The contemporary opera of China (Peking Opera) is a relatively late development. Little is known of the earlier forms of Chinese opera in relation to their actual performance, though many texts are still extant. Dance gesture in Peking Opera is part of a bewildering gamut of highly stylized gestures, costumes, masks, and properties, all of which lead the initiated to immediate recognition of the characters and story being presented. Most dance gestures, though imaginative and graceful, are easily recognizable without instruction. When beating a drum, the hands and body move as if beating a drum: no drum is used, but even the uninitiated cannot mistake the meaning of the action. The gestures of Peking Opera are pictographic rather than ideographic, and are greatly stylized by convention.

In Japanese no drama, a Zen inspired form, the gestures have been abstracted by simplification, rather than imagination. As in sumi-e painting, the barest possible means are employed. But the aesthetics demands that we do not violate the basic nature of n that it is a drama. It is not reality, nor does it attempt the illusion of reality: rather, it suggests reality in its essence. If completely imaginative gestures were used, one would be impressed with the skill of the performer in conjuring up before our eyes invisible drums or boats or swords. Our thoughts would be bound up in the intricacies of technique, rather than free to comprehend the underlying eternal truth. No, reality is not imitated in no drama: the essence of reality, that which is eternal, the Buddha nature in its general and particular forms is depicted.

Therefore, when a drum is to be beaten, an elaborate (but not too elaborate) toy drum is used as a prop, usually very small, and the performer beats upon it without sounding, and in a visual rhythm completely free of the accompanying music! We cannot possibly imagine that a real person is playing a real drum; we are forced beyond the surface of reality into the emptiness of essence, the just being so.

This forced abandonment of external reality is everywhere obvious in no. If a boat is called for in the story, an imaginary boat would let us imagine our own private imitation of reality: the no prop is a simple, open bamboo frame, wrapped in white paper: a public denial of external reality.

To complete the cycle, we must consider the proletarian theater of Japan, the kabuki. Here the aesthetic demands utmost imitation and dramatization of reality. Revolving stages and painted sets reproduce to the letter any city or country scene (and occasionally even ocean scenes). When a drum is to be beaten in kabuki, a real drum is really beaten. The overly dramatic quality of kabuki is most unZen, perhaps even antiZen. Today kabuki is vastly popular with all classes of people in Japan, but no remains an aristocratic, highly specialized art, inaccessible to most of the population.

It is strange that the peculiar nature of Zen aesthetics created a dramatic form, the no, which is so isolated from the main stream of social arts, while at the same time fostering a poetic form, the haiku, which has become immensely popular.

The haiku, as developed by Basho, and to a lesser extent by Issa, was couched in the popular idiom and avoided literary sounding phrases. It is poetry which celebrates the commonplace.

Gazing at the flowers
of the morning glory
I eat my breakfast. --Basho

Within the highly restrictive verseform of seventeen syllables, the haiku presents a precisely chosen objective slice of nature, and its earthiness is accessible to all who can read or hear it read; it carries out in poetry the ideals of Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism, who democratically held that every man has the same ability and opportunity to become enlightened regardless of education or status.

The aesthetic of haiku is not far removed from that of sumi e or no. The basic principle is still: the most of the essence with the least possible means. One must work within only a few syllables, and eschew the high-flown dramatic language typical of other genres.

Zen music is more difficult to discuss. A discussion of no music in detail would become overly technical, therefore this section shall be confined to a few general remarks of an introductory nature, to provide a basis for later discussion.

The Japanese have long been aware of the sounds of nature and have identified these with music. The Chinese have been a bit more hesitant to identify music as being those sounds produced by nature. In The Tale of Genji, music of nature plays at least an equal part with human music. Thus, in Zen-influenced music, one might expect to find an aesthetic situation similar to that in the other Zen arts: the essence of the sounds of nature suggested by the least possible means. Or, in further abstracted form: the essence of sound itself suggested by the least possible means. Both have a part in Zen music. It is first necessary to determine, then, the nature of sound as the Japanese heard it.