Wabi-sabi, and Buddhism’s 3 fundamental characteristics of existence

‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’ (Francis Bacon)

There is a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in… (Leonard Cohen)

The rather odd Japanese response to anything of profound beauty is to call it wabi sabi. It means the slightly rough, unfinished, worn, irregular, imperfect nature of something truly beautiful. As you sometimes get with the Japanese, there seems to be a fetishizing of something that many of us perhaps tend to take in our stride.

Wabi sabi makes a lovingly curated lifestyle out of something you’d think should just happen naturally. There can seem to us something preciously self-congratulatory about offering your guest their tea in an old, slightly chipped, but miraculously turned bowl, with a knowing glance that says, ‘Do you have the most exquisitely profound taste too?’ A bit like Marie Antoinette playing at being a milk-maid.

It’s not as if everything that is imperfect or decayed counts as wabi sabi – food past its sell-by date, bad breath, for example. No-one on ‘The Great British Bake Off’ (a reality TV show) has tried to justify the imperfections of their cakes as wabi sabi. Try getting that one past Paul Hollywood. Nor is the retired politician Ed Balls’ widely noted problem with the Cha Cha Cha on ‘Strictly Come Dancing' (another reality TV show) going to be glossed by the judges as a brave wabi sabi version of the notoriously challenging Cuban shuffle. (The word is that the show’s judges deliberately re-introduced the Cha cha Cha as an extra challenge in order to force the old political bruiser of the Left off the programme, in an attempt to make it about great dancing rather than great effort. And he thought politics was brutal.)

And what about my face? Not only has it the worn and wrinkled patina of age, it has the added allure for the wabi sabi enthusiast, of looking, after my operation, kind of home-made. Actually I’m being unfair on my surgeon, who seemed quite pleased with his handiwork when we met. At least he didn’t say ‘OMG what have I done?’

However, after my radiotherapy and chemo it will look even more wabi sabi. My face ought to fit in with the current vogue for distressed furniture, expensively ripped jeans, and artfully coiffured unkempt hair.

The reason my face is in fact unlikely to make it as wabi sabi is that wabi sabi is a meditative reflection on beauty. It is explicitly linked to the Buddhist idea of the three lakshanas, the three fundamental marks of conditioned existence - impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness. And we are able to take in the truth of these features of reality at a deeper level when we find them in objects of beauty. We open up to the beauty, and in doing so we open up to the truth that they communicate. They bring us home to our own mortality and imperfection.

Gerard Manley Hopkins writes about this in his poem Spring and Fall:

‘Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?...’

Check it out. He makes the point in the poem that the child who weeps over the golden falling of leaves in autumn will grow up to weep over other things, but that it will be the same sorrow for the same thing:

‘It is Margaret you mourn for.’ I guess this is something of the spirit of wabi sabi.

In the west in particular we don’t appreciate that our experience is by its very nature unsatisfactory and imperfect and impermanent. It’s not ok. Much of the burden we carry through life consists in our faith that the unsatisfactory reality of our present experience can be turned into something satisfactory. Yes, our dreams can be realized - our football team can go from being a mid-table also-ran to being a long term contender for the highest honours in Europe (e.g. Manchester City); a ramshackle old property can be turned into a beautiful home; a failing business can be turned around. But as for our experience of things, this is a different matter. The nature of existence itself, the itch of it, the cracks in it, will always show through.

And in the Zen tradition, beauty is something or someone coming into their own, becoming themselves, who or what they were always meant to be, growing into themselves, coming home. So for us, growing older presents us with this challenge: can you fully inhabit your appearance, your experience of yourself? Can you drop the need to present yourself, to become some version of yourself - maybe a slightly younger one, a fun version, an interesting one – a facebook presentation of yourself? At present, I am uncomfortable with my face. I do not yet inhabit it. I do not feel it represents me. But we have all experienced the beauty of someone or something that is unapologetically chipped and old, but real and fully alive, and maybe even broken and repaired in such a way as to make its imperfection what it was always meant to be.

The Buddhist truth of conditionality, and cancer – why me?

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was… (Beckett: Molloy)

The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience… (Donald Trump: Think like a Billionaire)

You have to say, for a cartoon character, Trump can sometimes come over all Nabokov. He is right. Effective public pronouncements need to be basically feeling with minimal content. (I mean what does the Gettysburg Address actually say?)

The Buddha had something of the same insight as The Donald. He saw that people don’t generally take much in. They need to dig out meaning and depth for themselves. Which is why Buddhism is a practice, not a belief system. He made this point in particular about his central teaching, called ‘conditionality’, or ‘dependent origination’. The teaching is simple: things happen, or they exist, only on the basis of certain conditions being in place. ‘This being, that becomes…’ Change those conditions, or wait for the conditions to change, and these things stop happening or existing. And er, that’s it. It’s not exactly inspirational is it? It’s not one for the fridge door.

