buddhahood for the nonsentient reconsidered: the case of kakitsubata (the iris) and other nō plays...

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/22118349-12341255

Journal of Religion in Japan 2 (2013) 222-243 brill.com/jrj

Buddhahood for the Nonsentient Reconsidered: The Case of Kakitsubata (The Iris) and Other Nō Plays

by Konparu Zenchiku

Susan Blakeley KleinUniversity of California, Irvine, USA

[email protected]

AbstractDonald Shively first considered the topic of “Buddhahood for the nonsentient” (sōmoku jōbutsu) as a theme in Nō plays back in 1957. In subsequent years there have been several major studies published on sōmoku jōbutsu in Japanese and one major study in English. This new research enables a more complex understanding of how popular conceptions of sōmoku jōbutsu play themselves out in Nō involving nonsentient beings, and in particu-lar how the concept of Buddhahood for the nonsentient intersects with the possibility of enlightenment for women. A vexing question for medieval Buddhist scholars was whether nonsentient plants (and to a lesser degree, women) could achieve enlightenment through their own efforts ( jiriki) or had to depend on the intervention of a higher Buddhist power (tariki). The article takes as a case study the Nō play Kakitsubata, in which an iris, manifest-ing as a young women, attains enlightenment and release from her obsessive attachment to her deep purple color, which for her signals that she is the most important and beloved of the katami (fetishized poetic mementos) associated with Ariwara no Narihira, a Heian poet deified in the medieval period as the Bodhisattva of Song and Dance. In this play, as in oth-ers by Konparu Zenchiku, the solution that the playwright presents performatively to this doubled problem of salvation is ambiguous, but may well be representative of the popular understanding of the ontological and soteriological status of both nonsentient beings and women in late medieval culture.

KeywordsKanze Zeami, Konparu Zenchiku, mugen nō, Nō, sōmoku jōbutsu, soteriology

This article reflects some preliminary thoughts on the historical develop-ment of ghosts in premodern Japan, and in this case, more specifically, the ontological and soteriological status of ghosts (of human beings) and other

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spirits (of nonsentient plants, insects, animals) in Nō plays. Here, I want to concentrate on how this issue plays out in Nō plays that center on the spir-its of nonsentient beings, with specific focus on the play Kakitsubata 杜若 (The Iris), thought to be composed by Konparu Zenchiku 金春禅竹 (1405-c. 1470), which features the search for enlightenment by the spirit of an iris manifesting as a young woman. Specifically, I want to think about the sote-riological mechanism by which the iris attains enlightenment at the end of the play, and how this might intersect with the possibility for women to achieve enlightenment, as understood in medieval popular culture. Along the way I will be making some comparisons to other Nō plays, including several by Zenchiku: Nonomiya 野宮神社 (The Shrine in the Fields) and Bashō 芭蕉 (The Plantain).

Let us begin with a few general thoughts about the topic of ghosts and spirits in Nō. Since I first started working on Nō, I have been puzzled by the apparent differences in how spirits are understood: their appearance, the ontological space in which they appear, what ritual means are used to help them achieve salvation/enlightenment, and why it is that some spir-its appear to achieve enlightenment, whereas others are left to wander unpacified. I should state at the outset, however, that the attempt to think logically about the ontological and soteriological status of ghosts and spir-its in Nō may well be delusional. Although scholars like to make generali-zations about whole categories of Nō, when you look at a specific play it almost always seems to be an exception to the rule. This is the case with the Nō play Kakitsubata as well. When I was preparing this paper initially, and I was trying to think about Kakitsubata as a case study of the larger category of plays about nonsentient beings, I realized that in fact, Kakitsubata is not typical of that category at all. It hovers in an ambiguous space between Nō about nonsentient beings and mugen 夢幻 (dream vision) Nō about female ghosts. To make that clear, I need to discuss soteriology in mugen Nō involving ghosts; specifically, the usual mechanisms understood to enlighten the spirit.

Mugen Nō about ghosts are usually thought to have at least some didac-tic content: demonstrating the power of Buddhism in the figure of a priest character to help ghosts caught in a kind of limbo of passionate attach-ment. The usual mechanism for pacification in a mugen Nō is the ritual prayers that the priest character offers; most often a recitation of the Lotus Sutra or calling on Amida Buddha via the nenbutsu 念仏. If the ghost or

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spirit character does achieve enlightenment and release from his or her attachment, at least one factor is that those ritual prayers have been (and are perhaps continuing to be) performed. A secondary factor appears to be the cathartic nature of reenacting the historical trauma that is the source of the obsession; theatrically, of course, that is the central focus of the drama.

But in fact, the narrative demands of mugen Nō sometimes support and sometimes undercut didactic arguments about the ritual efficacy of recit-ing the Lotus Sutra or calling on Amida Buddha via the nenbutsu. In Kinuta 砧 (The Fulling Block), a fourth category miscellaneous play with elements of dream vision, the rituals work perfectly. A wife, who feels abandoned by her husband, dies with anger in her heart, and without the benefit of rituals to help her achieve release from that anger. Her husband pays to have someone recite the Lotus Sutra for her, and it is clear that this ritual, along with her being allowed to return as a ghost to vent her anger at her husband, provides the mechanism for her release and enlightenment. But in other plays, most particularly second category plays about warriors that appear in Heike monogatari 平家物語 (Tales of the Heike), we may know from the original story that a particular warrior recited the nenbutsu before his death, and yet it seems to have had no efficacy, since in the Nō play he is still lingering in this world because of an unfulfilled desire. So for example, we know from the description of his death in Heike monogatari that the poet-warrior Tadanori was able to call upon Amida Buddha, reciting the nenbutsu ten times before his death. And yet in the eponymous Nō play, he returns to request that his poem, listed as “author unknown” (yomibito shirazu 詠み人知らず) in the imperial anthology Senzaiwakashū 千載和歌集 (1187), be listed under his own name. In this case, having his last wish be fulfilled is more important than having proper rituals be performed. This may indicate an overall secularization process occurring in Nō, whereby it is more important that we get to see the obsessive attachment of the ghost played out via dance and song, than that religious rituals are efficacious, but it leaves us with some questions about the efficacy of Buddhist rituals that are troubling.

