“One Who Hears Their Cries”: The Buddhist Ethic of Compassion in Japanese Butoh

Abstract

In the San Francisco Weekly in 2002, reviewer Bernice Yeung referred to butoh as a “bizarre and mysterious art.” Although it has become a leading postmodern and international art form in the last thirty years and is familiar to contemporary arts festival viewers around the globe, butoh is still referred to as bizarre, tortured, disturbing. As a butoh practitioner who has seen many butoh performances in Tokyo, the United States, Canada, and Sweden from 1981 to 2006, I have come to believe that its grotesque elements, though important, do not constitute the core of butoh. Rather, it is the basic Buddhist value of compassion that inspires butoh's content and powerful expression. In the above remarks by Ohno and Hijikata, the founders of this esoteric art form, stretching out a hand or stepping a crippled step forward in crisis are acts of compassion, and it may be this compassionate aspect of butoh that engenders its appeal.