The power of it is that it is something we lose sight of when it comes too close. We understand it but we don’t get it, we don’t live it. For example, when people talk about the Washington or Westminster ‘elite’ they are talking about people who have forgotten the truth of conditionality, that power is contingent, it is dependent, it is a relationship with a lot of ordinary people with rather unglamorous views and concerns. Ask anyone in showbiz. Like Trump. They understand.

You find the same thing when you get up close to the mind. Your thinking is the mind’s privileged elite, dedicated to optimizing the self’s google rankings, at least in your own mind. When Kim Jong Il, N Korea’s dear leader, recently persuaded the Chinese to block from the internet the expression ‘Kim Fatty the Third’, he was doing what we all do in our own way. We make it all about me. Our mental habits keep feeding us ourselves. Our thinking lives in a little world of its own, a kind of Westminster bubble of the mind.

Mindfulness and meditation is a kind of democratizing exercise. It is about listening, giving voice to the voiceless, unregarded aspects of the mind, its mysterious experience of sensation, of raw presence and feeling, of being alive to the world, and ‘the inarticulate speech of the heart’ (Van Morrison). When you meditate, the bubble of mental habits bursts open. At least for a while. Or for a moment or two. You experience a sense of yourself not as a fixed entity, but as a complex of changing conditioning factors. If I really pay attention, I will find that my experience of myself has changed from how I was even half an hour ago.

All religions answer questions. How should I behave? Where does the world come from? (actually Buddhism opts out of that one) and Why do we suffer? For example, cancer – why me? Well, how long have you got? There are any number of factors. There are probably genetic factors that have produced it; there may be lifestyle factors like diet; there may be external factors like pollution (living and cycling in central London); there may well be psychological factors like repression; there may even be spiritual factors, or karma, some sort of unskillful activity in my past, or some past life, that may be bearing this bitter fruit (not necessarily, but you never know); there is almost certainly an element of bad luck, or relatively bad luck (I am not that young - can’t complain, eh?) There is also the question of the effectiveness or otherwise of the doctors who failed to diagnose my condition. It may also be said that I am suffering from cancer now because I have survived long enough to do so.

And then, an illness is not simply an objective process that is going on separately from the person it affects. It is an experience, and how one experiences it represents another significant conditioning factor. We imagine that different people going through the same disease (or any other bit of hard cheese) are getting pretty much the same experience. This is not at all the case. This last factor is one I can change. I‘m not stuck with my experience as it is.

Surgery, and the Buddha’s ‘four sights’

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations for his enquiry do not strike a man at all'. (Wittgenstein)

‘I want to tell you, don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery.’ (Saul Bellow: Seize the Day)

I see a lot of apocalyptic hand wringing over the buffoonish apotheosis of Mr Trump. But there is no point being outraged. Being outrageous and transgressive is what got him elected. 

I came out of hospital this week. And in hospital you also get in touch with what was not supposed to happen. When I was changing into my surgery gear, long tight stockings, etc, I shared this oddly seductive moment with another guy going up with me and I asked him what he was in for. Cancer of the penis, he said cheerfully. Yes, life is sometimes transgressive. (They used to put bars on the windows of the penis ward, but not any more; they can do amazing things apparently.)

In my own case, I had quite good news before I had my operation. When we had the tests results meeting with the surgeon, oncologist and nurse specialist, the rather sickening presence of death had been there in the room as well. As a result, I didn’t really take in anything they were saying, beyond the fact that the cancer had not spread to the lungs, and they were ‘aiming for a cure’.

You could say that one aim of Buddhism is to have the distinguished presence of old man death walking with you wherever you go. I wish I could say that once glimpsed ‘he’ was going to continue to hang around, reminding me of the central Buddhist truth of impermanence. Well, I’m afraid by the time that meeting finished, the old bastard was gone. For now.

I had fairly major surgery on my face: removing a salivary gland with its tumour, and a whole load of lymph nodes in the right side of the neck. The surgeon could not do anything about the numbness all down the right side of my face or the failure of the muscles there. The nerves were too badly damaged by the time he had got to them. But in order to stop my mouth drooping on one side, he cleverly attached a line of some kind to the side of the mouth reaching up to the side of my head.