One idea that might work here is to look at the tension within the medi-eval development of Pure Land Buddhism itself. On the one had there is the supposed absolute efficacy of the nenbutsu (recited by the practitioner him or herself ) as advocated by the founder of the Jishū 時宗 branch of Pure Land Buddhism, Ippen Shōnin 一遍上人 (1234-1289). We can see this

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position taken in the Nō play Yugyō yanagi 遊行柳 (The Priest and the Wil-low) by a priest in Ji-shū Pure Land tradition:

ichinen jūnen/ tada hitokoe no uchi ni umaruru/ shikai ichinin nenbutsumyō/ saihōben yūichi renshō

一念十念ただ一声の中に生るる此界一人念仏名西方便有一蓮生(Nishino 1998: 316-317)

One calling of his name,/or ten, it matters not/ a single invocation/ suffices for salva-tion. (Beichman 1970: 230)

On the other hand there were the profits to be made by temples on funeral and memorial rituals paid for by family members. Given the money involved, temples would have strong incentive to encourage doubt about whether a loved one had truly gained entrance to the Pure Land—perhaps there was a moment of doubt or distraction just at the moment of death?—that would complicate the salvation of even those who were clearly docu-mented to have done the right thing in their last moments. This may have allowed just enough leeway that a character such as Tadanori could return as a ghost because of an attachment to his reputation as a poet.1

In the case of third category (female) plays such as Izutsu 井筒 (The Well Curb), the soteriological issues are even more ambiguous. In Izutsu the ghost of Ki no Aritsune’s daughter appears to a wandering priest who hap-pens to visit the ruins of Ariwara Temple. She recalls (and reenacts through dance) her idyllic childhood friendship with the Heian court poet Ariwara no Narihira 有原業平 (825-880) and their later more troubled marriage.2 In terms of soteriology, it is unclear from the play (or its sources) whether or not Ki no Aritsune’s daughter was given appropriate pacification

1 There may also be some connection between whether the death is documented in Heike monogatari or not. The Heike warrior Tsunemasa 経政, like Tadanori, returns because of an obsessive attachment: to his biwa lute Seizan and perhaps also an amorous attachment to his former prelate, who he served as a young boy. In Heike monogatari Tsunemasa’s death is not depicted, so we do not know exactly how he died. This might allow for the more ambigu-ous ending of the play Tsunemasa, in which the ghost does not appear to achieve enlighten-ment at the end, but remains in the Ashura realm of continuous battle.

2 The story is based on Ise monogatari episodes 17, 23, and 24 and on the medieval com-mentary Reizeike-ryū Ise monogatari shō, which identified the anonymous woman in those episodes as Ki no Aritsune’s daughter (Katagiri 1969: 294).

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rituals at death. Ki no Aritsune’s daughter is thought to be historical; the introduction to poem 784 in the imperial anthology Kokinwakashū 古今和歌集 mentions her marriage to Narihira. But female deaths were not worth recording in the same way that warriors’ were, and so the fact that they are left lingering in this world is less obviously problematic. When women achieve enlightenment, one can simply assume that the implied ritual was effective; but that still leaves us with plays such as Nonomiya where the final enlightenment of the ghost of Rokujō Miyasudokoro 六条御息所 from Genji monogatari 源氏物語 (Tale of Genji) is left in doubt.

Nonomiya was probably written by Konparu Zenchiku, who is also thought to have written Kakitsubata (Itō Masayoshi 1989: 65-69; Atkins 2006: 248-257). We could say that historically this ambiguous ending may be a function of Nō’s increasing independence of Buddhist didacticism, although given Zenchiku’s dependence on patronage from elite clergy from the Kōfukuji 興福寺 complex in Nara, it seems counterintuitive. But there is no doubt, given the number of Zenchiku’s plays in which the female ghost fails to gain enlightenment, or is left in an ambiguous state, that for a playwright such as Zenchiku following a logic internal to the play itself must have seemed more important than the external force of didacti-cism. Paul Atkins (2006: 21-25) has argued persuasively for the metaphor of “revealed identity” as being one kind of internal logic that might be at work in these plays, both on the level of plot and on the level of rhetoric, and I certainly am not interested in discounting that idea here, since I think it neatly unlocks a number of troubling issues in Zenchiku’s plays. Instead I would like to think about whether other supplementary mechanisms might also be at work.

