Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/70



(The barrier guards take their leave; the baggage-bearer hoists his burden on his shoulders.)

The tone of pessimism that pervades this drama is characteristic of all the Nô composed during the Military epoch, and has been interpreted as proving their priestly authorship. Some learned critics go so far as to assert that the laymen generally credited with having written the Nô were really responsible, not for the text, but only for the music, the dances, and the staging, the text being furnished by Buddhist priests, who employed it as a vehicle for inculcating the instability of life, metempsychosis, the circle of fate, the chain of existences, and other religious doctrines. Certainly the dramas offer internal evidence of the truth of that theory.