Wabi Sabi

by Beth Kempton

  Travel with me

  This book is an invitation to travel with me as a curious explorer in a foreign land. Know that you are safe with me by your side. The map I have sketched out will guide us off the beaten track, down crooked paths, through old wooden gates, into ancient forests, along winding rivers and deep into the mountains.

  This book is an invitation to relax into the beauty of your life in any given moment, and to strip away all that is unnecessary, to discover what lies within.

  Now and then, we will stop at a roadside tea house to rest awhile and ponder, hitch lifts from strangers and be blessed with unexpected wisdom from new friends. There will be times when we sing as we walk and times when we feel weary. We might pause to soak our aching bodies in a hot spring or be hushed by falling snow. Some days we will rise with the sun, others we will amble beneath the stars.

  Along the way, you’ll encounter the familiar and the unknown, the old and the new. Some things will challenge the very foundations of what you have been led to believe. I’ll be here with you every step of the way.

  Let’s commit to travelling slowly, exploring far and going deep, as I share this ancient Japanese wisdom with you.

  A search for wabi sabi is a journey to the heart of life itself. Open your eyes and embrace the mystery of all that is to come.

  Beth Kempton

  Kyōto, 2018

  Y ou could spend a lifetime in the company of Japanese people and never hear the words wabi sabi spoken out loud. If you open Kōjien , the most authoritative Japanese dictionary available today, wabi sabi is nowhere to be found. 1 There are long entries for the individual words wabi and sabi , but none for the combined term. It does exist in the spoken language, and there are a small number of books in Japanese about it, but generally, it lives in hearts and minds, rather than on paper. I can’t even remember when I first came across it. It’s as if I internalised the philosophy of wabi sabi by osmosis during my time in Japan.

  If you ask a Japanese person to explain wabi sabi , they will most likely recognise it, but will, as I’ve said, struggle to formulate a definition. It’s not that they don’t understand it; it’s that the understanding is intuitive, and this is a reflection of a very different way of thinking and learning. Outside of rote academic learning, much of what Japanese people absorb is by watching and experiencing. For a logical, rational-thinking Westerner this can be challenging to grasp. We want step-by-steps, how-tos and exact translations. But offering specificity and complete explanations is not the way in Japan. To truly appreciate the wisdom in this culture, we need to be aware that it is often within the unsaid that the true message lies.

  Origins of wabi sabi

  Wabi sabi (which can be written or 2 ) originated as two separate words, both steeped in aesthetic value, with roots in literature, culture and religion. Wabi is about finding beauty in simplicity, and a spiritual richness and serenity in detaching from the material world. Sabi is more concerned with the passage of time, with the way that all things grow and decay and how ageing alters the visual nature of those things.

  It’s less about what we see, and more about how we see.

  Both concepts are important in Japanese culture, but perhaps even more fascinating is the meaning they take on when combined to become wabi sabi.

  The setting

  Imagine, if you will, the world in the mid-sixteenth century – a time of great exploration by seafaring Europeans, with the Spanish and Portugese opening up worldwide trade routes. It was a time of colonialism, and mercantilism, when many countries had national economic policies to accumulate as much gold and silver as possible.

  The paint hadn’t long dried on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa , and David had only emerged from Michelangelo’s block of marble a few decades previously, at the turn of the century. Over in England, Shakespeare was penning his latest masterpiece.

  China was flourishing under the Ming Dynasty, and was way more technologically advanced than the West. It was also very cultured, with rumours that Chinese government officials were encouraged to compose poetry and practise calligraphy between official meetings.

  Meanwhile, late-medieval Japan was caught up in a century of warfare and destruction. Frequent famines, fires and natural disasters plagued the nation, taxation was high and poverty widespread. Society was so torn apart that many ordinary folk sought solace in Buddhism, which was having a significant influence on the way people lived.

  An emperor and court were in place, but the shōgun (military leader) had the true power. The country was ruled by a class of military feudal lords known as daimyō , who established local territorial domains, wielded their power from newly built castles and installed samurai warriors in the towns around those castles to protect them and serve in their armies.

  The higher-ranking samurai were well educated and powerful, and known for their extreme loyalty and dedication to the service of their daimyō lord. Zen Buddhism was popular among them, due to its emphasis on discipline and meditation. A number of the great temples of the capital, Kyōto, were home to karesansui (dry-landscape gardens), said to reflect the essence of nature and inspire deep contemplation.

  Many samurai had developed an interest in the ritual of tea, both because of the physical boost – it helped them to stay awake on long watches – and the spiritual benefit of creating moments of peace and harmony in their violent lives. They lived ready to die, so welcomed opportunities to appreciate beauty in a life that could be over at any moment.

  It was a time of growth for major urban areas, and Japan was seeing the rise of the merchant class. They were making a fortune as moneylenders to samurai , who were permitted to earn only a capped stipend. This industry was on the edge of the law, so merchants risked having their riches taken away at any time, meaning that they too were motivated to enjoy it while it lasted.

