Y ou could spend a lifetime in the company of Japanese people and never hear the words wabi sabi spoken out loud. If you open Kōjien , the most authoritative Japanese dictionary available today, wabi sabi is nowhere to be found.¹ There are long entries for the individual words wabi and sabi , but none for the combined term. It does exist in the spoken language, and there are a small number of books in Japanese about it, but generally, it lives in hearts and minds, rather than on paper. I can’t even remember when I first came across it. It’s as if I internalised the philosophy of wabi sabi by osmosis during my time in Japan.

If you ask a Japanese person to explain wabi sabi , they will most likely recognise it, but will, as I’ve said, struggle to formulate a definition. It’s not that they don’t understand it; it’s that the understanding is intuitive, and this is a reflection of a very different way of thinking and learning. Outside of rote academic learning, much of what Japanese people absorb is by watching and experiencing. For a logical, rational-thinking Westerner this can be challenging to grasp. We want step-by-steps, how-tos and exact translations. But offering specificity and complete explanations is not the way in Japan. To truly appreciate the wisdom in this culture, we need to be aware that it is often within the unsaid that the true message lies.

Wabi sabi (which can be written

² ) originated as two separate words, both steeped in aesthetic value, with roots in literature, culture and religion. Wabi is about finding beauty in simplicity, and a spiritual richness and serenity in detaching from the material world. Sabi is more concerned with the passage of time, with the way that all things grow and decay and how ageing alters the visual nature of those things.

Both concepts are important in Japanese culture, but perhaps even more fascinating is the meaning they take on when combined to become wabi sabi.

Imagine, if you will, the world in the mid-sixteenth century – a time of great exploration by seafaring Europeans, with the Spanish and Portugese opening up worldwide trade routes. It was a time of colonialism, and mercantilism, when many countries had national economic policies to accumulate as much gold and silver as possible.

The paint hadn’t long dried on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa , and David had only emerged from Michelangelo’s block of marble a few decades previously, at the turn of the century. Over in England, Shakespeare was penning his latest masterpiece.

China was flourishing under the Ming Dynasty, and was way more technologically advanced than the West. It was also very cultured, with rumours that Chinese government officials were encouraged to compose poetry and practise calligraphy between official meetings.

Meanwhile, late-medieval Japan was caught up in a century of warfare and destruction. Frequent famines, fires and natural disasters plagued the nation, taxation was high and poverty widespread. Society was so torn apart that many ordinary folk sought solace in Buddhism, which was having a significant influence on the way people lived.

An emperor and court were in place, but the shōgun (military leader) had the true power. The country was ruled by a class of military feudal lords known as daimyō , who established local territorial domains, wielded their power from newly built castles and installed samurai warriors in the towns around those castles to protect them and serve in their armies.

The higher-ranking samurai were well educated and powerful, and known for their extreme loyalty and dedication to the service of their daimyō lord. Zen Buddhism was popular among them, due to its emphasis on discipline and meditation. A number of the great temples of the capital, Kyōto, were home to karesansui (dry-landscape gardens), said to reflect the essence of nature and inspire deep contemplation.

Many samurai had developed an interest in the ritual of tea, both because of the physical boost – it helped them to stay awake on long watches – and the spiritual benefit of creating moments of peace and harmony in their violent lives. They lived ready to die, so welcomed opportunities to appreciate beauty in a life that could be over at any moment.

It was a time of growth for major urban areas, and Japan was seeing the rise of the merchant class. They were making a fortune as moneylenders to samurai , who were permitted to earn only a capped stipend. This industry was on the edge of the law, so merchants risked having their riches taken away at any time, meaning that they too were motivated to enjoy it while it lasted.

As a result, although many ordinary people were still living in relative poverty, the ruling and merchant classes had a tendency for lavish spending. Ornate castles boasted screens embellished with gold. Extravagant social events were popular among the wealthy, particularly tea gatherings. Those in power had a penchant for Chinese tea bowls and utensils, and these were rapidly becoming status symbols. An astute observer might have sensed the emergence of conflicting ideas of tea as a spiritual experience, and tea-utensil collecting as a showy demonstration of wealth.

