An Artist’s Response to the Climate Crisis Through Japanese Mappō Thought

Abstract

Over a three-year period from 2014–2017, as part of my artistic research into how aspects of mediaeval Japanese philosophy and aesthetics could be usefully revived in response to the climate crisis, I wrote and produced three music-theatre works collectively titled the Vanitas series. The first work addressed Japanese conceptions of landscape through the Buddhist and kami-venerating aesthetics of Konparu Zenchiku’s nō. The second work took as its focus the fugal nature of overlapping cyclical patterns of rising and falling, with mappō as the central conceptual frame. The third work was structured around Kamo-no-Chōmei’s Hōjōki, a lament for the degenerate mappō age through which he was living.

In this paper, I delve into the aspects of Japanese mappō thought that inspired the Vanitas series, showing how mappō thought can inform works (comprised of narrative texts, collage texts, or no text at all) that are about contemporary environmental degradation. The series title, Vanitas, refers to a sixteenth–seventeenth-century style of painting in the Netherlands (as well as to Salvatore Sciarrino’s 1983 opera of the same name). I also discuss the underlying theme of comparing Christian and Japanese Buddhist eschatological artistic traditions. Through my explication of the Vanitas series and its mediaeval Japanese inspiration, I show the contemporary practical uses of mediaeval Japanese Buddhist aesthetics for writers, interpreters, and audiences of music and theatre wishing to find alternative ways of addressing the climate crisis today.