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It is the feeling which the garden artist tries to create when, in a crowded country, he wants to give you the sensation of being way off in a mountain landscape. So this sense, you see, of solitariness, of being able to wander off on your own, is sabi, and is a thing, of course, that any sane person has to have. One has to have privacy.
You have to have space in which to be alone, so as not to become a rubber stamp. You see, it’s often thought that Eastern philosophy is against individuality. And this is not true.
The unity of man in the universe is not a loss, or a merging, of personality in something impersonal. It’s more like the fact that, when individuality, when personality, is known and experienced as an expression of the whole cosmos, then the person becomes more individual, not less individual. But he becomes individual in a non-strident way; in a way that has in it the spirit of the uncarved block and the unbleached silk.
And so one of the qualities of this is solitariness. The great Chinese poem which has sabi in it preeminently is Asking for the Master: So the whole idea, you see, of Zen is that wherever you stand—if you realize Zen—you create a mountain. Everywhere is the mountain solitude, even in the middle of an uproar.
This is sabi. And for this reason, then, an enormous amount of the subject matter of Far Eastern painting and poetry is solitude and the love of solitude. Now there is, next, wabi.
This is a more difficult idea. Let’s imagine that you are feeling very bad about something: you’re depressed, the world is too much with you, just… you’re sick of life. And then, quite surprisingly, you notice a small weed growing underneath a hedge.
And this weed is really, after all, not just to be dismissed as a weed, but some rather lovely design that is in the nature of this plant. Or, supposing you are bothered by financial uproar, wars, politics, and everything like that, and you are sitting on a beach, and you become aware of the water endlessly crossing pebbles, and you get a sense that this goes on for ever and ever and ever: it is long before you were thought of, long before all human history, empires, schemes, and so on, and will endure long after. But it’s something that strikes you that is very simple, very ordinary—like the water on the pebbles, or like the little weed under the hedge—that suggests a kind of amazing eternal reliability of nature.
The very humble form goes on and on and on, and whatever human beings may do, this everlasting sanity persists. Now, that strange flip from the mood of depression to the mood of a certain consolation in this weed is wabi. Now, don’t let me be too dictatorial.
I’m trying to explain these things through examples rather than through trying to give you philosophical definitions. It’s better to give examples than to pin it down with abstract terminologies. Wabi comes out in the haiku very much: This is wabi.
This is all there is. The path comes to an end among the parsley. Which has a touch of yūgen, but but also wabi, because the parsley is just… well, everybody has parsley in the garden.
Now, next, this word aware, A-W-A-R-E, is very much connected with the Buddhist feeling for the transience of life: that everything is change and nothing at all can be held onto or possessed. This feeling of transience is at the root of the philosophy of poverty that exists in Buddhism, and it has a curious difference in it from the Christian philosophy of poverty as, say, explained by Saint Francis of Assisi. It’s cognate to it, it’s like it, but a little subtle difference.
Somehow, one feels (in the Christian emphasis on poverty) that poverty contrasts with richness as good to evil—in other words, poverty is unpleasant, but it’s something you ought to share with the poor who live unpleasant lives. So if you are to expiate your sins, well, you ought to be poor and to live roughly. And so, for this reason, in Buddhism one would not say so much “poverty” as one would say “simplicity:” not going without, not clinging to things because it’s good for you, but because it is actually the happiest way to live.
Because nothing is more terrifying than the state of chronic anxiety which one has if you are subject to the illusion that something or other in life could be held onto and safeguarded. And nothing can. So the acceptance of everything flowing away is absolutely basic to freedom; to being an unsui: a cloud-water person who drifts like cloud and flows like water.
But in this we mustn’t take ourselves too ridiculously. I mean, naturally, all human beings have in them certain clinging. So you can’t let go totally.
You wouldn’t be human if you did. You can’t be just a leaf on the wind or just a ball in a mountain stream—to use a Zen poetic phrase—because if you were that, you wouldn’t be human. Just as I pointed out that a person with no emotions, who has completely controlled his emotions, is a stone Buddha, so a person who would be completely let go would also be some kind of an inanimate object.
