Part 12 (1/2)
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 of _yugen _is 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 As.h.i.+kaga Zen art. Some of Zeami's texts are ranked among the most complex and subtle of all j.a.panese poetry. For six hundred years the No has been a secular Zen Ma.s.s, 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
_G.o.d has given us the Papacy; let us enjoy it.
_ Pope Leo X, 1513
THE As.h.i.+KAGA was the last era in j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan, and the first Europeans in history set foot on j.a.panese soil. Within three years the Portuguese had opened trade with j.a.pan, and four years after that Francis Xavier, the famous Jesuit missionary, arrived to convert the heathen natives to the Church. For the eclectic j.a.panese, 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 j.a.panese 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 G.o.ddess of mercy remarkably like the Buddhist Kannon. In addition to bringing a new faith, the Portuguese, whose armed merchant s.h.i.+ps were capable of discouraging pirates, were soon in full command of the trade between China and j.a.pan--a mercantile enterprise once controlled by Zen monks.
Still, the direct influence of Europe was not p.r.o.nounced. Although there was a brief pa.s.sion for European costume among j.a.panese dandies (similar to the Heian pa.s.sion for T'ang Chinese dress), the j.a.panese by and large had little use for European goods or European ideas. However, one European invention won j.a.panese hearts forever: the smoothbore musket. The j.a.panese, 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 cla.s.sical military tactics were swept aside, while the j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese souls, had succeeded only in revolutionizing j.a.panese capacity for combat.
The musket was to be an important ingredient in the final unification of j.a.pan, the dream of so many shoguns and emperors in ages past. The process, which required several b.l.o.o.d.y decades, was presided over by three military men of unquestioned genius: Oda n.o.bunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi Hideyos.h.i.+ (1536-1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616). The character of these three men is portrayed in a j.a.panese allegory describing their respective att.i.tudes toward a bird reluctant to sing.
n.o.bunaga, the initiator of the unification movement and one of the crudest men who ever lived, ordered bluntly, ”Sing or I'll wring your neck.” Hideyos.h.i.+, possibly the most skillful diplomat in j.a.panese 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 n.o.bunaga and Hideyos.h.i.+ 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 As.h.i.+kaga shogunate and the aristocratic Zen culture of Kyoto, j.a.pan had become a collection of feudal fiefdoms. The emperor and As.h.i.+kaga shoguns in Kyoto were t.i.tular rulers of a land they in no way governed. Into this regional balance of power came n.o.bunaga, 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 autonomous _daimyo_ fiefs. Rival _daimyo_, 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 n.o.bunaga'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 ec.u.menicity 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 j.a.pan.
n.o.bunaga's armies of musket-wielding foot soldiers were on the verge of consolidating his authority over all j.a.pan when he was unexpectedly murdered by one of his generals. The clique responsible for the attempted coup was dispatched in short
order by n.o.bunaga's leading general, the aforementioned diplomat Hideyos.h.i.+. Hideyos.h.i.+, who later became known as the Napoleon of j.a.pan, was not of _samurai _blood and had in fact begun his military career as n.o.bunaga'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 j.a.pan. 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 j.a.pan. For example, a favorite military stratagem was to bring a recalcitrant _daimyo_ to 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 j.a.pan of converting a desperate enemy into an indebted subordinate.
With the country at peace, foreign trade flouris.h.i.+ng, and a rigorous system of taxation in force, Hideyos.h.i.+ found himself with an excess of time and money. His response was to launch the Momoyama age of j.a.panese art. With more power than any ruler since As.h.i.+kaga Yos.h.i.+mitsu, 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 (Hideyos.h.i.+ 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 ant.i.thesis of Zen aesthetics. Hideyos.h.i.+ 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 Hideyos.h.i.+ what Zen gardens, painting, and the No were for the As.h.i.+kaga. His patronage not only inspired a flouris.h.i.+ng 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 As.h.i.+kaga had furthered Zen art among the _samurai _and the aristocracy; Hideyos.h.i.+'s patronage opened it to the people at large.
Ironically, the Zen arts profited from Hideyos.h.i.+'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 unemployed _samurai_, 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 n.o.bunaga's heirs, Hideyos.h.i.+ 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, Hideyos.h.i.+ formed a council of _daimyo_ headed 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 n.o.bunaga suspected her of treason, and he spent the first five years after Hideyos.h.i.+'s death consolidating his power and destroying rival _daimyo_. When Hideyos.h.i.+'s son came of age, Ieyasu was ready to move. Hideyori was living in the family citadel at Osaka defended by an army of disenfranchised _samurai _and disaffected Christians, but Ieyasu held the power. In the ensuing bloodbath Hideyos.h.i.+'s line was erased from the earth, and the Christians' faulty political judgment caused their faith eventually to be forbidden to all j.a.panese under threat of death.