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Wabi Sabi in Haiku The two word phrase "wabi sabi" originated in the Japanese language but has made its way into English largely because English lacks an adequate equivalent.
Even in Japanese the exact meaning of the phrase is difficult to pin down. It is first and foremost a beauty seen in aged or worn objects; objects that contain deep patterns, patina, character, or qualities of authentic individuality.
When a haijin (a writer of haiku) writes a haiku about something wabi sabi she will often attempt to capture both its transient beauty AND the abiding qualities within the beauty, what haiku masters in years past called, Fueki Ryuko. Such haiku stimulate feelings of favorable melancholy. The most successful haiku of this type produce a clarity of perception in which the reader sees the subject of the haiku for what it is. There is a release of any desire to repair or arrest the effects of time, experience, or age. Everything is just right the way it is, defects and all.
Wabi and Sabi: The Aesthetics of Solitude Nearly all the arts in historical China and Japan derive their aesthetic principles from Taoism and Zen Buddhism. The two great philosophical traditions proved compatible specifically with the culture and psychology of Japan. The hallmark of a Chinese or Japanese masterpiece free of modern influence continues to be the naturalness and uncontrived, even "accidental" appearance of the work. The artist works with and harmonizes nature and its universal accidents.
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The guiding principles are wabi and sabi.
Wabi The two dominant principles of Chinese and Japanese art and culture are wabi and sabi. Wabi refers to a philosophical construct, a sense of space, direction, or path, while sabi is an aesthetic construct rooted in a given object and its features, plus the occupation of time, chronology, and objectivity. Though the terms are and should be referred to distinctly, they are usually combined as wabi-sabi, as both a working description and as a single aesthetic principle.
Sabi Sabi suggests natural processes resulting in objects that are irregular, unpretentious, and ambiguous. The objects reflect a universal flux of "coming from" and "returning to." They reflect an impermanence that is nevertheless congenial and provocative, leading the viewer or listener to a reflectiveness and contemplation that returns to wabi and back again to sabi, an aesthetic experience intended to engender a holistic perspective that is peaceful and transcendent.
The Japanese haiku poet Basho transformed the wabizumai he experienced into sabi poetry, and the melancholy of nature became a kind of longing for the absolute. But this longing never fulfilled -- the "absolute" is not part of Zen vocabulary -- makes the tension between wabi and sabi an enriching and inexhaustible experience.
However much a consensus on the meaning of sabi may elude us, a humble viewpoint of selfless detachment seems to lead us into its realm of truth:
how silently the wave-tossed log is beached and snow-flaked ・Geraldine C. Little
Visiting the graves: The old dog Leads the way. ・Issa
Resting . . . the sagging fence goes on up the hill ・Foster Jewell
(Information from the World Kigo Database, used with permission)
