Wabi and Sabi

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Wabi and Sabi

侘び　寂び
wabisabi

wabi ... simple and quiet, austere refinement

sabi ... elegant simplicity ... patina, rusty



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Wabi and Sabi: The Aesthetics of Solitude
the hermitary and Meng-hu

Nearly all the arts in historical China and Japan derive their aesthetic principles from Taoism and Zen Buddhism. The two great philosophical traditions proved compatible specifically with the culture and psychology of Japan. The hallmark of a Chinese or Japanese masterpiece free of modern influence continues to be the naturalness and uncontrived, even "accidental" appearance of the work. The artist works with and harmonizes nature and its universal accidents.
The guiding principles are wabi and sabi.

Wabi
The two dominant principles of Chinese and Japanese art and culture are wabi and sabi. Wabi refers to a philosophical construct, a sense of space, direction, or path, while sabi is an aesthetic construct rooted in a given object and its features, plus the occupation of time, chronology, and objectivity. Though the terms are and should be referred to distinctly, they are usually combined as wabi-sabi, as both a working description and as a single aesthetic principle.

Sabi
Sabi as the outward expression of aesthetic values is built upon the metaphysical and spiritual principles of Zen, but translates these values into artistic and material qualities. Sabi suggest natural processes resulting in objects that are irregular, unpretentious, and ambiguous. The objects reflect a universal flux of "coming from" and "returning to." They reflect an impermanence that is nevertheless congenial and provocative, leading the viewer or listener to a reflectiveness and contemplation that returns to wabi and back again to sabi, an aesthetic experience intended to engender a holistic perspective that is peaceful and transcendent.

The Japanese haiku poet Basho transformed the wabizumai he experienced into sabi poetry, and the melancholy of nature became a kind of longing for the absolute. But this longing never fulfilled -- the "absolute" is not part of Zen vocabulary -- makes the tension between wabi and sabi an enriching and inexhaustible experience.

Read the full article HERE:
　　© 2004, the hermitary and Meng-hu
COPY


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Daisetz T. Suzuki, who was one of Japan's foremost English-speaking authorities on Zen Buddhism and one of the first scholars to interpret Japanese culture for Westerners, described
wabi-sabi as "an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty."
He was referring to poverty not as we in the West interpret (and fear) it but in the more romantic sense of removing the huge weight of material concerns from our lives. "Wabi is to be satisfied with a little hut, a room of two or three tatami mats, like the log cabin of Thoreau," he wrote, "and with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall."
...
Until the fourteenth century, when Japanese society came to admire monks and hermits for their spiritual asceticism, wabi was a pejorative term used to describe cheerless, miserable outcasts. Even today, undertones of desolation and abandonment cling to the word, sometimes used to describe the helpless feeling you have when waiting for your lover. It also carries a hint of dissatisfaction in its underhanded criticism of gaud and ostentation-the defining mark of the ruling classes when wabisuki (a taste for all things wabi) exploded in the sixteenth century.
In a country ruled by warlords who were expected to be conspicuous consumers, wabi became known as "the aesthetic of the people"-the lifestyle of the everday samurai, who had little in the way of material comforts.
...
Then along came Murata Shuko, an influential tea master who also happened to be a Zen monk. In a radical fashion departure, Shuko began using understated, locally produced utensils during his tea gatherings. Saying "it is good to tie a praised horse to a straw-thatched house," he combined rough, plain wares with famed Chinese utensils, and the striking contrast made both look more interesting. Shuko's successor, Jo-o, was even more critical of men whose zeal for rare or famed utensils was their main motivation for conducting tea. Jo-o began using everyday items such as the mentsu, a wooden pilgrim's eating bowl, as a wastewater container, and a Shigaraki onioke, a stoneware bucket used in silk dyeing, as a water jar. He brought unadorned celadon and Korean peasant wares into the tearoom.

Long essay about Wabi and Sabi :
source : www.nobleharbor.com/tea

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WHAT IS WABI-SABI?

