Wabi-sabi, an ordinary beauty
I wrote this article in 2010 for Urthona Magazine, the themes are as relevant to me now as they were then. Though my mum is no longer here, she lives on in the red tank top and in countless other ways.
When my mum had a serious health scare recently, I decided I would go and stay with her for a while. She lives in a place called ‘Gorleston-on-Sea’, which my uncle David once memorably described as being ‘like Sunday afternoon, but every day of the week’ – that was in the days when Sundays were unlike any other day of the week. With the prospect of nothing much to do, I decided I would ask mum to teach me to knit. It seemed the perfect time for her to be passing on to me the craft that she’d learnt from her own mother. A few weeks later, I had a knitted tank top, in pillar-box red. The ribbing on the bottom is a bit erratic and there is the odd hole. Also mysteriously the waist ended up somewhere just below the armholes. I worked out that for the price of the wool I could have bought a designer tank top and I’m not even going to add up the number of hours spent knitting it. It’s not a perfect tank top, it has something more than perfection, it has wabi-sabi.
Something ordinary, a red woolly tank top, has become a priceless object, with meaning, love and ancestry knitted into it. It is a living object, telling about life and about being human and all the beautiful imperfections humanness entails.
In 16th cen Japan Rikyu and others introduced people to this kind of beauty in the form of the tea ceremony. It was very simple. They took the most ordinary activity imaginable, making a cup of tea, and turned it into something sublime. The catalyst for this transformation was mindfulness. By taking ordinary objects and handling them as though they were of unimaginable value, they became exquisite. This isn’t a beauty that lifts us above our everyday experience but the beauty that is within our experience. This is a beauty showing us reality, showing us impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality.
This transformation of the ordinary teacup or tank top into an object of meaning and wonder is a metaphor for the transformation that takes place as we practice the dharma. Samsara is transformed into Nirvana or, to use a different metaphor, Awakening is when we wake up to the wondrousness of ordinary life. As Sangharakshita says, ‘the unconditioned is the conditioned itself when the conditioned is seen in its depths…’
Our ordinary, unenlightened experience has these three marks, known as the laksanas. We experience things as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and insubstantial. The teachings ask us to look into these experiences, not out of some pessimistic perversity, but because within these experiences there is treasure, there is gold. The Icelandic pop star Bjork hints at this in the lyrics to ‘It’s not up to you’ when she sings: ‘If you wake up, And the day feels, Ah broken, Just lean into the crack, And it will tremble, Ever so nicely, Notice, How it sparkle, Down there.’
If we go deeply enough into these experiences, they say that we will come to the three vimoksa mukhas, the doorways to freedom. Vimoksa, usually translated as freedom or liberation, literally means ‘to be undone’, or shedding, as in the shedding of tears. It is echoed in the Latin phrase ‘lacrimae rerum’, the ‘tears in things’, or the ‘tears for things’. Also, with the Japanese term ‘mono no aware’, mono meaning ‘things’ and aware (pronounced AH-wah-re) as an expression of sober amazement, a measured and knowing ‘ah’ or ‘oh’, it is pointing to the ‘ahh-ness of things’.
Sangharakshita’s quote above continues;
“The unconditioned is reached by knowing the conditioned deeply enough, by going right to the bottom of the conditioned and coming out the other side (so to speak).”
We ‘come out the other side’ through these doorways, the vimoksa mukhas.
This turning towards life can have a sense of exquisite heartbreak, as in Issa’s poem written when his daughter died,
“The laksanas can cut like
blades sometimes.
While the dewdrop world,
is the dewdrop world
but yet, but yet … ”
All at once in his experience are these three elements: the painfulness of losing his daughter, the insight that all is unreal, it is a ‘dew like world’, along with a sense of love and longing for life.
My practice as a Buddhist is to turn towards these experiences. This ‘turning towards’ can be counter-intuitive, so I need help and one thing that helps is beauty. The idea of a beauty that communicates truth exists in the Japanese term Wabi Sabi, summed up by Andrew Juniper as the ‘love of life balanced against a serene sense of its passing, distilled into form.’
So what is this Wabi-sabi? Originally, the term Wabi brought to mind a sense of aloneness and sadness. It was associated with the hermits who lived alone and in poverty. Later, this life of simplicity, of being content with few possessions, the hermit life, was recognised as an opportunity for a different kind of relationship with, and enjoyment of, the world. It brings to mind Ryokan’s love for his little begging bowl:
“Picking violets by the side of the road,
I forgot my begging bowl,
How sad you must be, my poor little bowl!”
Or the modern-day Tom Waits wondering who will put flowers on a flower’s grave;
“As one rose blooms and another will die
It’s always been that way
I remember the showers
But no one puts flowers
On a flower’s grave”
These hermits were living the ‘life of wabi’, or wabizumai, a life of simplicity and aloneness. When these principles were embodied in specific objects or events, then these were said to be ‘sabi’. Maybe some of the photos alongside this article have a flavour of sabi. When we encounter such things, they lead us back to the feeling of wabi and this feeling, in turn, may help us discover, or even create, other sabi objects. Though the two terms have different nuances, they are usually used as one, wabi-sabi.
The terms originate in Japan, yet the experience they point to is universal. We all encounter objects or expressions that provoke in us a feeling of melancholy, of time passing along with a longing for and a love of life. A darned sock, a silver teaspoon, the base of the bowl flattened by being laid down a thousand times, the shipping forecast on Radio 4. I once found a sugar bowl at a car boot sale and the lid, once broken, had been meticulously mended with tiny ceramic staples. I bought it for this very scar, or at least for the sense of it having been so cared for. Watching the Antiques Roadshow with my mum, I notice that any object that has been repaired has much less value than if it had been in perfect condition, in a wabi-sabi world it has much more value!
Then there is the wabi-sabi of communication, the art of understatement, which brings to mind films by Tarkovsky or Ari Karismaki. Wabi-sabi is like homoeopathy, the smaller the dose, the greater the effect.
How is any of this relevant to us and to how we live our lives? We seem to be living amidst economic and ecological crises, often against a background of excess. We may feel that it is time for a simpler way of life, yet fear that our lives with be impoverished. But maybe by introducing a little more poverty into our lives, we’ll find we’ve introduced more beauty. Instead of going to the supermarket to buy our vegetables, we’ll start growing them on our allotment. When that allotment needs a shed instead of looking online, we’ll find some old doors to create a shed out of. A modicum of poverty can be a great spur to creativity; maybe we’ll even find ourselves involved in ‘outsider art’.
At the end of the day, wealth isn’t to be measured in what we have, but the degree to which we cherish what there is, then everything matters, as William Carlos Williams says,
“so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens”
For me, wabi-sabi has become an aesthetic metaphor for the spiritual life. If we are practising the dharma, then we are going to wake up to a new world, this world in all its beauty and perfect imperfection.
Take this photo of rose petals and a cigarette butt fallen by a drain, it’s the sunlight that brings out the beauty. What we are trying to do is shine a light on our own lives, a light that coaxes the beauty out of the ordinary, helping us to turn towards all of our own human experience, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and insubstantiality and as we do maybe, we’ll get an inkling that in this very humanness there is treasure to be found.
As Leonard Cohen sings in ‘Anthem’, ‘Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’.
I have a huge amount of gratitude to Leonard Koren whose book, ‘Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers’ was my introduction to the theme. I still consider it the wabi-sabi bible.
