Sep 16, 2009, 12.00am IST
MARGUERITE THEOPHIL.
Today the words of a Leonard Cohen song stay in my mind long after the music stops playing: “Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in...”
Simple yet profound, these lines bring to mind a Japanese concept ‘wabi-sabi’ that confers value to what may be unfinished, imperfect and faulty.
Wabi-sabi is centered on the acceptance of transience, while nurturing all that is authentic, acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.
The phrase comes from two words ‘wabi’ and ‘sabi’, which I was told do not translate easily or directly into English. In fact, the words were not clubbed together in earlier times.
Wabi, refers to tranquillity, also poverty, and originally was about the loneliness of living remote from society. Someone simple, non-materialistic, humble, and in tune with nature would be described as wabi. The life of the hermit came to be called wabizumai, essentially "the life of wabi," a life of solitude and simplicity.
Sabi by itself meant lean or withered, as also ‘the bloom of time’ – signs of fading, tarnishing, the aging and dulling of that which once sparkled.
These meanings began to change around 600 years ago in the 14th century, with a Zen approach giving it more positive colourations, with wabi connoting simplicity, freshness, or understated elegance that can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, and sabi referring to beauty that comes with age, or even in any visible repairs.
Wabi-sabi things were those seen to carry the burden of their years with dignity and grace. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of creation, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object – like the raku-fired pottery piece, which sits on my desk. It is uneven-edged, unevenly glazed; bearing the mark of my hands. The randomly crackled lines and hints of metallic lustre that surprised me when it emerged from the kiln make it so very beautiful; inexplicably, it grows lovelier each passing day.
Wabi-sabi is not just about objects; it is an approach to life. Daisetz T Suzuki, one of the first scholars to interpret Japanese culture and Zen Buddhism for non-Japanese, gives us a fuller pen-picture. It is “ ...to be satisfied with a little hut, a room of two or three tatami mats ... and with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighbouring fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall."
For those of us who cannot go off to a forest, and must continue to live in our high-rise apartments, living a wabi-sabi life “... is simple, but may not be so easy,” as a respected teacher once smilingly pointed out. To begin with, it requires us to develop a more trusting approach; to replace the stress of relentless action and competition with a willingness to let life unfold without needing control over every aspect.
Living a wabi-sabi life is the direct result of developing our ‘wabikokoro’, wabi heart-mind, by living in the moment, paying attention to what makes life meaningful, learning to be satisfied -- things otherwise overshadowed by the pressures and excesses of life today. We are invited to stop, become more aware, getting clarity on what is essential, then working to strip away the superfluous. In addition, we are encouraged to find beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature and above all, to accept the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death.
The writer is a Mumbai-based personal growth coach and workshop leader.
Email: weave@vsnl.net
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