Wabi-sabi and Its Influences

“Sen no Rikyu desired to learn The Way of Tea. He visited the Tea Master, Takeno Joo. Joo ordered Rikyu to tend the garden. Eagerly Rikyu set to work. He raked the garden until the ground was in perfect order. When he had finished he surveyed his work. He then shook the cherry tree, causing a few flowers to fall at random onto the ground. The Tea Master Joo admitted Rikyu to his school.”

The average Westerner may not understand why the Tea Master found genius in Rikyu’s method because the concept of maintaining order and perfection is such an integral part of our culture’s foundation, whereas a Zen Buddhist would find the philosophical insights of wabi-sabi familiar. The Zen principles present in Wabi include severance from dependence of the material as well as appreciation of life’s evanescence in order to live in harmony with nature. Sabi is an aesthetic expression which translates the values of Zen into artistic manifestations. Like the Zen principles of spontaneity and living in the moment, Sabi indicates natural processes resulting in objects that are humble, irregular, imbalanced, and indistinct while reflecting an impermanence that is nevertheless pleasant and inspiring. Through wabi-sabi one learns to embrace both the loveliness and the melancholy found in marks of passing time. As with Zen Buddhism, bringing wabi-sabi into your life does not require any money, training, knowledge, or special skills. All you need is a mind open enough to understand unconventional beauty, willingness to accept things as they naturally are, and the ability to focus on appreciating rather than perfecting.

Therefore it is clear that the primary aesthetic ideal at the core of traditional Japanese culture is harmony in all things. Though the westernization of modern Japanese culture may have undermined wabi-sabi, I believe that its ideals are too essential to the Japanese world view for wabi-sabi to ever truly diminish. In fact, wabi-sabi is the contrary to everything that today’s mass-produced, mainstream, technologically-dependent culture represents. It is the antithesis to the sleek and shiny, corporate style of art that is desensitizing American society. Even so, factors of wabi-sabi still arise in different forms in emphatic counter-cultural movements, such as punk or grunge. Wabi-sabi is a call to break away from this futile search for the unattainable ideal of perfection, liberate ourselves from material dependency, and reconcile with nature. Leonard Koren, an expert author on Japanese aesthetics, explained this concept perfectly when he wrote, “suffering is not a defect of the universe nor some punishment for flaws in ourselves – it is a reflection of our misguided aspiration for something called perfection. If we let go of this desire for perfection, abandon all hope of achieving perfection, and instead embrace the world, ourselves and one another as it and we really are, we may find liberation, freedom to live no longer separate from the world and one another, but firmly anchored in the wabi-sabi truth of mud and water and air and light and lotus blossoms.”