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Paper short abstract

This paper reads Zeami’s treatises as performative texts that embody Buddhist ritual knowledge. Through Shikadō and Kyūi, it shows how Zen concepts and Esoteric Buddhist visualization techniques serve as enactive vehicles for transmitting Nō practice and aesthetic categories.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the theatrical treatises of Zeami (1363–1443), founder of Nō theatre, as sites of embodied ritual knowledge rather than as purely aesthetic or technical manuals. Zeami conceptualizes the transmission of art through metrical, rhythmic, and bodily practices that draw extensively on religious frameworks, particularly Zen and Esoteric (mikkyō) Buddhist disciplines. Central notions such as movement, rhythm, breath, and the “unity of body and mind” are articulated through spiritual knowledge grounded in Buddhist ritual practice, which functions as a medium for expressing and structuring the teachings of Nō. The paper argues that performativity in Zeami is not limited to the stage but is already inscribed in the structural logic of his treatises, offering a new epistemological lens for their interpretation. Through patterned repetition, progressive sequencing, and pedagogical layering, these works activate modes of ritual training that parallel Buddhist initiatory and disciplinary regimes. In this sense, Zeami’s writings function as performative media: they encode, transmit, and actualize ritualized knowledge through practices of reading, memorization, and embodied enactment.

Two case studies illustrate this process. The first focuses on the Zen principle of hi niku kotsu “skin, flesh and bones” as articulated in the Shikadō (A course to Attain the Flower, 1420). Here, aesthetic refinement is framed as a gradual process of subtraction that mirrors Zen disciplinary practices, in which bodily training leads to the internalization of spiritual insight. The second case examines the Kyūi (Nine Ranks, 1428?), interpreting its progressive structure considering Esoteric Buddhist visualization practices. The sequential internalization of the actor’s potentialities described.

By reading Zeami’s treatises through the lens of Buddhist ritualization, this paper demonstrates how performative knowledge in medieval Japan was transmitted not only through theatrical performance, but also through texts that functioned as ritual embodiment. Zeami’s theory thus reveals a conception of performance in which religious knowledge functions as a vehicle through which body, mind, and text are brought into a unified performative practice.