So for example, let us consider the differing outcomes for Rokujō Miyas-udokoro in the Nō plays Aoi no ue 葵上 and Nonomiya. In the original Genji monogatari, Rokujō feels great ambivalence towards her lover Genji and suppressed anger towards Genji’s primary wife, Aoi no Ue, who humiliated her publicly in the famous carriage battle (kuruma no arasoi) at the Kamo parade. Her living spirit (onryō 怨霊) attacks and kills Aoi, despite all the protective exorcism rituals that money can buy. After Aoi’s death, Rokujō’s ambivalence continues but now her decision is whether to stay with Genji, who has become even more distant and cold because of his suspicions about her involvement in Aoi’s death, or to leave the capital and go to Ise with her daughter, the newly installed priestess. With regard to Rokujō’s

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salvation, we are shown quite clearly in Genji chapters 35 and 36 that after her death, Rokujō has not achieved enlightenment, but remains caught in this world as an onryō, despite the rituals that both Genji and Rokujō’s daughter, Akikonomu 秋好む, have had performed for her. From this it should be clear that the author Murasaki Shikibu 紫式部 (c. 978-c. 1014 or 1025), whose patronage did not include religious institutions, was not worried about demonstrating the efficacy of Buddhist rituals or even whether Rokujō achieves enlightenment; in fact very much the opposite. By leaving Rokujō unsaved, she allows her to remain an un-recuperated voice of dissent against the system of polygamy that so oppressed the women of Heian Japan.

In the Nō play Aoi no Ue, on the other hand, Rokujō and her attempted victim are both saved by the ritual intervention of an Esoteric Buddhist priest. Aoi no Ue thematizes Rokujō’s habitual ambivalence from the origi-nal source, but in the play, the choice is now between obsessive anger with Genji’s primary wife Aoi and the release from that attachment to be gained through enlightenment. In Aoi no Ue, Rokujō is able to achieve that release, thereby providing a new happy ending for Rokujō (as well as for Aoi, who dies in the original story but in the play appears to be saved). Aoi no Ue is generally understood to be a very early play, perhaps revised by Zeami 世阿弥 (c. 1363-c. 1443), and one reason for the problematic disjuncture between the original source and the new happy ending could be didactic motives: demonstrating that if even so problematic a woman as Rokujō could be saved by Buddhist intervention, then surely the rest of us are savable.

In the later play Nonomiya Rokujō’s ambivalence is now transformed into an inability to decide to give up her attachment to Genji and the past, and to thereby attain the release of enlightenment. Rokujō’s inability to decide is dramatized at the end performatively by the actor’s movement in and out of the torii gate to the shrine, a gate that has come to symbol-ize the gate of the “Burning Mansion,” a parable from the Lotus Sutra’s third chapter:

koko wa moto yori/ futajikenaku mo/ kamikaze ya Ise no/ uchito no torii ni ideiru sugata wa/ shōji no michi o/ kami wa ukezu ya/ omouran to/ mata kuruma ni/ uchinnorite/ kataku no kado o ya/ idenuran/ kataku no kado

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ここはもとより忝くも神風や伊勢の内外の鳥井に出で入る姿は生死の道を神は享けずや思ふらんと又車に打乗て火宅の門をや出ぬらん火宅の門 (Nishino 1998: 628)

This spot from old, awesome to tell,/ has held in honour the great Gods of Ise,/ both the Inner and the Outer Shrines:/ as in and out the torii she goes,/ one fears those Gods may righteously reject/ her travels on the road of birth and death./ Now she steps again into her carriage./ May she at long last find her way/ forever out of the Burning Mansion’s gate,/the Burning Mansion’s gate. (Tyler 1992: 214)

The end of the play leaves Rokujō in the same ambiguous and ambiva-lent state in which she began. Zenchiku’s ending for Rokujō is ostensibly closer to the Murasaki Shikibu’s ending, since in both versions she remains in a state of painful attachment. But their concerns are completely differ-ent: Murasaki Shikibu’s concern was to show the problematic effects of polygamy on elite Heian period women, whereas at least one of Zenchiku’s concerns is the question of whether worship of the kami and worship of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, can ever be completely syncretized. In this way we can see the internal logic of the play at work, an internal logic that would have been reinforced by the tendency of Zenchiku’s female ghost characters in general to return to the same state in which they began.

Now, in the remainder of the paper, I want to consider how this issue is dealt with in Nō that involve the spirits of nonsentient beings, and in particular in Kakitsubata. In English, the issue of Buddhahood for nonsen-tient beings was first considered by Donald Shively more than fifty years ago (Shively 1957). And I first analyzed the Nō play Kakitsubata twenty years ago in my dissertation (Klein 1994, see also Klein 2009). But much research on Buddhahood for the nonsentient has been done since then, both in Japanese and English, and it is time to reconsider the question on the basis of that newer research. Especially helpful in this regard has been the full chapter that Fabio Rambelli devotes to the historical development of the problem of whether nonsentients can acquire Buddhahood in his 2007 book, Buddhist Materiality.3

3 For a fuller discussion in English of the general concept of sōmoku jōbutsu 草木成仏 in both Tendai and Shingon Esoteric Buddhism, and its ideological uses in the medieval period, see Rambelli (2001 and 2007). Paul Atkins (2006: 21-25) gives a short, but useful, introduction to the main concepts pertinent to Nō. In Japanese, the earliest discussions of the concept as used in Nō were in Hanabusa (1917); Anezaki (1938); and Hanada (1938). More recent articles

