apocryphal legend attributes the tea bush to Bodhidharma, relating that during his nine years of meditation outside Shao-lin monastery he found himself nodding and in anger tore off his eyelids and flung them to the ground, whereupon tea plants sprang forth. There was a reason for the legend. Tea had long been used to forestall drowsiness during long periods of meditation. (A cup of modern steeped tea contains an average three-quarters of a grain of caffeine, about half the amount in a cup of coffee.) The drinking of tea became ritualized in Ch'an monasteries, where the monks would congregate before an image of Bodhidharma and take a sacrament of tea from a single shared bowl in his memory. This ritual was gradually adopted by Japanese Zen monasteries, providing the forerunner of the solemn moment of shared tea which became the basis of the tea ceremony.
The Japanese aristocracy and the warrior class also took up tea, and borrowing a custom from the Sung court, gave tea-tasting parties, similar to modern wine-tasting affairs. From the time of Ashikaga Takauji to Ashikaga Yoshimasa, these parties were an accompaniment to many of the courtly evenings spent admiring Sung ceramics and discussing Sung art theories. Although Zen monks played a prominent role in these aesthetic gatherings, the drinking of tea in monasteries seems to have been a separate activity. Thus the ceremonial drinking of tea developed in two parallel schools: the aristocracy used it in refined entertainments while the Zen monks drank tea as a pious celebration of their faith.
These two schools were eventually merged into the Zen-
inspired gathering known simply as the tea ceremony,cha-no-yu. But first there was the period when each influenced the other. Zen aesthetic theory gradually crept into the aristocratic tea parties, as taste turned away from the polished Sung ceramic cups toward ordinary pottery. This was the beginning of the tradition of deliberate understatement later to be so important in the tea ceremony. Zen ideals took over the warrior tea parties. During his reign, Yoshimasa was persuaded by a famous Zen monk-aesthetician to construct a small room for drinking tea monastery-style. The mood in this room was all Zen, from the calligraphic scroll hanging in the tokonoma art alcove to the ceremonial flower arrangements and the single cup shared in a sober ritual. After this, those who would serve tea had first to study the tea rituals of the Zen monastery. Furthermore, warriors came to believe that the Zen tea ritual would help their fighting discipline.
By the sixteenth century the discipline and tranquility of the ceremony had become fixed, but the full development ofcha-no-yuas a vehicle for preserving Zen aesthetic theory was yet to come. Gradually, one by one, the ornate aspects of the earlier Sung tea parties were purged. The idea took hold that tea should be drunk not in a room partitioned off from the rest of the house, but in a special thatch-roofed hut constructed specifically for the purpose, giving tea drinking an air of conspicuous poverty. The elaborate vessels and interior appointments favored in the fifteenth century were supplanted in the sixteenth by rugged, folk-style pottery and an interior decor as restrained as a monastery. By stressing an artificial poverty, the ceremony became a living embodiment of Zen with its distaste for materialism and the world of getting and spending.
It remained for a sixteenth-century Zen teacher to bring all the aesthetic ideas in the tea ceremony together in a rigid system. He was Sen no Rikyu (1521-1591), who began as the tea instructor of Nobunaga and continued to play the same role for Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi was devoted to the tea ceremony, and under his patronage Rikyu formalized the classic rules under whichcha-no-yuis practiced today.
The most famous anecdote from Rikyu's life is the incident remembered as the "tea party of the morning glory." As the son of a merchant in a port city, Rikyu developed a taste for the new and exotic. At one time he began the cultivation of imported European morning glories, a novel flower to the Japanese, which he sometimes used for the floral display accompanying the tea ceremony. Hideyoshi, learning of these new flowers, informed Rikyu that he wished to take morning tea with him in order to see the blossoms at their finest. On the selected date, Hideyoshi arrived to find that all the flowers in the garden had been plucked; not a single petal was to be seen. Understandably out of temper, he proceeded to the tea hut—there to discover a single morning glory, still wet with the dews of dawn, standing in thetokonomaalcove, a perfect illustration of the Zen precept of sufficiency in restraint.
Tea ceremonies today are held in special backyard gardens, equipped for the purpose with a waiting shelter at the entrance and a tiny teahouse at the far end. When one arrives at the appointed time, one joins the two or three other guests in the garden shed for a waiting period designed to encourage a relaxed state of mind and the requisite Zen tranquility. The tea garden, known as theroji, or "dewy path," differs from conventional Japanese temple gardens in that it is merely a passageway between the waiting shelter and the teahouse. Since the feeling is meant to be that of a mountain path, there are no ponds or elaborate stone arrangements. The only natural rocks in evidence are the stepping stones themselves, but along the path are a carved stone in the shape of a water basin and a bamboo dipper, so that one can rinse one's mouth before taking tea, and a stone lantern to provide illumination for evening gatherings. The unpretentious stones of the walkway, set deep in natural mossy beds, divide the garden into two parts, winding through it like a curving, natural path. Dotted about the garden are carefully pruned pine trees, azalea bushes clipped into huge globes, or perhaps a towering cryptomeria whose arching branches protect guests against the afternoon sun. Although the garden floor is swept clean, it may still have a vagrant leaf or pine needle strewn here and there. As one waits for the host's appearance, the garden slowly begins to impose a kind of magic, drawing one away from the outside world.