Contingency

I had an opportunity to build a special Noh stage at To-ji Temple closely associated with a Japanese Buddhist monk Kukai.

The stage was specially built for the performance of a new Noh play entitled “Isseki Sennin” written by a Japanese Immunologist Tomio Tada, which expressed the notion of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the form of Noh.

The stage consists of a large wood board placed on top of randomly piled up logs. It is impossible to predict how the stage maintains its equilibrium, but because the respective components can behave freely, they eventually settle into a state of equilibrium. A person who watched this stage performance described this stage using the word “contingency”. I hope that the stage connects to the world view of Kukai, Einstein, and Tomio Tada which can be described with the word “tolerance.”