Discovering wabi-sabi
Do you remember when you first heard of wabi-sabi?
For the last decade or two, it’s been everywhere, co-opted into the mission of trying to sell us stuff. Wabi-sabi rugs, wabi-sabi bowls, wabi-sabi jackets.
Of course, actual wabi-sabi has always been everywhere, unnamed. Wabi-sabi prefers it that way.
I came across it around 20 years ago. I was living with a good friend who was teaching English to Japanese students and they told her about this ‘wabi-sabi’. We looked it up and got ourselves a copy of Leonard Koren’s recently published, ‘Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers’. He describes wabi-sabi as -
“A beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”
I immediately recognised the laksanas, the marks of conditioned existence that the Buddha had been pointing to. It was like a revelation, ‘there’s beauty in the laksanas’. This was going to change everything.
The teaching of the laksanas is central to all Buddhist schools. It’s often stated as ‘all conditioned things are unsatisfactory, impermanent and insubstantial. The goal being to seek the state of Enlightenment, which was the opposite, satisfactory and permanent, though still insubstantial.
Later, I came to see that this was a rather literal translation. It’s more that -
Awakening is a process of making peace with the truth of the laksanas. It is a radical dropping of our unrealistic expectations, expectations that things, people and situations, will be completely satisfying, will last, and will live up to our ideas about them.
It had never occurred to me that there could be a particular beauty in the laksanas and this realisation opened up a whole new avenue of practice.
Knowing there was beauty there helped me look more closely at my experience of impermanence.
It’s given me the courage to open my heart more to the unsatisfactoriness of life.
And the confidence to lean into those feelings of openness or insubstantiality.
Though I’d never heard of ‘wabi-sabi’ I already resonated with that kind of beauty, many of us do. The worn stone steps, the favourite t-shirt that’s now so thin it’s close to disintegration, the imperfect hand-knitted gloves, the mist lying over the marshes.
In order to turn the teaching of the laksanas into a practice that has the power to wake us up, we must reflect on our experience, moment to moment, day to day, in the light of these truths.
To live a wabi-sabi life is to create a life of beauty that is, at the same time, filled with reminders of reality.
To gather around us objects that, in the words of Andrew Juniper, communicate -
‘...a love of life balanced against serene sadness of its passing’ distilled into form.’
I’m still finding ways to create that life.
Next time: How wabi-sabi helped me integrate my punk roots with the Dharma.