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When scholars discuss plays about nonsentient beings, they also like to make generalizations about the category as a whole. One of the generaliza-tions that you run into is that nonsentient beings, unlike ghosts, are not in need of enlightenment. This does seem to be true of the spirit of a play such as Zeami’s Saigyō zakura 西行桜 (Saigyō’s Cherry Tree), where the spirit of the cherry tree manifests as a venerable old man (okina 翁) to the poet-priest Saigyō Hōshi 西行法師 (1118–1190). Although the cherry tree spirit is a bit miffed about the fact that Saigyō has written a poem in which he faults the cherry tree for bringing too many visitors in spring, there is no indication that the spirit needs Saigyō’s help: here nature as embodied in the okina of the cherry tree is the very model of Tendai’s concept of Original (or Innate) Enlightenment (hongaku shisō 本学思想). But then we have a play such as Yugyō yanagi by Kanze Nobumitsu 観世信光 (?1435-1516) which appears to be modeled on Saigyō zakura since it similarly features the spirit of a tree connected to the poet Saigyō, manifesting as an okina. But this withered tree spirit seems to be in dire need of the Pure Land Bud-dhism teaching provided by the priest. (The yugyō of the title refers to the head of the temple where the willow resides, a priest in the direct lineage of Ippen’s Ji-shū sect). The willow tree has been waiting to die until it is able to receive the teaching that will guarantee its entry into the Pure Land. It seems likely that here the striking difference between the two plays cor-responds to the plays’ respective reliance on Tendai Esoteric Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism. Plays such as Yugyō yanagi and Kochō 胡蝶, in which a butterfly obsessively yearns to flutter and play among the plum blossoms, seem to treat nonsentient beings as stand-ins for human beings and their attachments, and in that sense, like the male and female ghosts discussed above, they need help from a religious specialist.4

include Itō Hiroyuki (1981); Shinkawa (1982); a three-part article by Sueki (1995); and an eleven-part article by Itō Hiromi (1996-2006).

4 Note that Kyogen parodies of plays about nonsentients, such as Tako 蛸 (The Octopus) and Semi 蝉 (The Cicada), almost always treat the nonsentient being as though it were a human suffering from attachment, allowing for a two-fer: Tako and Semi get to light-heart-edly parody both the idea of Buddhahood for the nonsentient and second category war-rior Nō plays. In Kyogen plays, at least those that have come down to us today, the main character always attains enlightenment, even if the priest’s prayers are hopelessly garbled mumbo-jumbo.

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Another way to think about the difference between the two main types of plays about nonsentients—one type whose main character (shite) needs our help, the other type whose shite helps us—is to go back to the popular medieval understanding of Buddhahood for the nonsentient, and in par-ticular the question of agency.

The doctrinal question of whether nonsentient plants and grasses, which were not included in the six (sometimes ten or more) realms of transmigra-tion, could achieve Buddhahood was the subject of heated debate in the Heian period. The Tendai sect (Tendaishū 天台宗) in Japan, following the sixth patriarch of the Chinese Tientai sect, Zhanran 湛然 (711-782), gener-ally took the position that since all beings share the Buddha nature (the fundamental, unchanging nature of things), any being, whether sentient or nonsentient could become Buddha (Rambelli 2007: 16-17). And in Japan the notion that nonsentient beings can attain Buddhahood was, at least initially, mainly developed within Tendai. The Tendai scholar Annen 安然 (841-895?), in his influential Shinjō sōmoku jobutsu shiki 斟定草木成仏私記 (A Personal Collection of Selected Passages on Plants Becoming Bud-dhas, c. 869-885), was the first to quote the Chūingyō (or Chūinkyō 中陰経) sutra as doctrinal support for the idea that plants and trees have kokoro 心 (sentience) and that they are therefore able to achieve awakening (hosshin 発心) and Buddhahood (Sueki 1995a: 28-29; Rambelli 2007: 31-32).

It appears that after the Ōwa era debate of 963, in which the Tendai cleric Ryōgen 良源 (912-985) soundly trounced the Hossō 法相 scholar monk Chūzan on the question of enlightenment of plants, it was gener-ally accepted among most Japanese sects that nonsentients could, indeed, achieve Buddhahood.5 The main issue then shifted to whether they were capable of doing so independently, by their own efforts ( jiriki 自力), or only passively through a karmic link (en 縁) to a buddha or bodhisattva (tariki 他力). In the Heian period both Annen and Ryōgen attempted to prove that plants are actually sentient and therefore capable of Buddha-hood through their own efforts (Rambelli 2007: 36-40). But the phrase most often alluded to in Nō plays about the enlightenment of nonsentient beings appears to take the opposite position, that nonsentient beings achieve Bud-dhahood only passively, through the karmic agency of a sentient being who has achieved enlightenment:

5 For a fuller discussion of the Ōwa debate in English, see McMullin (1989).

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ichibutsu jōdō kanken hokkai sōmoku kokudo shikkai jōbutsu

一仏成道観見法界草木国土悉皆成仏

When one Buddha attains the Way/ and contemplates the realm of the Buddhist dharma,/ the grasses, trees and land/ all become Buddha.6

It may not be coincidental then that in plays such as Kakitsubata, which focus on the struggle of a nonsentient being to achieve enlightenment, only the second half of the proverb is quoted.7

In addition, Sueki Fumihiko (1995a: 28-29) has noted that with the fur-ther development of Original Enlightenment thought during the medieval period, a new position developed within Tendai with regard to Buddhahood for the nonsentient. The Original Enlightenment text Sanjūshika no koto-gaki 三十四箇事書 (Notes on Twenty-four Items, c. 13th century) argues there is no necessity for plants and trees to acquire Buddhahood because they are innately enlightened in and of themselves (sōmoku fujōbutsu 草木不成仏). As noted above, certain Nō plays such Saigyō zakura appear to take this position fairly straightforwardly: the cherry tree spirit who appears to the poet-priest Saigyō is in no need of the priest’s help, but rather acts as a model of innate enlightenment for human beings.

