Sotoba Komachi, or The Salvation of Komachi is perhaps the most interesting and powerful of all the Noh plays that have been translated into English. It is based on an incident in the life of a historical personage, Ono no Komachi, a celebrated poetess and Court beauty some of whose lyrics have come down to us. As proud as she was beautiful — though she was perhaps simply an early feminist — she refused all her suitors and condemned her most persistent admirer, the Captain Shosho, to appear before her house for a hundred consecutive nights. He died before completing the ordeal and legend has it that his ghost returned to haunt Komachi who lived on until she was a hundred years old as a despised beggar woman in Kyoto, the scene of her former triumphs.
        The story of Komachi must have seemed to many pious people a Buddhist sermon on the vanity of human wishes and the ill effects of pride. As such, it doubtless appeared too simplistic to the author of our play, Kwamani Kiyotsuge: at any rate he gave the story a very different conclusion in accordance with the insights of the Zen sect to which he belonged.

        Noh was originally a popular form of theatre; like salvation it was accessible to all. Kwamani’s son, Seami Motokiyo, tells us that his father, who like Shakespeare and Molière was actor as well as playwright, excelled equally before a Court or peasant audience. At the end of the fifteenth century, however, Noh become virtually the exclusive property of the samurai class and was even made subject to State control.
        The details of Noh as a form of theatre need not concern us overmuch. The texts are brief, there is very little plot and no intrigue. There are very few characters, originally only two, the Shite or principal character, the Waki or subsidiary character, perhaps one or two Assistants and a small Chorus. Lyrical passages are sung to a musical accompaniment of one flute and two drums. The Shite  wears a sumptuous costume and is usually masked. All actors are male as in Greek and Elizabethan drama.
        Noh is not an exclusively Buddhist art form since it contains ritual and spectacular elements that are more in keeping with Japan’s indigenous religion, Shinto. However, many of the subsequent conventions of Noh are consistent with, and sometimes directly derived from, Buddhist teachings.
        Noh does not fit the Aristotelian formula whereby tragedy brings about a catharsis, a ‘purging’ or ‘purification’ of the audience by exciting the emotions of pity and fear. Some extant Noh plays, doubtless those based on earlier models similar to our Mediaeval morality plays such as Everyman, are deliberately frightening: we have the terror without the pity and the audience is scarcely pacified. In the majority, however, the audience is rather invited to participate in a catharsis that has already occurred. The dramatist studiously avoids whipping up extreme emotions in the audience; the Shite is typically an old man or woman, sometimes even a ghost. The reverberations of events long past within the Shite’s consciousness are felt to be more important than the events themselves, as indeed is the case in Sotoba Komachi. This is entirely in line with Buddhist teaching since Buddhism is above all a doctrine of salvation, and salvation is achieved, if at all, not by stirring deeds but by an inner transformation.
        Noh is indifferent to the traditional Aristotelian unities of time and place to a remarkable degree : this disconcerted Westerners when they were first exposed to Noh but in our age of the cinema it almost makes Noh feel modern (or postmodern). It is not historical time and geographical space that are important in Noh, at any rate in the works of Kwanami and his son Seami, but rather the psychological time and ‘inner space’ of the Shite — someone in the Sixties went so far as to compare watching Noh drama to taking LSD. From the Buddhist point of view, this is as it should  be, since for Mahayana Buddhism neither time nor space, nor even the physical identity of the human individual are real, whereas the gradual progression towards Nirvana certainly is real, is indeed the only true reality.
        The art in Noh remains in evidence. In some Noh dramas, especially those written by Seami, the theatrical illusion is ceaselessly built up only to be abruptly dissipated and slowly recreated once more. For someone committed to an idealist type of Buddhism, as Seami is, it would be wrong to endow a representation of the phenomenal world with a solidity and a consistency that the original does not in fact possess. At the same time the play must be prevented from simply falling apart; this would not only be a theatrical disaster but would fail to demonstrate the underlying unity of the world of appearances. But there are no eternal Forms that the natural world is striving ceaselessly to emulate as in Plato’s philosophy : appearances remain appearances and what lies behind them is of another order, is meta-physical, beyond the physical.
        Despite its sceptical attitude towards life in the world, Buddhism remains a man-centred religion : it is thus appropriate that, despite the Court influence, the naturalistic element in Noh never completely disappeared. Human beings, and not personified natural forces or gods, hold the centre of the stage, and people are represented realistically in the sense that they behave as we know people tend to behave and not as we would like them to behave. The characters in Noh often embrace deliverance from the illusion we call physical reality with a certain reluctance.
        Noh characters enter the stage proper by way of a bridge and the first to speak is traditionally always a traveller. In this way the provisional and ephemeral nature of the world in which we live is emphasized: human beings are themselves travellers on their way to Nirvana, and they enter and leave the stage that is life-in-the-world by way of the bridge that leads from and to the Japanese Buddhist underworld.
        Sotoba Komachi opens with the appearance of two priests on their way down from the hills to the city. This, like almost every other detail in a Noh play, is significant since the play is centred on the conflict between this-worldliness and otherworldliness and the bearing this has on salvation. The priests have left their remote retreat and are about to be exposed to the world with unexpected results; their type of otherworldly Buddhism has proved inadequate.

“The Buddha that was is gone away…
The Buddha that is to be has not yet come into the world.”