So Zen very definitely emphasizes being human, being perfectly human, as its ideal. And so, to be perfectly human one must have not a state of absolute detachment, but a state of detachment which contains a little bit of resistance. A certain clinging, still.
They say in India of a jivanmukta (a man who is liberated in this world) that he has to cultivate a few mild bad habits in order to stay in the body. Because if he were absolutely perfect he would disappear from manifestation. And so the great yogi—maybe he smokes a cigarette, or has a bad temper occasionally: something that keeps him human.
And that little thing is very important. It’s like the salt in a stew. It grounds him.
Well, this is another way of saying that even a very great sage, a great Buddha, will have in him a touch of regret that life is fleeting, because if he doesn’t have that touch of regret, he’s not human and he’s incapable of compassion towards people who regret very much that life is fleeting. So the mood aware is that touch of regret, of nostalgia, of—you know that poem which speaks of the feeling of a banquet hall, deserted? Here it is: there’s been a great banquet, you know, and all the guests have gone home, and there are empty glasses and dirty plates and crushed napkins and all sorts of things all over, and somehow the echo of voices and merriment is still there.
And so this mood, aware, comes up. So even a very great person should feel that, because the prize otherwise is not to be human. So, for this reason, Buddhist and Taoist poetry is not unemotional, it’s not dehumanized, and so somehow speaks very much to us as people, and does not have in it the feeling that we ought instead to turn into saints or supermen.
That’s the humane thing about this philosophy of life. The next word, the special term, is fūryū. Fūryū means literally: “wind flow.” Fū (風) is the character for “wind,” ryū (流) means “flowing.” And the dictionaries translate it “elegance,” and this won’t do.
Fūryū—first of all, you must remember that the word “wind” is used in Chinese and Japanese alike to indicate atmosphere; the atmosphere of a place. So when a person has, say, a certain school of poetry or philosophy, it’s called the family wind. That means that the atmosphere, the slant, the attitude, of this particular school.
So that meaning of “wind,” “atmosphere,” comes into the expression fūryū. And fūryū is like this. Here is a man, fishing, and he’s sitting in the evening in the twilight on the edge of a river with his fishing rod in a lonely little boat tied up by the bank.
Now, if this man is fishing with his mind intent simply on catching fish, this is not fūryū. But if he’s also digging the atmosphere, it’s fūryū. To flow with the wind, you see?
To dig the atmosphere. American offers the most beautiful possibilities of translation in our incomparable slang for some Oriental ideas. Fūryū is there, you know, to get with it, to flow with it—and not (again, you see) in the sense of the merely passive leaf flowing on the wind.
But fūryū has in it, you see, a touch of self-consciousness, like that man fishing. Now, you would think (if you studied Taoist philosophy) that this would be very bad. Zhuang Zhou somewhere says that a comfortable belt is one that you don’t feel, and you’re unaware of it.
That’s not the most comfortable belt. Like comfortable shoes: would you be completely unconscious of comfortable shoes? No!
Something better than comfortable shoes are shoes that you know are comfortable. So, in the same way, self-consciousness adds something to life. It’s one thing to be happy and not know it.
It’s another thing to be happy and to know it. It’s like: one’s voice in the shower room or bathtub has more resonance than one’s voice in the open air. And that’s why temples, and cathedrals, and resonating boxes for guitars and drums, and things, are created to give this little quality of echo.
For all echo is a certain kind of feedback which enables you to reflect upon what you’re doing and to know that you know. So one might say that ordinary people are Buddhas, but they don’t know it. And the Buddha is one who knows he’s a Buddha—only, they don’t let you settle for this comfortably and easily, because, really, to know is also defined as not to know.
In the Upanishads it is said that if you know what Brahman is, you have yet some study to be done, for those who know Brahman do not know Brahman, and those who do not know Brahman really know. Now, all this paradoxical language is intended to keep you confused so that you can’t say, “I’ve got it.” But this position, you see, is not one-sided. There is something about being human, about being self-conscious, you see, that is not a mistake of nature, not a completely evil fall into self-awareness, but self-awareness—although it creates all kinds of problems, because through self-awareness the human being is in some sense a self-frustrating mechanism: he knows that he is going to die.