6 By the Muromachi period this phrase had become the kind of popular proverb that anyone could quote, but for which no one had an accurate source. In the Nō plays Sumi-zomezakura 墨染桜 and Nue 鵺 the phrase is explicitly attributed to the Chūingyō sutra, but it is not to be found in any extant copies of it. It is likely that Annen’s citation of the Chūingyō in Shinjō sōmoku jōbutsu shiki became the basis for the medieval idea that the phrase origi-nally came from the Chūingyō (Hanano 1976; cited in Sueki 1995a: 28-29). In the same article Sueki summarizes the research of Miyamoto Shōson 宮本正尊 (1961), who tracked down the first instance of the exact phrase in its entirety. According to Miyamoto it first appears in the later half of the twelfth century in volume one of the Kangyōshoshiki Shikan shiki 観経疏私記 (Meditation diary) by the scholar-priest of Eizan Hōchibō Shōshin 宝地房証真 (dates unknown), which cites the Chūingyō as source.

7 When I gave this paper at the “Buddhist Ritual and Performance” conference at Colum-bia University (October 13-15, 2011), I suggested that plays that quote the phrase in full are more likely to emphasize the image of nonsentients as innately enlightened models for human beings, with no need for intervention by priests. In fact it seems as though the full quotation is not used in any plays about nonsentient plants; I have only found it in Nue, Hotoke no hara 仏の原 and Nomori 野守.

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However, the position of the iris in Kakitsubata with regard to this ques-tion of innate versus acquired enlightenment is quite ambiguous, if not downright vexing, and worth looking at in detail. Extended familiarity with the play has left me with the sense that on a number of levels Zenchiku is intentionally playing with us, tweaking our assumptions, collapsing dis-tinctions, and pushing ambiguity over easy understanding. In the case of Kakitsubata, Zenchiku appears to want to have it both ways: plants and grasses are innately enlightened and should properly be models for human beings, yet it is still possible for them to develop a passionate attachment that causes them to lose track of that enlightenment and need to acquire it again. Over the course of the play the kakitsubata’s delusory attachment is gradually revealed, and the question of whether she will gain release from it provides one of the play’s dramatic underpinnings. So although Kakitsubata is a beautifully constructed play, both thematically and rhe-torically, it may be wrong to take the Buddhist message seriously. I realize that this undercuts the whole point of this essay, but I am going to plow forward anyway.

Before I go on to analyze Kakitsubata in detail, however, I need to give a quick synopsis of the play. A priest is traveling through Azuma (the east-ern provinces) and arrives at Yatsuhashi in the province of Mikawa, where in the marsh he sees the kakitsubata iris blooming just at their prime. He is inspired to poetry by their beauty, and his poem in turn provokes the appearance of the spirit of the kakitsubata iris in the guise of a local young woman. The spirit relates episode 9 of Ise monogatari 伊勢物語 (Tales of Ise), the episode that has made famous both the kakitsubata iris and Yatsu-hashi as the place in which they grow. According to her version, the Heian court poet Ariwara no Narihira, exiled for his affair with the Seiwa Emper-or’s consort, Nijō no Kisaki 二乗の后 (842-910), was sadly journeying east with a few close friends when they stopped for a short meal by the marsh at Yatsuhashi. One of his companions noticed the kakitsubata blooming in elegant disarray and suggested composing an anacrostic waka poem on “The Spirit of Travel” (tabi no kokoro 旅の心) using a syllable from “ka-ki-tsu-ba-ta” at the head of each line. Narihira does so, and the poem so over-comes his companions with emotion that “they all wept onto their parched rice until it swelled with moisture.” Over the course of the play it becomes clear that because of this poem and her deep purple color, the kakitsu bata iris has become convinced that she is the most important of Narihira’s

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katami 形見 (fetishized poetic mementos) embodying his passionate feel-ings for Nijō no Kisaki. She rejects her link (yukari or en) to other ‘ordinary’ flowers and asserts that the priest should only look at her:

iro mo hitoshio komurasaki no/ nabete no hana no yukari tomo/ omoinazorae tamawa-zushite/ toriwake nagametamaekashi/ ara kokoro na no ryōjin yana

色もひとしほ濃紫のなべての花のゆかりとも思ひなぞらへ給はずしてとりわけ眺め給へかしあら心なの旅人やな (Nishino 1998: 301)

Their color is one dip deeper purple/ and so should not be thought of as comparable/or linked to other ordinary flowers;/ you should gaze on these flowers alone,/ as you would know if you were a traveler of any sensitivity!

In the second half of the play, the kakitsubata iris appears wearing Nijō no Kisaki’s robe and Narihira’s court cap, and proceeds to explain Narihira’s true nature as a kegen 化現 (avatar or provisional manifestation) of the Kami of Yin-Yang (In’yō no Kami 陰陽の神), the Bodhisattva of Song and Dance (Kabu no Bosatsu 歌舞の菩薩), and ultimately Dainichi Nyorai 大日如来, so every word he wrote is a sermon of Buddha’s dharma body and has the efficacy of a sutra. In fact, the words of his poetry have such power that when intoned as prayers, even trees and grasses can receive the merci-ful dew of enlightenment and attain Buddhahood.8 At a crucial moment in the play, as the iris is describing Narihira’s true nature, she appears to take on the Narihira persona and speaks in first person. After a graceful slow dance ( jō no mai 序の舞), as the chorus chants the concluding lines, through a series of kakekotoba pivots and engo associations we find that the spirit of the iris has ‘slipped out’ of her deeply colored robe, like a cicada shedding its shell, and that now, having been released from her attach-ment to her deep purple color, she accepts her relationship to other flowers such as ayame (another form of wild iris) and hanatachibana (flowering orange), and as she fades to pale purple she attains enlightenment along with “grasses, trees, and the land.”

