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.