To explore the origin of the word wabi we must venture into the world of tea. The powdered green matcha tea now associated with the tea ceremony didn’t arrive in Japan until 1191. It was brought back from China during the Song dynasty by the monk Myōan Eisai, who is credited with founding the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Tea seeds were planted in three places, including Uji near Kyōto, which would remain a world-class tea producer for centuries to come. Zen, and the tea ideal, spread rapidly during this time.

As far back as the fifteenth century, monk and tea master Murata Shukō had recognised that the act of preparing and drinking tea could be a reflection of Zen principles, and as a result he is credited with a founding role in the development of the tea ceremony. Shōgun Yoshimasa, an advocate of cultural pastimes, commissioned a bespoke tea ceremony from Shukō,³ who used this opportunity to take tea to a deeper level. According to Okakura Kakuzo in his seminal essay, ‘The Book of Tea’, Japan would soon raise the cult of ‘Teaism’ ‘into a religion of aestheticism … founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence’.⁴

This simplification was taken a step further by a man named Takeno Jōō, who studied under two of Shukō’s disciples in the first half of the sixteenth century. Jōō was a poet, with a talent for expressing tea ideals in verse. He made changes to the tea room to include materials in their natural state, and would later be an important influence for Sen no Rikyū, a businessman and tea master for Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of Japan’s most famous warlords.

By the second half of the sixteenth century, the tea ceremony had become an important social event and an opportunity for the rich to display their wealth. Hideyoshi filled his ostentatious all-gold tea house with expensive paraphernalia, mostly imported from China. At the same time, his own tea master, Sen no Rikyū, was quietly starting a revolution, reducing the physical space of the tea room significantly to alter the fundamental principles of related aesthetic ideals, stripping everything back to what was really necessary: a space to gather, a nod to nature, a kettle and basic implements – and time for tea.

At little over three square metres, Sen no Rikyū’s intimate tea room was less than half the traditional size. The tiny windows reduced the light level to a minimum, so that guests had a heightened experience of their other senses. The host and guests were positioned so close together that they could hear one another breathing.

Rikyū replaced an expensive celadon vase with a bamboo flower container, and a costly Chinese bowl with one fashioned by a tile maker by the name of Chōjirō.⁵ He used a bamboo tea scoop instead of an ivory one, and upcycled a humble well bucket in place of an extravagant bronze water container.

Rikyū also made the significant move of bringing in all the utensils at the beginning of the ceremony and removing them all at the end. This kept the room clear and simple, allowing the guests to settle their attention on the act of making tea, the delicate natural beauty of the carefully chosen seasonal flowers and the thought-provoking poetic calligraphy in the alcove. It was all about the shared experience, in that particular moment.

In one fell swoop, Rikyū changed the culture of tea from worshipping wealth to worshipping simplicity. And the contrast with Hideyoshi’s aesthetic choices could not have been more stark. It was a bold and radical step away from tradition and the general view of what was desirable. In a time of austerity among the masses, Rikyū railed against the prevailing culture of excess in the ruling classes, bringing aesthetics back to basics: to the simple, ascetic beauty that inspired reflection on the nature of life itself.

Although Rikyū did not invent the tea ceremony, in the last years of his life he brought it back to the philosophy of simplicity and natural beauty that remains important in Japanese culture today. Rikyū’s tea came to be known as ‘wabi tea’.

The word wabi (which can be written

) means ‘subdued taste’.⁶ It originally had linguistic connections to poverty, insufficiency and despair, from the verb wabiru (

– to worry or pine)⁷ and the related adjective wabishii (

– wretched, lonely, poor).⁸

As such, it was reflected in Japanese literature many centuries before Rikyū’s time – for example, in the eighth-century Man’yōshū (literally, ‘Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves’), the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, in Kamo no Chōmei’s famous short work Hōjōk i (‘An Account of my Hut’), written in 1212 and in the poetry of Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241).⁹ But it was with Rikyū’s tea ceremony that wabi came to represent the aesthetic value of simplicity.