And the price of being able to control the future is to know that, in the long run, you won’t be able to, and worry about that. But also with self-consciousness goes the possibility of resonance, of realization, of becoming enlightened, liberated, and knowing it, and therefore able to enjoy it. So fūryū adds this to the dimension of going with it.
Something more than the mere passivity of going with, but knowing that you’re going. But it does at the same time—it isn’t entirely wrong that the dictionaries have translated it “elegance.” You could say it fūryū is “style”—when we say somebody really has style. But this designates a particular kind of style.
It is the style of what one might call the elegant poor man. The aristocratic bum. The the rich pauper, you see?
Now, you find that a good deal in the things that we’ve been seeing. We’ve gone to many temples where nobody really owns anything, and yet, in a way, they’re luxurious. This is fūryū.
The next word, yūgen— So when you put these two characters together you get yūgen. And so yūgen is, first of all, suggestiveness. I was looking around one of the temples a few days ago, where I noticed that you couldn’t figure out how big it was, or it didn’t seem to have any limits.
Because always wall, say, of a room, seemed to be a screen which led to something else beyond. And at the back of every garden there seemed to be a little gate that led to some other courtyard. And everything led into something else.
And I said to the priest, “I don’t know whether I’m going to go exploring or not, or just leave it alone and think that, well here I left Kyōto and I never did find out what was through that little gate. And so what?” Forever there will be magic behind there, which I didn’t define, I didn’t draw in. And so this whole temple was was done that way.
All sorts of suggestions of little avenues disappearing, like a mountain path winding up among the trees: where does it go? True, if you follow it you will eventually go up out of Kyōto here, and get down to Ōtsu. And, you know, you find yourself back in the suburbs.
But there is the sense of that disappearing mountain path (like we’ve got going up here) that it goes to the place. And everybody has in the back of their minds an image of the place that you want to go to. Or some—not really an image, though.
It’s always slightly indefinite. There’s the certain feeling of: there ought to be somewhere the thing I’ve always wanted. We get disappointed, of course, because as we get older we feel that perhaps that doesn’t exist at all.
That one just has to put up with the second best, or with something—half a loaf is better than no bread. But still, I find that Far Eastern art is very, very full of hints about what is sometimes called horaisan. Horaisan is the magical island somewhere out in the Pacific which is the paradise island.
And all these Chinese paintings of wonderful floating pagodas, and terraces with scholars sitting around drinking wine, and so on, are hints of the paradise world. And that somewhere, then, these little steps lead up to that thing. And you’ve seen these steps.
Japan is full of them. You just go along in the train, you look up the hills, and there are arches, toriis, steps disappearing into the hills—all of which suggests the feeling: out there is that thing. So yūgen, as it were, comes around full circle to sabi.
The wonderful lonely place at the end of the road, where there won’t be any mother-in-law to bother you, any of that sort of dreadful social difficulty, but solitude which befits a bearded old gentleman. Now, of course, you see, all these things are symbols. On one level, they’re very human, and they reflect our perhaps childish and immature desires to be really alone, to have that paradise thing.
And realistic people say, “Well, you ought not to bother yourself or fool yourself with such fantasies.” And nowadays I find that we feel very guilty about thinking of paradise, of horaisan, or whatever it is; the enchanted garden. They think, “Nu-uh! Reality is what you read about in the newspapers and you’ve got to face it.” And everything is unpleasant, basically.
There’s the hard boiled school of zoologists, for example, who insist that birds hate flying. You know, everybody has always envied a bird and wanted be able to glide along with wings, you know? And so there comes up somebody (who is usually some wretched academician) who says, “No, we’ve discovered by measurements that birds loathe flying.” I say, “You must feel very satisfactory when you found that out.
because you’ve smashed an ideal.” I’m quoting the Psalms. But apparently doves just hate this chore of flying! Now, it is just in the same way as it’s ridiculous to try to be so inhuman as never to feel any regrets about the passing of time and of life, and so on.
It’s likewise inhuman not to have the paradise fantasy of the mysterious place around the corner, just over the crest of the hill, just behind the island in the distance. You see? Because that place is really the big joke.
