A CULTURE
OF SIMPLICITY
Leonard Koren
Zen simplicity, wabi tea bowl.
Photograph: Sakamoto Photo Research/Corbis
The sixteenth-century Japanese tea master and Zen monk, Sen no Rikyu, refined the culture of wabi-sabi.
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- 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.
- Wabi-sabi is a nature-based aesthetic paradigm that restores a measure
of sanity and proportion to the art of living.
- Wabi-sabi — deep, multi-dimensional, elusive — is the perfect
antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty.
- Get rid of all that is unnecessary. Wabi-sabi means treading lightly
on the planet and knowing how to appreciate whatever is encountered,
no matter how trifling, whenever it is encountered. "Material poverty,
spiritual richness" are wabi-sabi bywords. In other words, wabi-sabi
tells us to stop our preoccupation with success — wealth, status,
power and luxury — and enjoy the unencumbered life.
- Obviously, leading the simple wabi-sabi life requires some effort
and will and also some tough decisions. Wabi-sabi acknowledges that
just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important
to know when not to make choices: to let things be. Even at the most
austere level of material existence, we still live in a world of things.
Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure
we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.
- Mud, paper and bamboo have more intrinsic wabi-sabi qualities than
do gold, silver and diamonds.
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Sen no Rikyu is permitted to
learn The Way of Tea
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| 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. Rikyu in due course became a great Tea Master. It was he who introduced the concept of wabi-sabi, or elegant simplicity. |
- "Greatness" exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details.
Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great
beauty as something monumental, spectacular and enduring. Wabi-sabi
is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral:
things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes.
- Like homoeopathic 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 down, be patient and look very closely.
- Things wabi-sabi are unpretentious, unstudied and inevitable looking.
They do not blare out "I am important" or demand to be the
centre of attention. They are understated and unassuming, yet not without
presence or quiet authority. Things wabi-sabi easily coexist with the
rest of their environment.
- Things wabi-sabi are appreciated only during direct contact and use;
they are never locked away in a museum. Things wabi-sabi have no need
for the reassurance of status or the validation of market culture. They
have no need for documentation of provenance.
- Things wabi-sabi can appear coarse and unrefined. They are usually
made from materials not far removed from their original condition within,
or upon, the Earth and are rich in raw texture and rough tactile sensation.
Their craftsmanship may be impossible to discern.
- Simplicity is at the core of things wabi-sabi. The essence of wabi-sabi,
as expressed in tea, is simplicity itself: fetch water, gather firewood,
boil the water, prepare tea, and serve it to others.
- The simplicity of wabi-sabi is best described as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize. (Things wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.) Usually this implies a limited palette of materials. It also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. But it doesn’t mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into a meaningful whole. It also doesn’t mean in any way diminishing something’s "interestingness", the quality that compels us to look at that something over, and over, and over again.
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A comparison between modernism
and wabi-sabi.
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Modernism
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Wabi-Sabi |
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A logical, rational world-view |
An intuitive world-view |
Edited extracts from Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers by Leonard Koren, $14.95. To obtain a copy of the book write to: Stone Bridge Press, PO Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707, USA. ISBN 1-880656-12-4.