The Japanese view of life embraced a simple aesthetic
that grew stronger as inessentials were eliminated
and trimmed away.

One tea teacher I talked with begged me not to use the phrase wabi-sabi because she believes the marriage dilutes their separate identities;
a tea master in Kyoto laughed and said they're thrown together because it sounds catchy, kind of like Ping-Pong.
In fact, the two words do have distinct meanings, although most people don't fully agree on what they might be.

architect Tadao AndoTadao　安藤忠雄


MORE of my quotes about
. Wabi and Sabi .

the wabi-sabi house,the Japanese art of imperfect beauty



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- quote - Stephen Mansfield -
‘Wabi Sabi: The Art of Impermanence’:
A surprisingly accessible guide to traditional Japanese aesthetics
Japan’s passion for the modern coexists with aesthetic proclivities that favor antiquity and refinement.
One expression
of the appreciation for age and beauty is the much-cherished effect known as wabi-sabi, the subject of Andrew Juniper’s well-considered and surprisingly accessible book. The etymology of the expression is revealing: wabi stems from wabishii (lonely, wretched), while sabi touches both sabiru (to age and mature) and sabishii (lonely, inconsolable). The compound suggests a desolate beauty transformed by weathering, the resulting patina of age creating an object or scene of exquisite maturity and taste.
Japanese aesthetics can seem impossibly complex. Central posits of Zen aesthetics, such as yūgen (unfathomable depth), vital to the principals of Japanese garden design, for example, may baffle the uninitiated. But the aesthetician visiting the garden of Ryoanji Temple will be well equipped to admire its fine rock compositions as well as its often overlooked aburabei walls.
Here, the clay has been infused with oil, which has seeped out over the years, causing pleasing changes in the tonal quality of its surfaces. We know that, unlike the rocks in the garden, the walls will collapse or have to be shored up and rebuilt. Its very impermanence increases its existential value.
This is wabi sabi.
The cumulative effect, as Juniper explains in his graceful text, is to suggest both passing time and time transfixed.
- reference source : Japan Times August 2017 -


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HAIKU TECHNIQUES
Jane Reichhold

The Technique of Wabi - the twin brother to sabi who has as many personas can be defined as "(WAH-BEE)-poverty- Beauty judged to be the result of living simply. Frayed and faded Levis have the wabi that bleached designer jeans can never achieve." ... more wabi than sabi because it offers a scene of austere beauty and poignancy.

Read more here:
HAIKU TECHNIQUES, 2000

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A CULTURE OF SIMPLICITY
Leonard Koren

The sixteenth-century Japanese tea master and Zen monk, Sen no Rikyu,refined the culture of wabi-sabi.

a.. Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.

b.. It is a beauty of things modest and humble.

c.. It is a beauty of things unconventional.

d.. Wabi-sabi is a nature-based aesthetic paradigm that restores a measure of sanity and proportion to the art of living.

Read more here:
　©　Leonard Koren


Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
by Leonard Koren

"Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring. Wabi-sabi is not found in nature at moments of bloom and lushness, but at moments of inception or subsiding. Wabi-sabi is not about gorgeous flowers, majestic trees, or bold landscapes. Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to the vulgar eyes.

Like homeopathic medicine, the essence of wabi-sabi is apportioned in small doses. As the dose decreases, the effect becomes more potent, more profound. The closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become. Consequently to experience wabi-sabi means you have to slow way down, be patient, and look very closely.
source : www.spiritualityandpractice.com



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Wabi-Sabi,
For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
by Leonard Koren

- - - From the Introduction
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional.

The immediate catalyst for this book was a widely publicized tea event in Japan. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi has long been associated with the tea ceremony, and this event promised to be a profound wabi-sabi experience. Hiroshi Teshigahara, the hereditary iemoto (grand master) of the Sogetsu school of flower arranging, had commissioned three of Japan's most famous and fashionable architects to design and build their conceptions of ceremonial tea-drinking environments. Teshigahara in addition would provide a fourth design.