That’s you. That’s why you have found that, at the end of the line, when you get through the last torii and up the last stairway, you are liable to be confronted with a mirror. And so everybody is seeking, seeking, seeking, seeking, seeking for that thing that you’ve got to have, you see?
Well, you got it! But nobody’s going to believe this. But there it is: the real thing that you are is the paradise land that you’re looking for at the end of the line.
And it’s far, far more reliable than any kind of an external scene which you could love, and cling to, and hold on to. Of course, the whole fascination of life is that that seems perfectly incredible. So I think these terms are the crucial ones.
Let me repeat them briefly. You’ve got, firstly: the uncarved block and the unbleached silk. These are the prototypes.
Then you have sabi: the mood of solitariness. Wabi: the flip from disillusion with everything to the sudden recognition of how faithful the weeds are, how the sparrows chirping in the eaves suddenly take your mind away from important and dreadful business. Aware: the regret of the passing of life, which somehow makes that very passing beautiful.
Fūryū: getting with it and living with style—that is to say, with rich poverty, elegant simplicity. Yūgen: the aesthetic equivalent of… well, let me put it this way: there was a philosopher by the name of van der Leeuw who once said that the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. That’s yūgen.
And that mystery—that deep, deep, ever so deep thing which is before all worlds—is you; the unrecognized Self. So let’s have a brief intermission. [I have often made the remark that] it seems to me a great mistake to regard the civilization of the United States as a materialistic civilization, which is a very common assumption among the peoples of Europe and Asia.
The Americans—and especially that aspect of American civilization that we call the Anglo-Saxon subculture—is constantly accused of being interested in absolutely nothing but material values. But it seems to me, on the other hand, that if you can make any really broad generalization about something so complicated as the civilization of the United States, that it is fundamentally an anti-materialistic civilization. Now, not perhaps so much by intent as in the general effect of its action.
It seems dedicated to almost, I might say, the annihilation and destruction of the material world, and to its conversion into a junk heap of unimaginable dimensions. I travel around the country a great deal, and more and more one sees a thing that is called the growth of our expanding communities: an extension of something over the landscape that sometimes is almost indistinguishable from a rubbish heap. One goes down the main streets of all kinds of small towns and it seems to be—if you look at it as you pass by in a car or in a train—you just see a mess of all kinds of higgledy-piggledy pieces of cardboard and paper decked up with neon lights and wire and automotive junkyards, and all sorts of parking lots and dumps of every conceivable type.
Yes, there are some nice residential areas out on the corner, but by and large we seem to be converting the world into a dump heap. And I’ve called it the progressive Los Angelization of everywhere from Honolulu to Nantucket. Now, what is at the root of this?
Why is it that we don’t seem to be able to adjust ourselves to the physical environment without destroying it? Why is it that, in a way, this culture represents in a unique fashion the law of diminishing returns; that our success is a failure? That we are building up, in other words, an enormous technological civilization which seems to promise the fulfillment of every wish almost at the touch of a button.
And yet, as in so many fairy tales, when the wishes finally materialize they’re like fairy gold: they’re not really material at all. In other words, so many of our products—our cars, our homes, our food, our clothing—looks as if it were really the instant creation of pure thought. That is to say, it is thoroughly insubstantial, lacking in watch the connoisseur of wine calls “body.” After all, we’ve made the soil incredibly productive, but its products so largely appeal to the eye rather than the stomach.
People have been saying—all kinds of people been saying this; this is by no means my idea or my feeling—that our vegetables and fruits and, above all, that symbol, our bread, is just a kind of visually attractive pith or foam rubber. And although it has all kinds of vitamins introduced into it, what I think many of us want of our nutriments is not so much medicine as food. And in so many other ways, the riches that we produce are ephemeral.
And as a result of that we’re frustrated. We’re terribly frustrated. We feel that the only thing is to go on getting more and more.
And as a result of that, the whole landscape begins to look like the nursery of a spoiled child who’s got too many toys and is bored with them and throws them away as fast as he gets them. Plays them for a few minutes. Also, we’re dedicated to tremendous war on the basic material dimensions of time and space.
