Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence

The Japanese love ambiguity, and in literature the writer will aim to maximize the potential meaning of his prose by deliberately leaving out subjects and objects, thus increasing the scope of interpretation. This is very well illustrated by three-line haiku poems, which open an idea for the reader to expand on as they wish.

The term wabi sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in a Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection.

He felt that by focusing on the material world, the attendants and host were completely missing the latent spirituality of the ceremony, the essence of which lay in its appreciation of the modest and mundane.

Instead of the mind being drawn toward materiality, it was being encouraged away from it, toward introspection and a contemplation of the evanescence of life.

Zen masters say that this is pure illusion and that we are in fact everything we perceive.

It was not until the monks Eisai (1141–1215) and Dogen (1200–1253) returned from their pilgrimages to temples in China that Zen started to catch the imagination of the Japanese.

It has also been suggested that some of the mystery and intrigue surrounding the ethereal properties of wabi sabi art was intentionally promoted by the iemoto families, whose incomes had been severely diminished by the emergence of Kamakura. Without the funds for the more ornate and gorgeous artifacts, the iemoto families turned their attention to

So the terms wabi and sabi both find their roots in the nihilist Zen cosmic view, and between them convey the interplay between youth and old age, beauty and ugliness, life and death—the rhythms of nature.

The fusion of Taoism with Buddhist ideas is thought to have been inspired by the arrival of the eccentric monk known as the Bodhidharma (referred to as the Daruma in Japan).

Little has been done in Europe with ash glazes, but in Japan the ash glaze has been a predominant feature of pottery since its use was first discovered in the Nara period. The desire for a nonuniform surface that can catch, in the glaze of each pot, the irregularities of nature hails back to the Japanese love of things that are imperfect and incomp