wabi-sabi

Have you ever wanted to be perfect, or to attain perfection? Consider wabi-sabi, a quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, the beauty of things modest and humble, or unconventional. For example, it is the lines in our face that let us know how much we have laughed, considered carefully, or grimaced in our lifetime.

The genesis of wabi-sabi may well be the Buddhist word for suffering, duh-kha, which means "pervasive unsatisfactoriness". A direct translation is more difficult: In Sanskrit 'duh' means 'bad' and 'kha' means 'axle hole'; so it means not holding your wheel of existence (Samsara) correctly for it to roll from the center. Put yourself in the eye of the storm or suffer.

Wabi and sabi are independent word stems in normal speech. They are brought together only to make a point about aesthetics. Sabi is a quality of simple, restrained, and mellowed beauty, most often applied to physical artistic objects, not writing. "Sabishii" is the normal word for "sad", as in "that was a sad movie". Wabi is a quality of simple, serene, and solitary beauty of a slightly sombre kind. A well-known example of what one would call a "wabishii" object: black spit-polished boots with dust on them from the parade ground. Many Japanese pots, the expensive ones, are dark and mottled -- wabi.

Krishnamurti speaks of our souls each being of the same paper but that which makes us unique is the creases left in the paper from all the folding and unfolding of experience:
 
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There's a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Haven't had enough? Here's a delicious invocation from the Oxford English Dictionary:
"1962 J. PETRIE tr. Hasumi's Zen in Japanese Art iv. 51
The essential features of Higashiyama art, extending into all fields, can be summarized in..the idea of 'Wabi', which is supposed to express the highest beauty and can also be carried over into other fields of art. Fundamentally it means poverty, and at the same time simplicity and calm, but it also implies an inexpressible inner joy hidden in deep modesty. Out of 'Wabi' developed harmony, respect, purity, poverty... That is what the special designation of 'Wabi' amounts to: it was the favorite expression of the Haiku masters."

A related term in literature and the arts is "clinamen", the act of deliberately breaking a stylistic rule to enhance the beauty of an otherwise perfect whole.