Wabi-Sabi, and the beauty of imperfect things

On the surface, the Tao is impractical, illogical

The Cup That Leans a Little

The bowl shaped by hands
not the wheel,
allows the clay
to sag, to ripple,
to hold the trace
of touch and fire.

A potter shapes the bowl
with her own natural
beautiful hands.
And leaves a ridge,
a roughness—
and in that roughness
the bowl remembers
the mountain clay,
the river silt,
the smoke of the kiln.

When you hold it,
your fingers feel
the small unevenness
where beauty hid itself.
Where the potter wavered
The cup leans a little.
It is alive —
as the wind is alive.
The moon on still water
is never the same twice.

Rain, the wind
find the flaw
in the roof tile —
and sing.
- Heron Dance reflection on the aesthetic of wabi-sabi.

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A definition of wabi-sabi by Leonard Korben, author of Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers:

Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It 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…

Over the years I’ve occasionally referred to a book by Soetsu Yanagi — The Unknown Craftsman, A Japanese Insight Into Beauty — that explores the concept of the beauty of imperfection embodied by wabi-sabi and the Tea ceremony. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Beauty dislikes being captive to perfection. That which is profound never lends itself to logical explanation: it involves endless mystery.

Unlike other collectors, most Tea masters prefer the incomplete; they look for slight scars or irregularities of form. If carried to excess, this desire will, of course, become unhealthy, but that there is a close relation between beauty and deformation cannot be denied...

Why should one reject the perfect in favor of the imperfect? The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite. Beauty must have room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom.

The Buddhist aesthetician Shin’ichi Hisamatsu put forward a new idea. He says that the imperfect does not, in itself, constitute beauty. The imperfect is merely a negative concept. True beauty in the Tea ceremony must be more positive. It must go further, to the point of positively rejecting the perfect. . . The shape of Raku Tea-bowls is deliberately deformed – by, for example, not using a wheel – and the surface is left rough. By such means the masters sought to give life back to beauty in the Tea ceremony.

. . .

The clay Buddha crumbles —
Inside,
A spider builds its home.
- Shinkichi Takahashi (1901–1987)

. . .

You can order the original, a print or a poster (with the poem) here.

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