  As a result, although many ordinary people were still living in relative poverty, the ruling and merchant classes had a tendency for lavish spending. Ornate castles boasted screens embellished with gold. Extravagant social events were popular among the wealthy, particularly tea gatherings. Those in power had a penchant for Chinese tea bowls and utensils, and these were rapidly becoming status symbols. An astute observer might have sensed the emergence of conflicting ideas of tea as a spiritual experience, and tea-utensil collecting as a showy demonstration of wealth.

  Now, hold that thought as we take a quick detour into the history of tea.

  The tea connection

  To explore the origin of the word wabi we must venture into the world of tea. The powdered green matcha tea now associated with the tea ceremony didn’t arrive in Japan until 1191. It was brought back from China during the Song dynasty by the monk Myōan Eisai, who is credited with founding the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Tea seeds were planted in three places, including Uji near Kyōto, which would remain a world-class tea producer for centuries to come. Zen, and the tea ideal, spread rapidly during this time.

  As far back as the fifteenth century, monk and tea master Murata Shukō had recognised that the act of preparing and drinking tea could be a reflection of Zen principles, and as a result he is credited with a founding role in the development of the tea ceremony. Shōgun Yoshimasa, an advocate of cultural pastimes, commissioned a bespoke tea ceremony from Shukō, 3 who used this opportunity to take tea to a deeper level. According to Okakura Kakuzo in his seminal essay, ‘The Book of Tea’, Japan would soon raise the cult of ‘Teaism’ ‘into a religion of aestheticism … founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence’. 4

  This simplification was taken a step further by a man named Takeno Jōō, who studied under two of Shukō’s disciples in the first half of the sixteenth century. Jōō was a poet, with a talent for expressing tea ideals in verse. He made changes to the tea room to include materials in their natural state, and would later be an important influence for Sen no Rikyū, a businessman and tea master for Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of Japan
’s most famous warlords.

  In time, Sen no Rikyū would become known as the true father of tea.

  Simplicity as an aesthetic ideal

  By the second half of the sixteenth century, the tea ceremony had become an important social event and an opportunity for the rich to display their wealth. Hideyoshi filled his ostentatious all-gold tea house with expensive paraphernalia, mostly imported from China. At the same time, his own tea master, Sen no Rikyū, was quietly starting a revolution, reducing the physical space of the tea room significantly to alter the fundamental principles of related aesthetic ideals, stripping everything back to what was really necessary: a space to gather, a nod to nature, a kettle and basic implements – and time for tea.

  At little over three square metres, Sen no Rikyū’s intimate tea room was less than half the traditional size. The tiny windows reduced the light level to a minimum, so that guests had a heightened experience of their other senses. The host and guests were positioned so close together that they could hear one another breathing.

  Rikyū replaced an expensive celadon vase with a bamboo flower container, and a costly Chinese bowl with one fashioned by a tile maker by the name of Chōjirō. 5 He used a bamboo tea scoop instead of an ivory one, and upcycled a humble well bucket in place of an extravagant bronze water container.

  Rikyū also made the significant move of bringing in all the utensils at the beginning of the ceremony and removing them all at the end. This kept the room clear and simple, allowing the guests to settle their attention on the act of making tea, the delicate natural beauty of the carefully chosen seasonal flowers and the thought-provoking poetic calligraphy in the alcove. It was all about the shared experience, in that particular moment.

  In one fell swoop, Rikyū changed the culture of tea from worshipping wealth to worshipping simplicity. And the contrast with Hideyoshi’s aesthetic choices could not have been more stark. It was a bold and radical step away from tradition and the general view of what was desirable. In a time of austerity among the masses, Rikyū railed against the prevailing culture of excess in the ruling classes, bringing aesthetics back to basics: to the simple, ascetic beauty that inspired reflection on the nature of life itself.

  The origins of wabi

  Although Rikyū did not invent the tea ceremony, in the last years of his life he brought it back to the philosophy of simplicity and natural beauty that remains important in Japanese culture today. Rikyū’s tea came to be known as ‘wabi tea’.

  The word wabi (which can be written or ) means ‘subdued taste’. 6 It originally had linguistic connections to poverty, insufficiency and despair, from the verb wabiru ( – to worry or pine) 7 and the related adjective wabishii ( – wretched, lonely, poor). 8

  As such, it was reflected in Japanese literature many centuries before Rikyū’s time – for example, in the eighth-century Man’yōshū (literally, ‘Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves’), the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, in Kamo no Chōmei’s famous short work Hōjōk i (‘An Account of my Hut’), written in 1212 and in the poetry of Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241). 9 But it was with Rikyū’s tea ceremony that wabi came to represent the aesthetic value of simplicity.

  As an aesthetic term, the beauty of wabi is in its underlying tone of darkness. It is sublime beauty in among the harsh realities of life. As Buddhist priest Kenkō wrote, seven centuries ago, ‘ Should we look at the spring blossoms only in full flower, or the moon only when cloudless and clear?’ 10 Beauty is not only evident in the joyous, the loud or the obvious.

  Wabi implies a stillness, with an air of rising above the mundane. It is an acceptance of reality, and the insight that comes with that. It allows us to realise that whatever our situation, there is beauty hiding somewhere.

