Wabi Sabi

    Keywords: Culture & History

Wabi-sabi

Since wabi-sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic system, it is difficult to explain precisely in western terms. According to [ext] Leonard Koren, in his book [ext] Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty and it "occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West."

"Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is the beauty of things modest and humble.
It is the beauty of things unconventional."
(quote from Koren's book)

The concepts of wabi-sabi correlate with the concepts of Zen Buddhism, as the first Japanese involved with wabi-sabi were tea masters, priests, and monks who practiced Zen. Zen Buddhism was first brought to Japan from China at the end of the 12th century. Zen emphasizes "direct, intuitive insight into transcendental truth beyond all intellectual conception." At the core of wabi-sabi is the importance of transcending ways of looking and thinking about things/existence.

  • All things are impermanent
  • All things are imperfect
  • All things are incomplete

Material characteristics of wabi-sabi (again from Koren's book):

  • suggestion of natural process
  • irregular
  • intimate
  • unpretentious
  • earthy
  • simple

Aspects of wabi-sabi in Go

% this new section is tentative, intended to put wabi-sabi more in perspective of Go. I [axd] do not claim to know much about wabi-sabi, and what I write here is mainly based on own observations, so I might be wrong. These comments are not meant to stay; remove them and/or the entire section as necessary - there's too much questioning on SL. Maybe this section should merge into [aesthetics].

Wabi-sabi appears in following aspects of go:

  • natural stone placement
  • stones won't fit when lined up [1]
  • wood grain, colour palette, and natural degrading of a goban (see also kaya)
  • structure in stones
  • non-rectangular dimensions of the goban

From [ext] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi:

It is also two separate words, with related but different meanings.

Wabi is the kind of perfect beauty that is seemingly-paradoxically caused by just the right kind of imperfection, such as an asymmetry in a ceramic bowl which reflects the handmade craftsmanship, as opposed to another bowl which is perfect, but soul-less and machine-made.

Sabi is the kind of beauty that can come only with age, such as the patina on a very old bronze statue.


For more about wabi-sabi, see

Footnotes

[1] Although I haven't seen this in reality

unkx80: Do you consider the case where the stones intended for a larger sized board is played on a slightly smaller board? During the endgame stage, placing a stone on the board in this condition is a very tight fit - like a child who has outgrown his or her clothes.


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(OC) 2014 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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