An image I recently added is entitled “Old iron, dead leaves and limestone;” it is a wabi sabi subject. I recently began to investigate wabi sabi, a Japanese-Zen approach to art that I find very attractive. It emphasizes the beauty of the plain and old, reflecting an appreciation of the ultimate lightness of being and the fundamental essence of things.
Zen teaches that there is no truth in words and theories, which are mere abstractions. Truth and beauty are experienced in the natural world and especially in the ephemeral world of our senses. Wabi sabi accepts and appreciates the power of man’s loneliness, suffering and death. There is no true Zen aesthetic, and to the extent one were to create one, it would be antithetical to the West’s valuation of perfection, which is changeless, because to the Zen way of thought life is change. A fallen flower, better than in full bloom, and old cracked pot, over fine china, an old iron and dead leaves on a slab of rock from the bottom of an ancient sea, all point to the passing of time.
Like the Platonic worldview, however, wabi sabi wants to capture the essence of the experience of the thing. For Plato the essence or eternal form of the thing was the only reality, and for Zen the fleeting essence of the thing is the only reality. However, in a sense, the sense engendered by the wabi sabi aesthetic has been by many artists, for example, William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Blog No. 95, Wabi Sabi
An image I recently added is entitled “Old iron, dead leaves and limestone;” it is a wabi sabi subject. I recently began to investigate wabi sabi, a Japanese-Zen approach to art that I find very attractive. It emphasizes the beauty of the plain and old, reflecting an appreciation of the ultimate lightness of being and the fundamental essence of things.
Zen teaches that there is no truth in words and theories, which are mere abstractions. Truth and beauty are experienced in the natural world and especially in the ephemeral world of our senses. Wabi sabi accepts and appreciates the power of man’s loneliness, suffering and death. There is no true Zen aesthetic, and to the extent one were to create one, it would be antithetical to the West’s valuation of perfection, which is changeless, because to the Zen way of thought life is change. A fallen flower, better than in full bloom, and old cracked pot, over fine china, an old iron and dead leaves on a slab of rock from the bottom of an ancient sea, all point to the passing of time.
Like the Platonic worldview, however, wabi sabi wants to capture the essence of the experience of the thing. For Plato the essence or eternal form of the thing was the only reality, and for Zen the fleeting essence of the thing is the only reality. However, in a sense, the sense engendered by the wabi sabi aesthetic has been by many artists, for example, William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.