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 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 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