As an aesthetic term, the beauty of wabi is in its underlying tone of darkness. It is sublime beauty in among the harsh realities of life. As Buddhist priest Kenkō wrote, seven centuries ago, ‘ Should we look at the spring blossoms only in full flower, or the moon only when cloudless and clear?’¹⁰ Beauty is not only evident in the joyous, the loud or the obvious.

Wabi implies a stillness, with an air of rising above the mundane. It is an acceptance of reality, and the insight that comes with that. It allows us to realise that whatever our situation, there is beauty hiding somewhere.

Wabi can describe the feeling generated by recognising the beauty found in simplicity. It is a sense of quiet contentment found away from the trappings of a materialistic world. Over the years, tastes have changed and there are many decorative tea utensils available these days, but the wabi ideal remains part of the philosophy of tea in Japan.

Ultimately, wabi is a mindset that appreciates humility, simplicity and frugality as routes to tranquillity and contentment. The spirit of wabi is deeply connected to the idea of accepting that our true needs are simple, and of being humble and grateful for the beauty that already exists right where we are.

The word sabi (which can be written

) means ‘patina, antique look, elegant simplicity’.¹¹ The same character can also translate as ‘tranquillity’.¹² The adjective sabishii (

) means ‘lonely’ ‘lonesome’ or ‘solitary’.¹³ The essence of sabi permeated much of Matsuo Bashō’s haiku , penned in the seventeenth century and still loved all over the world for its haunting beauty.

There also exists a verb – sabiru (

) – with a different logograph, but the same reading. It means to rust, decay or show signs of age, adding another layer of flavour.

Over time, the word sabi has come to communicate a deep and tranquil beauty that emerges with the passage of time. Visually, we recognise this as the patina of age, weathering, tarnishing and signs of antiquity.

Sabi is a condition created by time, not the human hand, although it often emerges on quality objects that were originally crafted with care. It is interested in the refined elegance of age. It is beauty revealed in the processes of use and decay, such as the dull shine in the worn grain of a well-loved farmhouse kitchen table.

In his thought-provoking classic, In Praise of Shadows , celebrated author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki noted how Japanese people find beauty in sabi saying:

Although sabi is concerned with how the passage of time manifests itself physically in objects, as with so much of Japanese aesthetics, its deeper meaning hints at what is hidden beneath the surface of the actual item that we see. It is a representation of the way all things evolve and perish and can evoke an emotional response in us, often tinged with sadness, as we reflect on the evanescence of life.

Sabi beauty reminds us of our own connection with the past, of the natural cycle of life and of our very own mortality.

It is a wabi heart that recognises sabi beauty, and the two have gone hand in hand for many generations.¹⁵ The essence of their teaching stretches back through the centuries, but the conjoined term wabi sabi has only emerged as a recognised term within the past hundred years or so, ‘as a result of a desire to understand what lies beneath the psychology of Japanese people’.¹⁶ A label was needed for what people had always known.

Wabi sabi simultaneously lives on the edge of people’s consciousness and deep in their hearts. My friend Setsuko, now in her seventies, said she had never uttered wabi sabi out loud until I asked her about it, even though it is part of the essence of who she is, and she has an immediate sense of what it means to her.

Wabi sabi goes beyond the beauty of any given object or environment, to refer to one’s response to that profound beauty. Wabi sabi is a feeling, and it is intangible. One person’s wabi sabi is not the same as another’s, because each of us experiences the world in different ways. We feel wabi sabi when we come into contact with the essence of authentic beauty – the kind that is unpretentious, imperfect and all the better for that. This feeling is prompted by a natural beauty, that which is austere and unadorned.

The closest term we have for this response in the English language is ‘aesthetic arrest’, as hinted at by James Joyce in his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ¹⁷ Joyce wrote,

But even this is just talking about the physical response, and not the deeper philosophy of wabi sabi , which relates to the nature of life itself.

