No and Kyogen in the Contemporary World

Yūgen after Zeami

36 Yûgen after Zeami Arthur H. Thornhill III Of all the aesthetic ideals associated with nò, surely yûgen is the most widely recognized and admired by contemporary critics and students . However, a careful reading of Zeami’s treatises reveals relatively few passages that directly address or define yûgen. It has been left to scholars to piece together the evidence, and to audiences to savor what is considered the indispensable je-ne-sais-quois of the nò experience . My intention here is not to arrive at a universal definition of yûgen; this is not possible, if only because the term is used in so many different ways by poets and performers from the tenth century to the present. Rather, I would like to make some observations on the implications of yûgen as it appears in the writings of Zeami and especially in the treatises of his son-in-law Komparu Zenchiku (1405–1468?), whose views have received relatively little attention. The term yûgen itself is a compound of two Chinese graphs: the first means “faint” or “distant,” the second “dark,” with overtones of “mystery .” As Taniyama Shigeru notes, however, the second character gen (Ch. hsüan) predominates (Taniyama 1943, 3), and thus the expression has a strong Taoist flavor. Hsüan is used in Lao Tzu to represent the dark, mysterious aspect of the Tao—the nameless, formless realm antecedent to the differentiated world of light, and the primordial nature to which all things return. In Japan, the compound yûgen is first used in Buddhist commentaries , meaning “difficult” or “obscure,” in reference to Buddhist doctrine (Nose 1944, 14–18, 28–34). It should be noted that in a Buddhist context, the conventional connotations of darkness are the opposite of hsüan. Darkness in Buddhism is avidyâ, or “ignorance,” and only through the light of wisdom can the truth of the Dharma be realized. Nevertheless, probably under the influence of Taoism, the term yûgen is frequently used to describe a transcendent ideal of Buddhist practice, Yûgen after Zeami 37 prajñâpâramitâ (perfected wisdom); thus it comes to mean “difficult” in the sense of profound, distant, and ineffable. The underlying perspective, then, is that of human perception. Rather than representing a teleological state from within—where indeed the psychological experience is one of illumination—or from an absolute perspective, where the good is inherently bright and the impure is dark and polluted, yûgen presents both the Tao and the transcendent wisdom of Mahayana Buddhism as we perceive them: dark, unintelligible, and mysterious. This perspective is consistent with the Chinese proclivity for abstractions based upon perception of the natural world; witness the (originally) pictorial qualities of Chinese characters . The underlying model of darkness and light is of course the basis for the most essential bipolarity in Chinese culture, that of yin and yang. This perceptual orientation is of more than casual interest, because it is the intrinsic orientation of aesthetic experience. In reference to poetry, yûgen first appears in the Chinese preface to the Kokinshû, composed by Ki no Yoshimochi at the beginning of the tenth century: “In compositions like the Naniwazu poem, which was presented to the Emperor, or the Tominoogawa poem, which was written as a response to the Crown Prince, poetry entered the realm of the supernatural (shin’i) and the mysterious (yûgen).”1 The first of these poems, said to be composed by the scribe Wani to urge the future Emperor Nintoku to take the throne, is presented as an example of soeuta, the “indirect style”: Naniwazu ni Flowers on the trees saku ya ko no hana in bloom at Naniwazu fuyugomori say, “Now the winter ima wa harube to yields its place to the springtime!” saku ya ko no hana Flowers blooming on the trees.2 The Tominoogawa poem is attributed to a beggar who responded to kindness shown him by Prince Shòtoku as follows: Ikaruga ya Only when the Tominoo River Tominoogawa no of Ikaruga taeba koso runs dry wa ga òkimi no will I forget mina o wasureme the name of my lord.3 Some commentators state that the term yûgen probably applies to the first poem only, denoting the “obscurity” of its metaphorical 38 Values in Contemporary Society meaning (Okumura 1978, 381). In the second poem, supernatural connotations arise from a legend which identifies the beggar as an incarnation...