After a three-plus-hour train and bus ride from my office in Tokyo, I arrived at the event site, the grounds of an old imperial summer residence. To my dismay I found a celebration of gorgeousness, grandeur, and elegant play, but hardly a trace of wabi-sabi. One slick tea hut, ostensibly made of paper, looked and smelled like a big white plastic umbrella. Adjacent was a structure made of glass, steel, and wood that had all the intimacy of a highrise office building. The one tea house that approached the wabi-sabi qualities I had anticipated, upon closer inspection, was fussed up with gratuitous post- modern appendages. It suddenly dawned on me that wabi-sabi, once the preeminent high-culture Japanese aesthetic and the acknowledged centerpiece of tea, was becoming-had become?-an endangered species.

Admittedly, the beauty of wabi-sabi is not to everyone's liking. But I believe it is in everyone's interest to prevent wabi-sabi from disappearing altogether. Diversity of the cultural ecology is a desirable state of affairs, especially in opposition to the accelerating trend toward the uniform digitalization of all sensory experience, wherein an electronic "reader" stands between experience and observation, and all manifestation is encoded identically.

In Japan, however, unlike Europe and to a lesser extent America, precious little material culture has been saved. So in Japan, saving a universe of beauty from extinction means, at this late date, not merely preserving .....
source :　www.amazon.co.jp

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More of my LINKS and QUOTES about - - Wabi and Sabi



CLICK for more books !

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Visiting Shiki’s House

The home of Masaoka Shiki in the Negishi District of Tokyo was often referred to as
"Negishi no sato no wabizumai", the simple abode of the retired poet.

No. 82 Kami-Negishi was the address of the Shiki-an (Shiki Hut), which housed the bed-ridden genius, his mother and sister and was frequented by his friends and followers. He had lived for two years in No. 89 of the same Kami-Negishi. Having been a "semi-detached" house of lower-grade samurai of the Maeda Han (clan), his new house was a relatively big one by the standards of the time. The size of the whole place was 55 tsubo (1 tsubo=6 "shaku" square) of which more than half was garden (according to Hekigodo, the house measured 24 tsubo). Shiki paid a rent of 6 yen and 50 sen per month.

suzume yori uguisu ooki Negishi kana

more bush warblers
than sparrows are here –
Ah, Negishi!

Read more here :
Tr. Susumu Takiguchi


Wabizumai, a simple hermitage

　©　bird.zero.ad.jp: More Photos of Negishi

...

Four haiku with the same two lines
"the lonely abode in Negishi" through the four seasons

「春は逝き根岸の里の侘び住まい」
haru wa yuki Negishi no sato no wabizumai
spring is leaving

「蝉時雨根岸の里の侘び住まい」
semi shigure Negishi no sato no wabizumai
shrill of cicadas

「花すすき根岸の里の侘び住まい」
hana susuki Negishi no sato no wabizumai
pampas grass blossoms

「降る雪や根岸の里の侘び住まい」
furu yuki ya Negishi no sato no wabizumai
it is snowing

　©　三重県教育文化会館

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侘びてすめ月侘斎が奈良茶歌　
wabite sume tsuki wabisai ga Naracha uta

Live poor! be bright!
Moongazer sings
a song of Nara gruel
Tr. Haruo Shirane


MORE about Naracha and Haikai 奈良茶
. Matsuo Basho 松尾芭蕉 - Archives of the WKD .



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A TRACTATE ON JAPANESE AESTHETICS
by Donald Richie


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Still in the Stream
Here you will find articles that explore wabi sabi and related subjects.

©　Wabi Sabi Haiku

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wabi sabi and the cat
Mark Reibstein and Ed Young


Loneliness (sabishisa)

Wabi, Sabi, Wasabi ...


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quote
Wabi Sabi in Haiku
The two word phrase "wabi sabi" originated in the Japanese language but has made its way into English largely because English lacks an adequate equivalent.

