What can be seen and what cannot be seen – the aesthetic sense of the Japanese medieval arts. Akira Amagasaki The Gakushuin journal of international studies Vol 4, March 2017: 1-14
Imagine that you live in a world of extreme beauty. Would you appreciate it or would you be unaware of just how wonderful it is? Now imagine losing that world, would you then be more likely to appreciate it? This is how the Japanese of the middle ages thought about beauty, according to Akira Amagasaki, author of the article.
This is not unknown to us today “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” being the same sentiment from Joni Mitchell. The Japanese named this standard “cold” or “whithering” or “thinning”. It is the moon behind the clouds, cherry blossoms as they are falling, a raku bowl for your tea. Things that are Wabi, somehow not warm, full or fattened. In other words, incomplete.
This is the emotional (down)side of Yugen, the ache of knowing what you have lost, or never had. How can you understand this aesthetic? Some said that you must first have it and then lose it. For instance, you must handle perfect, “full”, tea equipment before you can understand and appreciate a raku bowl. As the author says “It is meaningless for people who have never seen cherry blossoms in full bloom to declare, “Cherry blossoms are better after they scatter” and then go to a cherry blossom viewing after the flowers have gone.”
In iai we sometimes speak of “yoin” the reverberation of a bell as it seems to move away from us into the distance, the feeling of longing that happens at the end of a kata. If you have never felt the fullness of a kata, how can you express the ache that happens after it is over? What could you do except perhaps count to five and then go on to the next bit. Don Harvey once taught me to move my hand slightly toward the dead man at my feet. A movement of “go in peace”. Where would that have come from except the feeling of loss of a human life. The cherry blossoms drifting toward the ground.
If you want to know why I am mostly uninterested in iai or jo as sport, it is this. To judge an iai kata, or a flower arrangement, or a bowl, is to try to fit cherry blossom viewing into a formula, to try and arrange clouds over the moon to a specified standard. In other words, to take something unique, hand made, organic, and jam it into a mould, to make it just another widget. Take a look at the videos of the latest all Japan iai or jo tournaments. Either video is a really lousy medium for watching (it is) or all the 5, 6, 7 dan competitors are jamming into the same phone booth. To my eye there isn’t much to separate them one from the other.
Fullness and thinning. By striving to make the perfect iai kata and failing, one creates “wabi”. By just hacking the kata, just “trying” to make it unique or flawed, one is creating garbage. By training yourself into a formula to fit the current judging model, you become an industrial robot, creating a widget. To try with all your heart to create the perfect moment, and fail, and know you have failed, and mourn that, is the aesthetic we are discussing.
In photography I was constantly asked by my models “what are you using these pictures for?” and my answer always had to be “nothing”. Each photograph was an act of creation, it was the act itself that counted, not the product. The attempt toward perfection and the failure. There is no end point in this, no “product”. Paper rots, digital standards change, floppy disks are no more. There is only the journey until we ourselves are dead.
That is why some people stay in the martial arts for their whole lives, for them there is no goal, no achievement to reach. Some people want to get their black belt and quit when they do. Some want to win a tournament, to prove they are “the best”, some want to be a sensei, to have all the eyes on them. Nude modeling is the same by the way, those who try it will sometimes realize that a gaze is a drug, to have someone really “look” can be an addiction. Other models, other photographers, other budoka find the act of creation is what is most satisfying, the performance of a kata, the creating of an image with no other goal but the act itself.
What purpose, what goal can compete with the “cycle of life”? Impermanance is important.
Existance is creation but eventually, everything is dust. Is this not beauty?
Is this not wabi?
Seito Bugei Juku 