The No is perhaps the most difficult Zen art for Westerners to enjoy. The restrained action transmits virtually nothing of what is occurring onstage, and the poetry does not translate well. (As Robert Frost once observed, in translations of poetry, it is the poetry that is lost.) The music is harsh to the Western ear; the chorus interrupts at intervals that seem puzzling; the strange cries and dances befog the mind. Most important of all, the concept of _yugen _is not a natural part of Western aesthetics. The measured cadences of the No have, for the Westerner, all the mystery of a religious ceremony wrought by a race of pious but phlegmatic Martians. Yet we can admire the taut surface beauty and the strangely twentieth-century atonality of the form. Its enigmatic remoteness notwithstanding, the No remains one of the greatest expressions of Ashikaga Zen art. Some of Zeami's texts are ranked among the most complex and subtle of all Japanese poetry. For six hundred years the No has been a secular Zen Mass, in which some of mankind's deepest aesthetic responses are explored. Part III THE RISE OF POPULAR ZEN CULTURE: 1573 TO THE PRESENT CHAPTER TWELVE Bourgeois Society and Later Zen _God has given us the Papacy; let us enjoy it. _ Pope Leo X, 1513 THE ASHIKAGA was the last era in Japan entirely without knowledge of Europe. In 1542 a Portuguese trading vessel bound for Macao went aground on a small island off the coast of southern Japan, and the first Europeans in history set foot on Japanese soil. Within three years the Portuguese had opened trade with Japan, and four years after that Francis Xavier, the famous Jesuit missionary, arrived to convert the heathen natives to the Church. For the eclectic Japanese, who had received half a dozen brands of Buddhism over the centuries, one additional religion more or less hardly mattered, and they listened with interest to the new preaching, far from blind to the fact that the towns with the most new Christians received the most new trade. Indeed, the Japanese appear to have first interpreted Christianity as an exotic form of Buddhism, whose priests borrowed the ancient Buddhist idea of prayer beads and venerated a goddess of mercy remarkably like the Buddhist Kannon. In addition to bringing a new faith, the Portuguese, whose armed merchant ships were capable of discouraging pirates, were soon in full command of the trade between China and Japan--a mercantile enterprise once controlled by Zen monks.