I have presented a highly abbreviated version of the story, but an impor-tant point to start with is that in the case of Kakitsubata, the spirit of the iris does not appear in order to ask for help from the priest; she appears

8 Although not an explicit allusion to the Lotus Sutra Parable of Medicinal Herbs, the phrase clearly plays on the audience’s knowledge of that text.

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in order to scold him for his lack of kokoro (here, aesthetic sensitivity) in not knowing that Yatsuhashi and its iris form a famous literary topos. The playful irony of a kokoro nashi (nonsentient) plant scolding a priest for being kokoro nashi (insensitive) would have been perfectly obvious to the audience. And although according to my analysis the iris’s passionate attachment to her status as the most beloved of Narihira’s katami is imped-ing her spiritual progress, she never explicitly acknowledges this attach-ment. As a one-act play there is no naka-iri 中入り, in which the main character goes backstage and changes costume to reappear in the second act in their true form, and so there is no time for the priest to speak with a local villager, learn the back-story, and be advised to pray (the usual plot line in a mugen dream vision Nō). In fact there is no indication that the priest prays at all, so that mechanism is removed.9 How then does she achieve enlightenment?

The secondary mode of confessional reenactment seems to be the key here. It may be that simply by explaining to the priest her relationship to Narihira and clarifying his true nature as a bodhisattva through her dance, she is able to work out her mistake in identifying with the secular rather than the heavenly Narihira, and her true role as a nonsentient plant, which is to be innately enlightened and interdependent with all other beings, including flowers.10

But I think there may be one other mechanism in play here as well: iden-tification. In Nō plays, this mechanism does not usually work in favor of enlightenment. A too strong identification with your beloved, manifested performatively in the doubled personas of the female ghost characters in Izutsu and Matsukaze 松風, for example, is a sure sign of delusory attach-ment. But the moment in Kakitsubata when the iris suddenly begins to

9 And whereas in the usual mugen Nō the spirit who appears like an ordinary person in the first half comes back in the second half in a completely new mode; here there is less emphasis on transformation—the young woman ducks into a hut and comes back wearing clothing a bit too resplendent for an ordinary village woman: Nijō no Kisaki’s karakoromo robe and Narihira’s sukibitai court cap. The fact that these katami are for two different peo-ple also provides an ambiguous identification at best.

10 This path of salvation follows the general trend within medieval Esoteric Shingon and Tendai to depend on oral transmissions (kuden 口伝) and secret initiations rather than ritu-als. This would make sense given that Kakitsubata is based on commentaries on Ise monoga-tari influenced by Esoteric Buddhism.

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speak as Narihira, elucidating may be the crucial moment that allows her to reacquire her innate enlightenment.

Further support for my idea that this mechanism of identification between the iris and Narihira as a manifestation of Dainichi Nyorai is cru-cial to her enlightenment might be found in the last lines of the play:

asamurasaki no/ kakitsubata no hana mo/ satori no kokoro hirakete/ suwa ya ima koso/ sōmoku kokudo/ suwa ya ima koso/ sōmoku kokudo/ shikkai jōbutsu no/ minori o ete koso/ usenikere

あさむらさきの杜若の花も悟りの心ひらけてすはや今こそ草木国土すはや今こそ草木国土悉皆成仏の御法を得てこそ失せにけれ (Nishino 1998: 304-305)

Dawn clouds/ of pale purple kakitsubata,/ her flower heart unfurls to enlightenment/ truly, in this moment/ grasses, trees and the land/ truly, in this moment/ grasses, trees and the land/ all become Buddha and acquire enlightenment’s fruit/ and with this she vanishes.

Note that the first half of the key phrase, “When one Buddha achieves the Way and contemplates the Dharma realm the grasses, trees and the land all become Buddha,” has been eliminated here. Instead it is the spirit of the kakitsubata iris herself who achieves enlightenment and brings along eve-ryone else. How does this transformation into a Buddha happen?

We have seen that the kakitsubata originally believes that it is her deep purple color that makes her the most beloved of Narihira’s poetic memen-tos and Yatsuhashi the most important of his associated poetic topoi. But when she comes to see that Narihira’s poetry is all meant as hōben 方便 (expedient means to reveal the dharma), she sees that her role in his poetry must be to be a hōben herself. This shift in understanding is marked at the conclusion of the play by a shift to her being described as light purple, and from arguing that she alone merits attention, to acknowledging her rela-tionship to other flowers such as the ayame iris, unohana deutzia and hana-tachibana flowering orange.

Perhaps when the iris becomes Narihira, she is able to contemplate the world (the realm) through his eyes, and in so doing she grasps the truth of co-dependent origination and realizes the futility of her attachment to her dark purple color. This enlightenment about her essential identity both with Narihira as Dainichi Nyorai and with the grasses, trees and the land,

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thus enables her to bring them along with her as she acquires the Buddhist fruit of enlightenment.

In this way it is the kakitsubata’s link to Narihira as an incarnation of Dainichi Nyorai that enables her enlightenment. Passive. But it is also clear that she has to figure this out for herself over the course of the play. Active. So in the character of the kakitsubata iris, Zenchiku seems to have his cake and eat it too: she is both an exemplar of originally enlightened nature and thus a model for our own soteriological path and an exemplar of a being who has become deluded and forgotten her originally enlightened nature. She depends on Narihira as the the Kami of Yin and Yang, Bodhisattva of Song and Dance, and Dainichi Nyorai to acquire her enlightenment, but she also depends on herself. What she does not appear to depend on is the intervention of the priest. He is an interlocutor and witness, but nothing more, and that is interesting to me as well.

