The Aesthetics of Spirituality
an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world
Andrew Juniper
Quoting Leonard Koren in his book, “Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers,” wabi sabi is the most characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West.
The term wabi sabi consists of two Chinese characters shared by both Japanese and Chinese. Originally, wabi meant ‘despondence’, and sabi meant ‘loneliness’ or ‘solitude’. These words embodied a more austere, restrained form of appreciation and a refined aesthetic sensibility implying a sense of solitude in nature.
Wabi sabi also means a serene beauty that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or any visible marks of its use.
Wabi sabi is not rigidly attached to a list of physical traits. Rather, it is a profound aesthetic consciousness that transcends appearance. It can be felt but rarely verbalized, much less defined. In order to see its true essence, one must look beyond the apparent, one must look within. As an aesthetic ideal, a quiet and sensitive state of mind sees the invisible, paring away what is unnecessary, and knowing where to stop.
Originating in Taoism during the Song Dynasty of China (960-1279) and evolving through centuries of Buddhist influences, over time, Wabi Sabi eventually evolved into a distinctly Japanese ideal. It became popularized in Japan through Zen Buddhism, literature, and the Tea Ceremony. Today, it implies a more relaxed acceptance of transience, nature and melancholy, as well as a sense of rustic simplicity, and quietness, or understated elegance.
In the Mahayana Buddhist view of the universe, these qualities are seen as positive characteristics, representing liberation from the material world and transcendence to a simpler life. These qualities also imply a sense of freedom from the tyranny of excessive conceptual thinking and the suffering that it can lead us into. In this sense, Wabi-Sabi is the material representation of Zen Buddhism.
Wabi sabi is essentially a training whereby one learns to find beauty in the most basic, natural objects, and in the processes of nature. Wabi sabi can change our perception of the world to the extent that a chip or a crack in a vase makes it more interesting and gives the object greater meditative value. Similarly, materials that age over time such as bare wood, paper and fabric become more interesting as they exhibit changes that can be observed over time.
Professor Tanehisa Otabe, professor at Tokyo University’s Insitute of Aesthetics, discussing the early origins of wabi sabi in the tea ceremony observes that by choosing common Japanese pottery over the popular, and technically perfect, imported Chinese examples, wabi sabi challenges the established canons of beauty. Guests were encouraged to study subtle colors and textures that would previously have been overlooked, because wabi sabi leaves something unfinished or incomplete for the play of the imagination.
This achieves three things: an awareness of the natural forces involved in the creation of the piece; an acceptance of the power of nature; and an abandonment of dualism – the belief that we are separate from our surroundings.
Combined, these experiences allow the viewer to see themselves as part of the natural world, no longer separated by societal constructs and, instead, at the mercy of natural forces. Rather than seeing dents or uneven shapes as mistakes, they are viewed as a creation of nature – much as moss would grow on an uneven wall or a tree would curve in the wind.
However, it is the inevitable fact of mortality inherent in nature that is key to a true understanding of wabi wabi.
It uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent.
Andrew Juniper
Things in decay are more evocative of wabi sabi than things in full bloom because they suggest the transience of things. As things come and go, they show signs of their coming or going and these signs are considered to be beautiful.
Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi sabi is, in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given an altered way of seeing the world, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.
Alone, natural patterns are merely pretty, but in understanding their context as transient phenomena that highlight our own awareness of impermanence and death, they become profound.
To get a better sense of what wabi sabi is, it might be helpful to compare it with modernism, the dominant aesthetic sensibility of mid- to late 20th century industrialized society.
Modernism implies a logical, rational worldview, while wabi sabi implies an intuitive world view. Modernism believes in the control of nature, while wabi sabi believes in the fundamental uncontrollability of nature. Modernism, romanticizes technology and the machine, while wabi sabi romanticizes nature and natural processes. Modernism is intolerant of ambiguity and contradiction, while wabi sabi is comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction.
Fundamentally, the philosophy of wabi sabi holds that all things arise out of nothingness and eventually pass into nothingness…that truth comes from understanding this law of impermanence as it manifests in nature.
In addition, an aesthetic appreciation of space in the Buddhist sense is very different than Western conceptions of space as simply being a lifeless container for objects.
Space in Zen painting is forever unmoved and yet in motion, it seems to live and breathe, it is formless and empty and yet the source of all form. It is nameless and yet the reason why everything has a name. Because of it, things have absolute value, are all equally important and meaningful exponents of the universal life that flows through them.
Ronald E. Purser
The active expression of space in Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings also exhibits an active and inclusive engagement of the observer.
Art, creativity and realized spirituality were seen as inseparable, and a Zen aesthetic developed which expressed eternal truths about the nature of reality and our place in the universe.
John Daido Loori
So, the question naturally arises….how do the principles of wabi sabi emerge from Buddhism?
First of all, it is important to understand that the insights of Buddhism arose from meditation. The Buddha himself attained his own awakening through the process of meditative contemplation.
In meditation, the first objective is to attain a state of concentration, where the constant flow of discursive thinking, or mental chatter, is quieted to the point where one is able to perceive experience through all the sense doors with a mind that is completely still and quiet. In that way, we are not experiencing the world through the lens of our subjective conditioning, expressed through our constant thoughts, judgements, comparisons, and commentaries, but as it is, unadorned and unfiltered, in its fundamental, intrinsic reality.
As we begin to do so, we come to a fundamental realization, which is that all things are impermanent…that everything arises, manifests, and passes away. That there is no eternal essence to anything. That all reality arises from specific causes and is constantly changing, so there is nothing that is permanent, immutable or unchanging in the world or universe.
It is through this realization that one is able to see the world as it truly is….as impermanent and not solid or unchanging. Through this truly relational view of the world, we begin to see a new sense of truth in terms of the essential nature of the world as it truly is.
In addition, another powerful result of deep meditation, is the realization of the profound beauty to be seen in the granular perception of the evanescent process of life itself.
The result is a sense of illuminated presence through all of the six sense doors, sight, smell, taste, sound, sensations and mental formations.
Ultimately, this ability arises from our ability to come into a place of mental quietude and into a full presence to one’s experience.
This is expressed in the related concept of Yugen, which says that:
The signatures of nature can be so subtle that it takes a quiet mind and a cultivated eye to discern them.
Yugen
Yugen is described by Alan Watts as “An awareness of the universe that triggers feelings too deep and mysterious for words.”
It is explained as feelings such as “watching the sun sink behind a flower clad hill, wandering on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, standing upon a shore and gazing after a boat that disappears beyond distant islands, and contemplating the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.”
However, wabi sabi is not a phenomenon that is specific to Buddhism or Japanese culture. It is a basic human characteristic that we can all experience in our daily lives.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, speaks of a psychological state known as “flow”…as an optimal state of inner experience when psychic energy is completely focussed on a task at hand, forgetting everything else, so that consciousness is harmoniously ordered and one is fully absorbed in one’s experience.
While commonly associated with skilled based activities such as sports, music, art and creative performance, it also applies to any activity involving sensory and motor skills that require a modicum of focused attention.
One can experience this state listening to beautiful music, seeing a beautiful sunset, or, as in Buddhist monastic practices, sweeping the floor, chopping wood, or fetching water. One sees it today, in the growing popularity of Mindfulness practice in western culture.
So, this capacity for seeing and experiencing beauty in the fundamental reality of nature, while extolled in Buddhist culture, actually describes a capacity that resides in every one of us.
When you hear the splash of water drops
that fall into the stone bowl,
you will feel that all the dust of your mind
is washed away
Zen Tea Master, Sen-No-Rikyu