ABSTRACT
Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic of poverty and loneliness, imperfection and austerity, affirmation and melancholy. Wabi-sabi is the beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral. The beauty of wabi-sabi is associated with the tea ceremony, and in particular with the great sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyu, who did much to define and propagate the ceremony that continues today. Wabi-sabi is a kind of trap, an ever-intensifying consciousness of the need for a lapse of consciousness, an ever-broadening exaltation of the ordinary in which the ordinary loses its ordinariness. The gravel garden is a peculiarly Japanese art, an art of wabi-sabi because of the humbleness of gravel and its relation to the earth. It’s also wabi-sabi in the paradox at its heart, because the apparently random effect of a gravel garden requires constant tending and its spontaneity arises through discipline: the gravel is constantly cleaned and raked into patterns.