Even in Japanese the exact meaning of the phrase is difficult to pin down. It is first and foremost a beauty seen in aged or worn objects; objects that contain deep patterns, patina, character, or qualities of authentic individuality.

This article presents examples of haiku that exhibit wabi sabi or focus on a wabi sabi subject. The commentary that accompanies each poem discusses the images the poet chose, what the poet left out, what is implied, and what techniques contribute to the success of the poem.
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When a haijin (a writer of haiku) writes a haiku about something wabi sabi she will often attempt to capture both its transient beauty AND the abiding qualities within the beauty, what haiku masters in years past called, Fueki Ryuko. Such haiku the word haiku on parchment (partial) stimulate feelings of favorable melancholy. The most successful haiku of this type produce a clarity of perception in which the reader sees the subject of the haiku for what it is. There is a release of any desire to repair or arrest the effects of time, experience, or age. Everything is just right the way it is, defects and all.

Richard R. Powell
source : www.stillinthestream.com


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quote
Wabi-Sabi and the Japanese Heart
The characteristics of Wab-sabi aesthetic are simplicity, modesty, asymmetry, asperity and intimacy. Nature does not produce things in absolute symmetry, nature is functional and therefore modest and so on. I think this is the Japanese way to describe things and a style that is in tune with nature.

Here is a BBC documentary about Wabi-sabi titled
“In Search of Wabi-Sabi”.
Not a great documentary on the subject but this video has surely made me want to go to Japan.
source : www.art-hose.com


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karumi かるみ【軽み】 lightness
from karui (light)

Karumi- lightness or light-heartedness.
This does not mean “make light of something or anything”.
It means to avoid sentimentalism or wallowing in emotions or taking things unduly seriously. It is the simple treatment of beauty to be found in ordinary things. It is simply to depict things as they are.
It is different from the court poetry.
It is minimalist, relying on terse concrete imagery and subtlety or lightness (as the shasei of Shiki later on).
"the beauty of ordinary things spoken of in a simple way".


Karumi was introduced by Matsuo Basho late in his life.
日常卑近な題材の中に新しい美を発見し、それを真率・平淡にさらりと表現する姿。

quote
Karumi was the most notable characteristic of Basho’s mature style. Karumi literally means a ‘light beauty with subtlety’ and was a quality Basho saw in higher levels of sabi. With karumi the loneliness of sabi opens into a contented acceptance.
When asked to describe karumi Basho said it was
“a shallow river over a sandy bed.”
source : www.stillinthestream.com

"looking at a shallow river with a sandy bed"
Tr. Stephen Addiss


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quote
Karumi
Matsuo Basho's Ultimate Poetical Value, Or was it?
Susumu Takiguchi, April 1983

By contrast, karumi represents the element characterised by Basho's contemporary world of the common people whose plain speech and everyday activities provided an immensely rich source for humorous rendering and light-hearted diction of universal relevance.

karumi represents the element characterised by Basho's contemporary world of the common people whose plain speech and everyday activities provided an immensely rich source for humorous rendering and light-hearted diction of universal relevance.

Of course, the relative importance of the sabi and karumi elements in Basho's poetry varied according to different stages of his development. But towards the end of his life, the karumi element was markedly becoming more and more crucial to the perfection of the so called Shofu, the style of the Basho School. The full development of the concept karumi itself was terminated, as we have seen, by Basho's death but the implication of my hypothesis is that karumi was to have been developed into an aesthetic key word equal in its importance to sabi.

After a hard work we need a break. After a serious thing we want something light-hearted. Between acts in an opera there has been invented ballet dance. Between serious Kabuki acts, there are comic kyogen plays. In the same vein, after the serious waka poems there came light-hearted and comic verse haikai which meant, and still ought to mean, comic verse. From haikai was born what is now known as haiku, even if the word haiku itself is an old entity dating back at least as far ago as the 17th century.

source : Susumu Takiguchi / WHR August 2010
WKD : Backup Copy




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