We want to obliterate their limitations. We want to get everything done as fast as possible. We want to convert the rhythms and the skills of work into cash—which, indeed, you can buy something with, but you can’t eat it—and then rush home to get away from work and begin the real business of life: to enjoy ourselves.
And, you know, for the vast majority of American families, what seems to be the real point of life—what you rush home to get to—is to watch an electronic reproduction of life. You can’t touch it, it doesn’t smell, and it has no taste. You might think that people getting home to the real point of life in a robust material culture would go home to a colossal banquet, or an orgy of lovemaking, or a riot of music and dancing.
But nothing of the kind. It turns out to be this purely passive contemplation of a twittering screen. As you walk through suburban areas at night—it doesn’t matter in what part of the community it is—you see mile after mile of darkened houses with that little electronic screen flickering in the room.
Everybody isolated, watching this thing, and thus in no real communion with each other at all. And this isolation of people into a private world of their own is really the creation of a mindless crowd. Some time ago, it occurred to me that a crowd could be defined as a group of people not in mutual communication.
A crowd is a group of people that is, say, in communication with one person alone. I regret to say that you, listening to me at this moment, thereby constitute a crowd. We’re not really in full communication with each other.
And naturally, it’s terribly difficult to bring about mutual communication between a large number of people. But that does seem to me to be the essence of a crowd, and thus of a community that is not a community; not a real society, but a juxtaposition of persons. Now, one other thing that one notices about this anti-materialism is its lack of joy—or I prefer to call it its lack of gaiety.
A little while ago I was reading a book called Motivation and Personality by A. H. Maslow, who is Professor of Psychology at Brandeis. And he had amassed together a very amusing set of quotations from about thirteen representative and authoritative American psychologists. And they were all saying words to the effect that the main drive behind all forms of animate activity was the survival of the species.
In other words, all the manifestations of life are regarded by these men as intensely purposive, and the purpose and the value for which they strive is the value of survival. And Maslow commented on this that American psychology, as a result of its contact with the culture, is over-pragmatic, over-puritan, and over-purposeful. That no textbooks on psychology have chapters on fun and gaiety, or on aimless activity, or on purposeless meandering and puttering, and so on.
And he said they are neglecting perhaps what may be one whole and even the most important half of life. In other words, it is a basic premise of the culture that life is work and it’s serious. And herein lies its lack of joy.
Life is real, life is earnest. What do we mean when we say life is serious? What do we mean when we differentiate work from play?
Well, work (it seems to me) is what we must do in order to go on living, in order to survive. And play is pretty much everything else. But now, you’ll notice that, in this culture, play is justified and tolerated insofar as it tends to make our work more efficient.
We have the saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” But that really means dull at work. Play is recreation. Something you do to get refreshed, to go back and face the great problems of life.
Now, this is all very well, but that saying, even to play—the play is necessary. You must play. I remember: in England we used to have the institution of compulsory games in school, as a result of which I developed an intense loathing for most of the games that we played, like cricket and football and so on.
They were forcing you to play. And so, in the same way, the thought that the supreme value is survival value—the thought, in other words, that it is absolutely necessary for us to go on living—is a basis for life which takes the joy out of life and is really contrary life. Now, I feel that the biological process that we call life—with its marvelous proliferation of innumerable patterns and forms—is essentially playful.
By that I mean that it doesn’t have a serious purpose beyond itself. It’s an art form like music and like dancing. And the point of these art forms is always their present unfolding; the elaboration of an intelligible design of steps and movements through time.
That is not to say that their goal is the present, when you think of the present simply as a hairline on a watch; the immediate instant. The present is—that’s only an abstract present. As, for example, in listening to music: a person who hears a melody: he doesn’t hear simply a sequence of notes, he hears the steps between the notes.
A tone-deaf person hears only the notes. What a person able to hear music hears is, therefore, steps in a certain order. And this is what this diffuse present is—what I would call the real or physical present.
And I feel life is very much something of this nature: it is a play and it is its own end. But now, if you say to a form of play: you must happen! You’ve got to go on!
You immediately turn it into work, and you immediately turn it, also, into what we call, colloquially, a drag. Are we surviving—is it our duty to survive in order that our children may go on living? Well, if we think that, our children catch the same point of view from us, and they go struggling along for the sake of their children.