Afterwards, in the ward, I chatted with an old bloke with cancer of the jaw who was being fed through his nose and talked animatedly but without consonants. Having had half my face and neck peeled off and stitched back I was certainly not looking my best – I’d have given Boris Karloff a nasty turn if he’d run into me unexpectedly (and in the supermarket yesterday a small child looked at me and burst into tears). But this old guy – he really did not look ready for his close up at all. I mean, I couldn’t help thinking, why bother? Why not call it a day, a good innings?’ But then he said he was planning his usual skiing trip to Zermatt in February after his face had been reconstructed. He was eighty, he looked like he’d been dug up, but he had not done with joy.

Another chap in the ward looked quite ok – he was a courtly, southern European gent - but he had been told it was over for him. I saw him out of the corner of my eye with his family, the love between them. After they’d gone, when we chatted, one thing we agreed was that life comes and goes, but that what we have done with it – and I would say done, not experienced – is never really done with us, and it runs like a river through the world we leave behind us.

The Buddha’s quest for Awakening began with what are called the ‘four sights’, each of which struck him with its significance for his own life: The legend goes that on four separate occasions he saw an old person, a sick person, a dead person, and a person engaged in practice, a wandering holy man. We don’t want to acknowledge the central significance of these aspects of life. They are not part of our facebook profile. But at some point they do break into our lives anyway. They were certainly, in my case, getting a bit close to the bone, a bit more ‘in my face’.

Beginner’s Mind, and a first proper meeting with Cancer

‘That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.’ (Philip Roth: American Pastoral)

‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ (TS Eliot: Gerontion)

If you pick up a violin for the first time and attempt to play a Bach Partita, no amount of Beginner’s Mind will stop it sounding like cats in a bag. When it comes to performance, give me competence and experience over Beginner’s Mind any day. I am having surgery this week. And no, I do not want my surgeon to operate with ‘Beginner’s Mind’. I don’t want him to be relaxed, playful, intuitive or open-minded. I would like him to be a bit anxious. I want boxes ticked, the whole tight-arse bureaucratic competence shebang.

The term Beginners Mind (another Zen Buddhist idea) refers of course to an odd phenomenon of meditation, which is that it is often most rewarding when you really have no idea what you are doing – i.e. when you’re a beginner. A different function of the mind kicks in from the narrowly focused one that engages for the familiar daily round. It is a mentality that is alert, watchful, but open. It isn’t deciding on what your experience is in advance. It waits for it to be whatever it is. It is more like the natural openness and curiosity of a child, for whom everything is mysterious, fascinating. Jesus (Matthew 18.3) makes the same point: ‘Unless you be converted and become like little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Jesus emphasizes how tricky it is, to arrive at a kind of deep innocence, the hands open and uncalculating, once we know our way around.

Where you might reasonably expect to see a bit of Beginner’s Mind is in Lord Sugar’s apprentices. On the reality TV programme ‘the Apprentice’, they are in a learning environment, and yet their starting point is invariably not learning and listening, but certainty. ‘The word ‘can’t’ is not in my vocabulary’ the contestants say; ‘I’m unique, Lord Sugar; I’m a one off, I’m the full package’; ‘I am so charming; nobody can resist me’. ‘For me the sky’s the limit;’ Yes, we watch these people make a clean break from the reality of planet earth, and then burn up as they try to engage with the ordinary reality of business. We watch with appalled fascination because it is a nightmarish reflection of our sense of our own specialness getting obliterated in the ordinary business of reality.

The aim of Buddhism is to see through our own inner Apprentice contestant. To experience Lord Sugar’s stubby finger pointing at us and to hear that brutally rasped dismissal: ‘You’re fired’. It’s a start, at least. Don’t even think about Beginners Mind till you hear that serious geezer voice and feel that implacable digit break into your world. What I mean is, Beginners Mind cannot be accessed from a position of knowing what you are doing.

As for me, I’m wondering if the long bony finger of death is going to point to me. I was rushed through various tests. An ultrasound established that I had a cancerous tumour that had spread to the lymph nodes. I remember this moment quite vividly. Up to that point I had been telling myself, they’ll whip out the tumour in my face, bit of radiotherapy, all clear by Christmas.

All of a sudden, there was a quite physical feeling of I suppose dread, or maybe despair. A friend of mind said he experienced this in hospital when after a routine operation to remove his gall bladder, he saw the doctors suddenly huddling around his scans. He said he had a feeling then he had never known before. It is a kind of vertigo, where you are suddenly confronted by a reality that your experience of life cannot encompass. Freud says, the unconscious mind does not contain a knowledge of one’s own death. The death of others, yes, that is something we can envisage. But not our own.

I was sent straight upstairs for a chest scan. I knew if it had got into the lungs I was batting in fading light on a sticky wicket. We waited for the results. Well, we rolled up for a meeting with the surgeon, oncologist and CNS nurse. The surgeon said to Claudia, who needed to be at work, that she should stay, and Claudia said to me, ‘This means it must be bad news’.