Döll, Steffen
Senior Fellow: April–August 2020
Research Project: Staging Doubt, Transforming Identities: Buddhism and Performing Arts in Early Modern Japan
(in cooperation with Eike Grossmann)
In late medieval and early modern Japan, it is first and foremost Nō theatre—including its performance, scripts, and theoretical treatises—that radically questions commonplace naturalist worldviews from a sceptic perspective. Nō theatre stages moments of crisis during which reality is questioned, and it does so by relying heavily on aspects of illusion, disguise, transformation, and revelation. The ambiguity of words, appearances, and emotions creates a transcendental space where collective and individual identities are negotiated and an awareness emerges which corresponds to ideas about karma and memory. The audience is suspended in a state of uncertainty in which doubt is the only certainty left. Thus, Nō is the performance of scepticism; it is, in fact, the staging of the Buddhist sceptic project itself.
This project proposes to investigate the interrelation of Buddhist scepticism and Nō theatre by focusing on:
(1) modes of specifically sceptic enquiry and multiform expressions of systematic doubt;
(2) their role in the intellectual currents of their time; and
(3) the interwoven relationship between critical religio-philosophical speculation and its Sitz im Leben as expressed in the performing arts.
Steffen Döll is Numata Professor of Japanese Buddhism and co-director of the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at the Asia-Africa-Institute at the Universität Hamburg