What The Japanese Wabi-Sabi Esthetic Is All About

Shibui means austere or restrained, yet it was wabi and sabi that caught on abroad – perhaps because they rhyme.

After taking off in America and other countries, the phrase wabi-sabi was imported back to Japan as a compound term; the mentions I found in online Japanese sources typically addressed such topics as how to explain wabi-sabi to foreigners. Wabi-sabi does not appear in standard dictionaries of the Japanese language.

Wabi is a noun derived from the classical Japanese verb“wabu,” related to the modern verb“wabiru” and adjective“wabishii.” Wabu means to languish or be miserable.

Here is a celebrated example from a ninth-century waka poem, the brief verse of 31 syllables that forms the backbone of classical Japanese poetry. The poet, a courtier named Yukihira, was a provincial governor who, by some accounts, was exiled to Suma Bay , a famous stretch of coastline in western Japan.

Suma Bay wasn't all misery for Yukihira; according to legend, he loved and was loved by two sisters there. But his poem well captures the pain of wabi – the misery of having been exiled from the courtly world he knew.

Eventually, the misery of wabi made its way into one of Japan's most iconic traditions: tea.

The custom of drinking powdered green tea, called matcha, entered Japan around 1200. Zen monks returning from China brought the powder home, using it as a medicine and a stimulant. Over time, tea spread to the rest of the population; by the middle of the 16th century, it was a mundane part of everyday life.

It was precisely then that the preparation and serving of tea was sublimated to high art, now known as“chadō” or“sadō,” the so-called Way of Tea .

As the tea ceremony gained in popularity, powerful warlords competed in acquiring the most coveted utensils, including braziers, kettles, scoops, whisks and the bowllike cups in which the tea was whipped and sipped. The tearoom itself might be decorated with rare works of art, such as paintings or calligraphy mounted on hanging scrolls, elaborate flower vases and incense burners.

Then there emerged a group of connoisseurs and teachers of tea who championed a more severe and austere style of presentation:“wabi-cha,” which literally means miserable tea. Whereas newly ascendant warriors and merchants used the tea gathering to flaunt their wealth, wabi-style tea emphasized subtlety, frugality and restraint.

It is not hard to see traces of wabi in old tearooms, with their patina of age and elegant but unobtrusive furnishings, and in the utensils themselves – in particular, the misshapen, cracked or somber-hued teabowls.

Wabi-style tea perhaps reached its pinnacle in the 16th century, when the celebrated tea master Sen no Rikyū introduced innovations still used today. These include bamboo tea scoops, black raku-style ceramic teabowls and the“crawling entrance”: the four-square-foot door through which attendees wriggle in order to enter the cozy, womblike tearoom.

Like wabi, sabi is a noun: in this case, derived from the classical verb“sabu.” Today, the verb“sabiru” means to rust, with its connotations of age and decay. The modern adjective“sabishii” means lonely.

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Classical poems yield many examples of sabi but it really took off as an aesthetic ideal in the 17th century. Poets often tried to capture its particular kind of loneliness in the 17-syllable poetic form of haiku.

As the scholar Makoto Ueda remarked, sabi is“not the loneliness of a man who has lost his dear one, but the loneliness of the rain falling on large taro leaves at night, or the loneliness emerging out of a cicada's cry amid the white, dry rocks, or the Milky Way extending over the rough sea, or a huge river torrentially rushing in the rainy season.”

Matsuo Bashō , a 17th-century master of haiku, saw sabi in this verse by his disciple Mukai Kyorai, translated by Ueda:

The juxtaposition of wabi-sabi as a single term is of recent, not ancient, vintage, and it does not seem to have occurred in Japan. Nonetheless, the terms originated in Japanese aesthetics: sabi out of poetry and wabi out of tea.

Combined, they appear to fill a gap in the Western vocabulary for talking about art and life – a leaning away from perfection, completion and excess, and a yearning toward leaving something undone, broken or unsaid.

Paul S. Atkins is a professor of Japanese at the University of Washington .

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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