Noh grew out of sarugaku, a loose category of medieval Japanese entertainment that included mime, acrobatics and comic sketch, and out of dengaku, the field music associated with rice planting rites. Both were performed at shrines and temples, which had a direct interest in drawing crowds, and troupes were attached to particular religious institutions: the four sarugaku companies of Yamato were associated with the Kofukuji temple and the Kasuga shrine at Nara, and performed there under obligation.
Kan'ami Kiyotsugu and his son Zeami Motokiyo turned this material into a single art in the second half of the fourteenth century, under the patronage of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who saw Zeami perform as a boy. Zeami then wrote about what he had made. His treatises, of which the Fushikaden is the best known, were secret documents intended for transmission inside his own family and were not published for centuries; they set out training by age, the idea of hana, the flower or living freshness of a performance, and the concept of yugen, a quality of profound and slightly obscured beauty that became the art's governing standard. The religious content was not incidental to any of this. Zeami was a Buddhist, the plays were written for audiences who took rebirth and attachment as given, and the temple and shrine remained the art's ordinary setting.