ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses how awakened life contributes both to the aesthetic enrichment of everyday experience, if not also to spiritual enlightenment. The author focuses on his personal experience of awakened living in Japanese Zen cloister. As the conception of everyday aesthetics is resolutely focused on appreciating the ordinary as ordinary rather than as special, so the aesthetic quality appreciated in this kind of everyday aesthetics would not call special attention to itself as an intense quality or powerful experience. Roshi Inoue Kido's lessons in everyday aesthetics are too abundant to present in proper detail. An aesthetic transfiguration of everyday life concerns the constant, pervasive experience of breathing. If Pragmatist Aesthetics and Practicing Philosophy offered arguments for reintegrating aesthetic principles into the ethical, practical conduct of life, these ideas were already prefigured in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau's works.