I want to end comparatively by considering the Nō play Bashō (The Plantain), another play by Zenchiku that features a nonsentient spirit of a plant who is gendered female. Paul Atkins (2006: 29-92) pairs Bashō and Kakitsubata together as two plays that performatively deploy a figurative landscape imbued with emotion. Bashō is based in Chinese-style sansui-ga 山水画 ink painting and its minu iro 見ぬ色, or unseen color; Kakitsubata is based on the vibrant colors of yamato-e 大和絵 style painting. I have been very struck by the complementarity of the two plays in Atkin’s analy-sis, and want to push this idea a bit more with regard to the soteriology of the plays.

In Bashō, like Kakitsubata, a plant appears to a wandering priest in the persona of a lovely woman, but here not a woman in the first flush of youth. In the opening lines of Kakitsubata the priest initially sets up an implicit parallel between himself and the ‘real’ Narihira by, first, traveling along the same path to the eastern provinces; second, bringing up the question of whether plants have kokoro (mind/consciousness); and third, making a gesture towards the Buddhist concept of mujō 無常 (transience) through comments on the travel pillows of night after night and seasons changing (Nishino 1998: 300-301). What he does not do is make any overt reference towards his profession. In fact he seems to be bent on sightseeing rather than spreading the good word. The priest in Bashō, on the other hand, tells us in the first few lines of the play that he is a believer in the Lotus Sutra and chants it day and night. A woman comes night after night to hear his

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chanting, and he decides to question her. She indicates in her entrance speech that her only friends are other nonsentient beings: “For such a lonely one as I, can have no friend save rocks and trees” (Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai 1955: 131; Nishino 1998: 206). She asks to be let into his hut to hear the Lotus Sutra chanted, and although he initially rejects her request, in the end her evident devotion and knowledge of abstruse Buddhist philosophy cause him to decide to allow her in. One might note that in Kakitsubata the invitation is reversed: the iris woman invites the priest to spend the night in her hut, and the priest happily accepts her offer. And unlike the priest in Bashō, he appears to have no qualms at all.

The Bashō woman explicitly asks the priest to explain the basis for non-sentients achieving enlightenment, and the priest, an aforementioned afi-cionado of the Lotus Sutra, claims the Parable of the Medicinal Herbs (the fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra) as source text for the idea that “all cre-ated things, be they possessed or not of sense, are all Reality” (i.e. that all sentient and nonsentient beings are identical with Absolute Reality) and that all of nature (even wind and water) teaches the truth of the Buddhist dharma. The phrase “Green are the willows, crimson the blossoms” is then used as proof that “plants of varied hues and scents,/ trees and grasses will become the land of Buddha” (Nishino 1998: 207-208). As Sueki Fumihiko (1995b: 26-27) argues, this is a literalization of the Lotus Sutra teaching that like rain that impartially falls on all plants and trees, each of whom take it in and flourish according to their nature, the Buddha impartially expounds the one Buddha Vehicle, but each person understands it according to his or her own nature (ichimibyōdō 一味平等).11 Literalizing the parable allows Zenchiku to collapse plants and human beings into one category, thereby placing us (and the bashō plantain) in an undecidable position similar to that of the kakitsubata iris: are plants models of innate enlightenment or are they, like human beings, in need of help from the Buddha to attain enlightenment? Whereas Kakitsubata appears to resolve the problem via an

11 Paul Atkins (2006: 63) has noted that this explicit citation of the Parable of the Medici-nal Herbs to support the concept of Buddhahood for the nonsentient is only found in Bashō and another play by Zenchiku, Teika 定家. However, other plays, including Fuji 富士, Hajitomi 半蔀, and Genzai shichimen 現在七面 at least implicitly link the concept of sōmoku jōbutsu to the Parable of the Medicinal Herbs by their use of the phrase ichimibyōdō. For a further discussion see Shinkawa (1982: 27, 31-32).

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identification of the flower with the poet Narihira as an incarnation of Abso-lute Reality, in Bashō this undecidability would appear to continue right up to the very last lines. And this undecidability parallels that of human beings, who are also innately enlightened, but must regain it through the teaching of the Buddha. In this sense, the Bashō plantain woman with her tattered leaves is perhaps a better exemplar of our actual state.

I want to close with a few other points of comparison. First, there is the problem of what might be called ‘environmental interdependency’ in the two plays. Buddhist enlightenment consists in the realization of the oneness of all things: their co-dependent origination and continued interdepend-ency (a concept used to ground contemporary Buddhist environmental-ism). In Kakitsubata we saw that one symptom of the iris’s obsession with her deep purple color is her rejection of her link ( yukari or en) with other flowers, and the first sign that she has lost her obsession is that she begins to recognize her relatedness to other flowers. In Bashō, by way of contrast, it is striking that the plant asserts her connectedness to other living beings, especially other plants, repeatedly. In her entrance speech she tells us that only rocks and trees are her friends. In the second half, she notes that “willow and plum, damson and peach,/ all blossom, and their varied hues and scents,/ravish men’s hearts,/And yet all these are one, not separate” (Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai 1955: 139; Nishino 1998: 210). And in the final lines of the play, the bashō plant mentions karukaya sedge grass and ominaeshi damsel flowers as being tossed and torn along with her (Nishino 1998: 210-211).