Wabi sabi is deeply connected to the kind of beauty which reminds us of the transient nature of life. This stems from the three Buddhist marks of existence: mujō (

, impermanence), ku (

, suffering) and kū (

, no individual self, a oneness with all things).

The life lessons wabi sabi can teach us, and which we will explore in this book, are rooted in the following ideas:

• The world looks very different when you learn to see and experience it from your heart.

• All things, including life itself, are impermanent, incomplete and imperfect. Therefore, perfection is impossible, and imperfection is the natural state of everything, including ourselves.

Still, wabi sabi is not a panacea. It’s a reminder that stillness, simplicity and beauty can help us fully inhabit a moment in the middle of anything, and that’s a lesson for all of us.

A NOTE ABOUT LANGUAGE

Based on some of what has been written about wabi sabi by non-Japanese people in the past, you might have heard it used as an adjective – as in ‘a wabi sabi bowl’, in the same way you might say ‘a wonky tea cup’ or a ‘weathered chair’. In the West it has come to describe a particular natural and imperfect look. However, it’s important to know that Japanese people do not use the word wabi sabi in this way.

At a stretch you might get away with saying something ‘has an air of wabi sabi ’ or ‘gives you a feeling of wabi sabi ’, but the term itself – at least in the original Japanese – does not describe the external look of an object. Rather, it conveys the impression you are left with after an encounter with a particular kind of beauty, which may be visual but could be experiential.

An ex-professor I talked to singled out the appreciation of moss in the garden of an old temple as a time he gets a feeling of wabi sabi . For a taxi-driving saxophonist I met, it is when he plays the blues. For others it was in the context of the tea ceremony.

It varies from person to person, because we are all moved by different things. But the moment this feeling arises – a knowing, a connection, a reminder of the evanescent and imperfect nature of life itself – then wabi sabi is present.

The meaning of words often shifts when they are brought into other languages, so if you have been using ‘wabi sabi ’ as an adjective and it helps you treasure imperfection and the simple life, then it’s not something to fret about. The point of this book is not to get caught up in semantics, but rather to extricate life lessons inspired by this wisdom, to soak up the philosophy and be moved by it to change your viewpoint in a way that enhances your life.

Indeed, it is not to say we cannot use the concept of wabi sabi to inspire the way we arrange our homes to honour simplicity, nature and beauty. We can, and we will go into this in depth in Chapter 2 . But if we pigeonhole wabi sabi simply as a desirable lifestyle or design trend, we miss the real opportunity offered by this deep and intuitive way of experiencing the world.

One of the most intriguing and simultaneously challenging things about the Japanese language and culture is its layering. Nothing is ever quite as it seems. Everything depends on the context, on who is speaking to whom and what has been left unsaid. If one of the central tenets of ‘imperfection’ is incompleteness, my job here is to paint a rich, yet incomplete picture of wabi sabi , so you can fill in the blanks from your own perspective.

In some parts of this book, I will speak purely of wabi sabi . In others, I will bring in related concepts from Japan that contribute to a simpler yet richer way of life. Ultimately, I hope you will come to sense the essence of wabi sabi for yourself and welcome it into your own life as inspiration for a new way of beholding the world.

Not long ago, I watched a pair of Japanese high-school students give a presentation on wabi sabi in the USA. At the end, one of the Americans in the audience asked, ‘Do you think anyone can learn wabi sabi ?’ The girls looked at each other, brows crinkled, panicked and unsure. After much deliberation, one of them responded, ‘No. We feel it because we are Japanese.’

Wabi sabi invites us to be present to beauty with open eyes and an open heart.

I disagree. Wabi sabi is a deeply human response to beauty which I believe we all have the capacity to experience, if only we better attune ourselves to it.

My perspective on wabi sabi will always be in the context of my own world view, which is based in a Western upbringing, heavily influenced by a twenty-year love affair with Japan. Your perspective will differ from mine and, if you have the opportunity to talk to a Japanese person about it, their perspective will be different again. But therein lies the beauty, and largely the point – it is in taking inspiration from other cultures and interpreting it in the context of our own lives that we excavate the wisdom we most need.