The priests are realistically portrayed. They probably belong to the Shingon sect but are recognizable as a type of religious person that one comes across in all faiths. They attach excessive importance to correct behaviour. They are somewhat cold and lacking in charity: when they come across Komachi their first thought is that here there is someone who is breaking the rules —  not someone in need of help. They express satisfaction at being as high up the ladder as they are : firstly, in being born as human beings and secondly at having renounced the world. In theory they should be well on the way to salvation and they are puzzled and perturbed by the apparent fact that this is not the case. Their tone of voice is plaintive rather than confident:

“We recognize no parents.
No children care for us.
In the fields we lay down
And slept the night in the hills
Which now become our proper dwelling place
Our proper home.”

It is one of the ironies of the play that these pious followers of the dharma are unable to instruct others and must learn from a wholly worldly person. It is they who are the lost souls. 
        Ono no Komachi, the Shite, now makes her appearance. Although only a few feet away from the priests she does not see them and it is typical of the casual attitude adopted towards time and place in Noh plays that, to make sense of the scene, really she should have been the first to arrive. But for theatrical and doctrinal reasons, we need to encounter the priests first. In a long lyrical passage, an aria in effect, Komachi takes us back to her days of splendour and compares them to her present misery.

“Unwelcome months and days pile over me
The wreck of a hundred years
In the city I avoid the eyes of men
Lest they should say ‘Can it be she?’ ”

Komachi speaks with regret but without self-pity and without self-condemnation: she recounts her life as if it were the life of someone else though someone dear to her.
        Exhausted she sits down on what she takes to be a tree stump but which the priests immediately recognize as being a sacred stupa (mound or box containing the ashes of a holy person) left there by chance, or rather by Providence. It is significant that Komachi ‘stumbles’ on the holy relic without realizing what it is whilst the two priests, after a life of renunciation and striving, have not found peace of mind. It is one of the most important tenets of Zen that although enlightenment may require perseverance it cannot be achieved by effort but comes about, as it were, by accident.
        The priests at once inform Komachi of the impropriety of her action and give her a lecture on the nature and virtue of stupas. To their chagrin and astonishment she counters each of their observations with her own perception of things :

“First Priest: ‘He that has once looked upon a stupa shall for all eternity avoid the three worst catastrophes.
Komachi: ‘One sudden thought can strike illumination.’ Is that not just as good?
(…)
First Priest: Unless you had no heart at all you wouldn’t have failed to feel the presence of a stupa.
Komachi: It was because I felt it that I came perhaps.
Second Priest: In that case you shouldn’t have spread yourself out on it without so much as a word of prayer.
Komachi: It was on the ground already.
First Priest: Just the same it was an act of discord.
Komachi: ‘Even from discord salvation springs.’ ”

        Komachi has by now not only confounded but even convinced the priests of her deeper understanding of the Buddhist message and, along with the Chorus, they join her in a sort of hymn:

“First Priest: Illusion
Komachi: Is Salvation.
Second Priest: ‘Salvation
Komachi: Cannot be watered like trees.’
Chorus:     Nothing is separate
                  Nothing persists.
                  Of Buddha and man there is no distinction
                   At most a seeming difference planned
                  For the humble, ill-instructed man
                  He has vowed from the first to save.
                  ‘Even from discord salvation springs.’

       Students of Buddhism will recognize in Komachi’s utterances various  doctrines that arose to counterbalance the original ascetic Arhat ideal : the Zen Doctrine of Instantaneous Enlightenment, the Doctrine of the Omnipresence of the Buddha-nature, and the Identification of the Relative and the Absolute, discord and harmony, Samsara and Nirvana.
        The play does not, however, lose itself in doctrinal niceties: we are returned to the human predicament. The priests do homage to Komachi but in some ways this is premature since she herself realizes that she still has a long way to go on her inner journey towards Salvation. She is ashamed to tell them her name and there follows a scene, typical of Noh, when she is possessed by the ghost of her dead admirer, the captain Shosho.
        It is not clear how we, as modern westerners, should interpret such a scene. On one level it is an effective technical device similar to flashback in a film. Psychologically, it is entirely appropriate for Komachi to ‘become’  Shosho since Shosho is not important in his own right but only as part of Komachi’s ‘unconscious’ as we would put it. The Shite must confront and be reconciled with his or her adversary in a process which is at once self-stripping and self-revelation.
        There is a parallelism between the situations of the captain Shosho and Komachi as an old woman, a parallelism ultimately based on the working out of the law of karma. Shosho was obliged to disguise himself in shabby clothes and to endure hardship and privation when he courted Komachi, and Shosho’s a hundred nights have turned into Komachi’s a hundred years. On a deeper level we are invited to recognize the underlying sameness of the human predicament: Shosho’s obstinate passion is just the reverse side of Komachi’s obstinate pride, both attitudes being based on avidya (ignorance).
        According to the law of karma, particular sequences of events are tiresomely repeated in a mechanical fashion ad infinitum. But the aim of Buddhism (as opposed to Hinduism) is to extricate mankind form this fate which is in the last resort self-imposed.
        In one version of the Komachi story she and Shosho enter deliverance hand in hand. In this version Komachi ends by committing herself to the law of the dharma which,  by teaching compassion and reconciliation, transcends the law of karma:

“The seeds of goodness I will pile
Into a towering hill.
Before the golden, gentle Buddha I will lay
Poems as my flowers
Entering in the Way
Entering in the Way.”

Note : Quotes from the translation by Sam Houston Brock. 
A version of this essay appeared in “The Middle Way“, the journal of the British Buddhist Association. SH 25/09/2025