A definition of wabi-sabi by Leonard Korben, author of Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers:

Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional…

Beauty dislikes being captive to perfection. That which is profound never lends itself to logical explanation: it involves endless mystery.
            - Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman, A Japanese Insight Into Beauty

The clay Buddha crumbles —
Inside,
A spider builds its home.
- Shinkichi Takahashi (1901–1987)

More thoughts by Soetsu Yanagi, author of The Unknown Craftsman, A Japanese Insight Into Beauty

Unlike other collectors, most Tea masters prefer the incomplete; they look for slight scars or irregularities of form. If carried to excess, this desire will, of course, become unhealthy, but that there is a close relation between beauty and deformation cannot be denied...

Why should one reject the perfect in favor of the imperfect? The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite. Beauty must have room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom.

The Buddhist aesthetician Shin’ichi Hisamatsu put forward a new idea. He says that the imperfect does not, in itself, constitute beauty. The imperfect is merely a negative concept. True beauty in the Tea ceremony must be more positive. It must go further, to the point of positively rejecting the perfect. . . The shape of Raku Tea-bowls is deliberately deformed – by, for example, not using a wheel – and the surface is left rough. By such means the masters sought to give life back to beauty in the Tea ceremony.

The Cup That Leans a Little

The bowl shaped by hands
not the wheel,
allows the clay
to sag, to ripple,
to hold the trace
of touch and fire.

A potter shapes the bowl
with her own natural
beautiful hands.
And leaves a ridge,
a roughness—
and in that roughness
the bowl remembers
the mountain clay,
the river silt,
the smoke of the kiln.

When you hold it,
your fingers feel
the small unevenness
where beauty hid itself.
Where the potter wavered
The cup leans a little.
It is alive —
as the wind is alive.
The moon on still water
is never the same twice.

Rain, the wind
find the flaw
in the roof tile —
and sing.
- Heron Dance reflection

As artists, we work with our own imperfection. Someone who has finished searching, has all the answers, has nothing to learn, cannot create art. Art is a search into realms where truth can be sensed but not seen. The big truths, the truths that are the territory of art, are contradictory.

A beauty that is not explicable is dearer than a beauty we can see the end of.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “The Poet,” Essays, Second Series

Beauty in art encompasses freedom, including freedom from the perfect. Beauty in art encompasses the infinite, and the infinite by necessity encompasses freedom.

Items made by machines can be perfect. Items made by hand, including art, cannot be both perfect and have a soul. It is the things left out, deliberately or unintentionally, the things hidden, the things not fully executed or complete, that suggest, point to, life beyond the painting.

A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle. . . The mistakes left in a drawing are the record of the artist's struggle.
- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Mistakes reflect the artist’s state of mind at the moment of execution.

. . .

If this work resonates with you, please support it. Heron Dance and Zen Mountain Journal survive on the kindness of strangers. Please make a contribution here.