We are living in a time of brain-hacking algorithms, pop-up propaganda and information everywhere. From the moment we wake up, to the time we stumble into bed, we are fed messages about what we should look like, wear, eat and buy, how much we should be earning, who we should love and how we should parent. Many of us probably spend more time thinking about other people’s lives than investing in our own. Add to this the pace at which we are encouraged to function, and it’s no wonder so many of us are feeling overwhelmed, insecure, untethered and worn out.

What’s more, we are surrounded by bright, artificial light, in our homes, shops and offices, on our phones and laptops. We are overstimulated and obsessed with productivity. It’s playing havoc with our nervous systems and ability to sleep. We are paying the price of having banished the calming shadows and rich texture from our lives, in favour of speed and efficiency. Our eyes and hearts are weary.

We give away freely that most precious of resources – our attention – and in doing so, we cheat ourselves out of the gifts that are already here.

While powerful and valuable in many ways, social media is turning us into comparison addicts and validation junkies. We interrupt precious life moments to take a picture and post it, then spend the next hour checking how much approval we have received from people we hardly even know. Any time we have a spare minute, out comes the phone and down go the eyes, as we scroll our way into someone else’s highly styled life, the jealousy bubbling, as we make the assumption that they actually live like that. Every time we do this, we miss unknowable opportunities for connection, serendipity and everyday adventure in our own lives, for the mind has gone somewhere the body cannot follow.

Many of us can’t make a move without stressing about what others will think. We sit in line waiting for permission from somebody else, all the while worrying about things that haven’t yet happened. We tell ourselves stories about our limits, downplaying where we measure up and overplaying where we fall down.

When we dare to imagine following our dreams, we are surrounded by so many manicured images of success we start wondering whether there’s any room left for us. Countless broken dreams lie scattered across the world for no reason other than someone compared themselves to someone else and thought, ‘I am not good enough.’ The upshot of this crisis of confidence is, at best, inertia.

Somewhere along the line, someone started a rumour that happiness lies in the accumulation of things, money, power and status, all the while looking young, pretty and skinny, or young, handsome and strong. But when we measure our lives with other people’s yardsticks, opening ourselves up to the tyranny of ‘should’, we put ourselves under immense pressure to achieve, and do and own stuff we don’t really care about. This desire for more affects our behaviour, our decision making and the way we feel about ourselves – not to mention the impact on our planet. Whatever we have or become, it’s not enough, or so we are led to believe.

And here’s the real irony. What we outwardly push for is often very different to what we inwardly long for. We have come to a point where we need to pause, take a look around and decide for ourselves what really matters. Wabi sabi can help us do this, which makes this centuries-old teaching more relevant than ever today.

What we need right now is a new way of seeing the world, and our place within it.

We need new approaches to life’s challenges. We need tools for intentional and conscious living and a framework for deciding what really matters to us, so we can move on from the constant desire for more, better, best. We need to find ways to slow down, so life does not rush right past us. We need to start noticing more beauty to lift our spirits, and keep us inspired. We need to give ourselves permission to let go of judgement and the endless pursuit of perfection. And we need to start seeing each other – and ourselves – for the perfectly imperfect treasures that we are.

All this, that we so desperately need, can be found in the philosophy of wabi sabi . Not because it solves the surface problems, but because it can fundamentally shift the way we see life itself. Wabi sabi teaches us to be content with less, in a way that feels like more:

Wabi sabi represents a precious cache of wisdom that values tranquillity, harmony, beauty and imperfection, and can strengthen our resilience in the face of modern ills.

Letting go of what you think should be does not mean giving up on what could be.

Importantly, accepting imperfection doesn’t mean having to lower standards or drop out of life. It means not judging yourself for being who you are: perfectly imperfect – at once uniquely you and just like the rest of us.

Put simply, wabi sabi gives you permission to be yourself. It encourages you to do your best but not make yourself ill in pursuit of an unattainable goal of perfection. It gently motions you to relax, slow down and enjoy your life. And it shows you that beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places, making every day a doorway to delight.