yūgen This elusive Japanese term suggests mystery, subtlety, and depth. There is no exact equivalent in English for the deep aesthetic ideal of elegance and grace. Yūgen was originally a Buddhist term that referred to the dark or obscure meanings of the Buddhist Sutras. It means “difficult” or “obscure” in Ki no Yoshimochi’s classical Chinese preface to the imperial anthology Kokinshū (ca. 905). The term yūgen was later applied to poetry and the other arts. It has had a bewildering number of critical interpretations over the centuries. The poet and nobleman Shunzei (1114–1204) was the first to advocate yūgen as a major poetic ideal. As he said, in the Jūzenshi postscript to the poetry contest that he judged in 1198 or so,
In general, a poem need not always attempt clever conceits nor present its ideas fully and systematically. Yet when it is recited, whether it is simply read aloud or is formally intoned, there must be something about it which resounds with allure [en] and with profundity [yūgen].
The term yūgen evolved over time to suggest an elusive kind of beauty. It was the aesthetic ideal of the No drama, the masked dance-drama of medieval Japan, which was perfected by Zeami (1363–1443), who believed the actor must develop a poetic sensibility, elegant and suggestive. Robert Brower and Earl Miner point out that despite the critical, historical, and semantic vicissitudes of the term, “the core of yūgen remained the ideal of an artistic effort both mysterious and ineffable, of a subtle, complex tone achieved by emphasizing the unspoken connotations of words and the implications of a poetic situation.” As a Zen concept, yūgen suggests the paring down of things to their essence. The symbol for yūgen is a swan with a flower in its bill. It is a poetic ideal of intensity and restraint, something mysterious and strange.
SEE ALSO renga, utaawase, waka, Zen poetry.