And the whole thing becomes a fatuous progress to an ever-eluding future. And it is because, I think, fundamentally, that we have this compulsive view of the necessity of existence that our culture is distinctly lacking in gaiety. Now, it seems to me that this attitude rests on two further premises.
The first is the idea of God that we inherit from the European Protestant and to some extent Catholic and Judaic background. This conception of God as creating the universe for the fulfillment of his purpose is a conception of God quite strangely lacking in either humor or joy, despite some hints to the contrary in the Bible. But they haven’t made very much impression.
There was a passage in the Book of Proverbs where the divine wisdom, which is God’s creative power, is represented as playing. But in the King James version it’s translated rejoicing. Now, to rejoice is something that one can do very properly.
You can rejoice by singing the more joyous hymns. But that’s not quite the same thing as playful joy or gaiety. In other words, look at our churches as symbols of our attitude to God.
Must we not admit the fact that the vast majority, especially of small-town Protestant churches in the United States, are absolute triumphs of architectural gloom? There is nothing in the remotest bit beautiful about them. They have appalling windows of an indescribable brown yellow, mottled stained glass.
They have vanished wooden pews and pulpits and altars. And hangings of plush and usually dark red or a dismal and unspeakable green. I’ve looked at so many buildings lately of an ecclesiastical nature and marveled at the pure ingenuity for religious ugliness that lies behind them.
And this, you see, reflects the idea of God as a very solemn, serious father of the universe who has created the world for some purpose to which our attitude is supposed to be sort of as stiff as Marines saluting the flag. It’s something that more or less resembles an everlasting church service. And in view of the kind of churches we have for the most part—of course there are exceptions—but in view of the kind of churches we have this is an exceedingly gloomy prospect for the spending of eternity.
But unfortunately, this is the idea of God that is in the back of our minds. And this state of mind persists even in people who don’t really believe in that kind of God anymore, but for whom God remains a symbol for a sort of moral idealism in the same way that Uncle Sam is a sort of symbol of the people of the United States. Now that’s, I think, one root of the attitude.
The other root of the attitude is our conception of man. And this conception of man has the same history because it comes from the same cultural roots as our conception of God. And this is, of course, the conception which Lance Whyte has called the European dissociation: the conception of man as an unhappy amalgamation of mind and body, spirit and matter, ego and not-ego, subject knower and object known.
And this concept of man has very curious consequences. I’ve mentioned a lot of them. But one that I that strikes me more and more is that it’s a non-participative conception of man.
By that I mean it causes us to feel ourselves as observers of life, whether that life is inside our own bodies or whether it’s outside in the external world. We’re observers. We are the subjects, and all that is the object.
And that is to say it confronts us; it stands over against us. And we’re looking at it. And, in a way, this is symbolized in our whole way of life insofar as its end and object seems to be to confront the television screen, which is non-participative contemplation of something which has been impoverished in its material and physical reality.
Deprived of, say, touch and smell and taste, and so on. And so, because we have great expectations out of this contemplation—whether it be of television or of mundane existence—but we are not with it. You see, we don’t believe we are our bodies.
We say, “I have a body” and we say, “I have instincts.” We never say, “I am a body” or “I am instincts.” And the bodies that we allow ourselves to have are a little bit pseudo. I mean, they are elegant surfaces. The ideal body is—I mean, you know, Marilyn Monroe.
It’s an elegant surface, but it’s not supposed to secrete sweat or tears, it’s not supposed to smell at all. Its insides are rather improper. And one is expected to give it attention in a sort of aloof way, but spend one’s life, on the whole, being as unconscious of one’s body as possible.
Alright then, so we have a conception of ourselves which is estranged from our physical organism, and therefore our whole life is estranged. It is, as I’ve said, not-participative. And this comes out in a very marked way in the current attitude of this subculture to sexuality, because here [is] where we represent sex as a necessary instinct.
Now, of course, we all know sexuality in this culture is the big thing. The sexually seductive girl is used to catch the eye and to advertise anything and everything, however remote it may be, from the sexual process. It advertises beer, it advertises automobiles, it advertises undertakers, bakeries, anything.