  Wabi can describe the feeling generated by recognising the beauty found in simplicity. It is a sense of quiet contentment found away from the trappings of a materialistic world. Over the years, tastes have changed and there are many decorative tea utensils available these days, but the wabi ideal remains part of the philosophy of tea in Japan.

  Ultimately, wabi is a mindset that appreciates humility, simplicity and frugality as routes to tranquillity and contentment. The spirit of wabi is deeply connected to the idea of accepting that our true needs are simple, and of being humble and grateful for the beauty that already exists right where we are.

  The origins of sabi

  The word sabi (which can be written or ) means ‘patina, antique look, elegant simplicity’. 11 The same character can also translate as ‘tranquillity’. 12 The adjective sabishii ( ) means ‘lonely’ ‘lonesome’ or ‘solitary’. 13 The essence of sabi permeated much of Matsuo Bashō’s haiku , penned in the seventeenth century and still loved all over the world for its haunting beauty.

  There also exists a verb – sabiru ( ) – with a different logograph, but the same reading. It means to rust, decay or show signs of age, adding another layer of flavour.

  Over time, the word sabi has come to communicate a deep and tranquil beauty that emerges with the passage of time. Visually, we recognise this as the patina of age, weathering, tarnishing and signs of antiquity.

  Sabi is a condition created by time, not the human hand, although it often emerges on quality objects that were originally crafted with care. It is interested in the refined elegance of age. It is beauty revealed in the processes of use and decay, such as the dull shine in the worn grain of a well-loved farmhouse kitchen table.

  In his thought-provoking classic, In Praise of Shadows , celebrated author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki noted how Japanese people find beauty in sabi saying:

  We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive lustre to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artefact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity … We do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colours and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them. 14

  Although sabi is concerned with how the passage of time manifests itself physically in objects, as with so much of Japanese aesthetics, its deeper meaning hints at what is hidden beneath the surface of the actual item that we see. It is a representation of the way all things evolve and perish and can evoke an emotional response in us, often tinged with sadness, as we reflect on the evanescence of life.

  Sabi beauty reminds us of our own connection with the past, of the natural cycle of life and of our very own mortality.

  The birth of wabi sabi

  It is a wabi heart that recognises sabi beauty, and the two have gone hand in hand for many generations. 15 The essence of their teaching stretches back through the centuries, but the conjoined term wabi sabi has only emerged as a recognised term within the past hundred years or so, ‘as a result of a desire to understand what lies beneath the psychology of Japanese people’. 16 A label was needed for what people had always known.

  Wabi sabi simultaneously lives on the edge of people’s consciousness and deep in their hearts. My friend Setsuko, now in her seventies, said she had never uttered wabi sabi out loud until I asked her about it, even though it is part of the essence of who she is, and she has an immediate sense of what it means to her.

  Wabi sabi goes beyond the beauty of any given object or environment, to refer to one’s response to that profound beauty. Wabi sabi is a feeling, and it is intangible. One person’s wabi sabi is not the same as another’s, because each of us experiences the world in different ways. We feel wabi sabi when we come into contact with the essence of authentic beauty – the kind that is unpretentious, imperfect and all the better for that. This feeling is prompted by a natural beauty, that which is austere and unadorned.

  The closest term we have for this response in the English language is ‘aesthetic arrest’, as hinted at by James Joyce in his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 17 Joyce wrote,

  The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which h
as been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani … called the enchantment of the heart.

  But even this is just talking about the physical response, and not the deeper philosophy of wabi sabi , which relates to the nature of life itself.

  Life lessons inspired by wabi sabi

  Wabi sabi is deeply connected to the kind of beauty which reminds us of the transient nature of life. This stems from the three Buddhist marks of existence: mujō ( , impermanence), ku ( , suffering) and kū ( , no individual self, a oneness with all things).

  The life lessons wabi sabi can teach us, and which we will explore in this book, are rooted in the following ideas:

  • The world looks very different when you learn to see and experience it from your heart.

  • All things, including life itself, are impermanent, incomplete and imperfect. Therefore, perfection is impossible, and imperfection is the natural state of everything, including ourselves.

  • There is great beauty, value and comfort to be found in simplicity.

  Still, wabi sabi is not a panacea. It’s a reminder that stillness, simplicity and beauty can help us fully inhabit a moment in the middle of anything, and that’s a lesson for all of us.

  A NOTE ABOUT LANGUAGE

  Based on some of what has been written about wabi sabi by non-Japanese people in the past, you might have heard it used as an adjective – as in ‘a wabi sabi bowl’, in the same way you might say ‘a wonky tea cup’ or a ‘weathered chair’. In the West it has come to describe a particular natural and imperfect look. However, it’s important to know that Japanese people do not use the word wabi sabi in this way.

  At a stretch you might get away with saying something ‘has an air of wabi sabi ’ or ‘gives you a feeling of wabi sabi ’, but the term itself – at least in the original Japanese – does not describe the external look of an object. Rather, it conveys the impression you are left with after an encounter with a particular kind of beauty, which may be visual but could be experiential.