Second, the bashō plant seems quite ambivalent about her manifesta-tion in a female form, and in particular about her lack of beauty. She is an ordinary, commonplace plant “such as you may find in any garden, field or hillside nook” (Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai 1955: 138; Nishino 1998: 209) and in fact the other flowers and plants she mentions also tend to be rather ordinary (sedge grass) or productive (fruit trees). In keeping with being a commonplace plant, the bashō is a commoner woman with no real back-story: she has “no sweet memories of glories past” that she can recall for comfort (Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai 1955: 140; Nishino 1998: 210). The kakitsubata iris on the other hand is almost flamboyantly proud of her youthful beauty and never evinces the slightest shame or embarrassment. She is connected by Narihira’s poetry to a woman of the highest status in the Heian capital and can never forget the sweet memory of Narihira

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writing the poem about Nijō no Kisaki that incorporated her name. And when she is finally willing to accept that she might be related to other plants, those plants are just as showy as she is: deutzia blossoms, the fra-grant flowering orange, the ayame iris.

Finally, whereas the bashō plant whose leaves are easily tattered and torn by the rough winds of autumn, is an exemplary hōben of mujō, from the very beginning to the very last lines of the play, the kakitsubata asserts over and against the truth of mujō that her color alone has not changed from what it was in the past (iro bakari koso mukashi narikere 色ばかりこそ昔なりけれ), subtly paralleling Narihira’s famous Tsuki ya aranu poem in which his body alone has not changed.12 Again, it is only when she shifts her allegiance to the bodhisattva Narihira, whose body is now understood as the dharma body of Original Enlightenment, that she slips out of the memento robe into sleeves of snowy white deutzia blossoms and acquires (or reacquires) her original enlightenment.

So the two plays develop two very different, almost completely comple-mentary conceptions of how one might function as a plant that is simulta-neously an exemplary hōben of Original Enlightenment and also represents the possibility of both ordinary and elite women’s salvation via the reac-quisition of their Original Enlightenment. In one case, the kakitsubata iris dispenses with any help the male priest might give, relying instead on her individual link to a bodhisattva to achieve enlightenment for herself and all around her. As an iris, she demonstrates how our hearts might unfurl to the enlightenment that has always been there. In the case of the bashō plantain, the spirit may have at first asked for help from the male priest, but in fact she quickly shows that she is just as adept at Buddhist philosophiz-ing as he is. And in the end, her tattered leaves live on in our imagination as an exemplary hōben of mujō.

In conclusion, let us return to Kakitsubata one more time. Itō Masay-oshi (1989: 65-69) based his argument for Zenchiku’s authorship of Kaki-tsubata on the play’s identification of Narihira with “The Way of Yin and Yang” (in’yō no michi 陰陽の道) and as an embodiment (mi o wake 身を

12 Ise monogatari episode 4; Kokinwakashū 747, Ariwara Narihira no Asson. Tsuki ya aranu/ haru ya mukashi no/ haru naranu/ wagami hitotsu wa/ moto no mi ni shite 月やあらぬ春や昔の春ならぬ我が身ひとつはもとの身にして. Is this not the same moon, is this spring, not the spring of old? Or has my body alone remained the same body as before?

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分け) of Absolute Reality. These ideas also appeared in Zenchiku’s writing on the various incarnations of Okina as the primordial deity of creativity in Meishukushū 明宿集:13

When we come to the age of human beings, the author of Ise monogatari, the Fifth-ranked Middle Captain Narihira, known as katai okina (the humble old man) was born into a poetic family; he guided foolish women and taught them The Way of Yin and Yang (in’yō no michi). He is named as one of the three old men (mitari okina), the waka sages of the imperial anthology Kokinshû; revealed as an embodiment (bunshin 分身) of the One Substance [Dainichi Nyorai], he composed poems about birth, old age, ill-ness and death. (Itō Masayoshi 1969: 279-280)

Sueki Fumihiko has pointed out that Zenchiku’s theoretical writings are strongly influenced by the idea of Original Enlightenment, and that although his Rokurin Ichiro 六輪一露 texts are highly valued, Meishukushū has until recently been treated as a misguided use of kenkyōfukai 牽強付会 homologizing, a form of interpretation that I have elsewhere called etymo-logical allegoresis (Klein 2004: 1-11 passim). It is true that when this homolo-gizing methodology is pushed to its extreme one will find connections of identity between anything and everything, and thus identities become functionally meaningless. However, as Sueki notes, such a methodology is supported by Original Enlightenment non-dualism:

Meishukushū proceeds using a monism that reduces all the native and Buddhist deities to okina. This basic method is similar to the reversal of honji suijaku 本地垂迹 used by Shinto to achieve independence. The independence of Shinto proceeded by using a kind of Original Enlightenment reasoning that placed emphasis on the nearby kami rather than the Buddhist deities that exist only as distant principles. Original Enlight-enment as a method of logic certainly includes rupture/destruction, a form of logic that is not logic. However, it therefore is able to reflect raw reality that more abstract reasoning cannot handle. Nō, in its aesthetic of yūgen 幽玄 (mysterious beauty), also includes confusing, irrational elements, going beyond existing logical concepts. The logic of this text (Meishukushū), which is to push the boundaries of logic by collecting together the monism of okina, rather than the profundity of yūgen, more accurately points to the core element/essence of Nō. (Sueki 1995c: 20-21)

13 For a fuller discussion of Meishukushū and Okina in English, see Pinnington (2006: 198-248).

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Given the strong connection between Meishukushū and Kakitsubata, perhaps we can see the same methodology at work here in Kakitsubata’s multiple layers of identity and the collapse of distinctions both ontological and soteriological. In that case, Kakitsubata, in demonstrating the collapse of those distinctions, becomes didactic in an entirely new way.

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buddhahood for the nonsentient reconsidered: the case of kakitsubata (the iris) and other nō plays...

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