By Will Lerner, Communications Manager for Portland Japanese Garden & Japan Institute
An Introduction by Aki Nakanishi
“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
I wanted to begin my introduction with a quote by Mary Lennox, a neglected and lonely young girl who discovers a hidden, abandoned garden and brings it back to life in a 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden.
The garden in the novel is more than a physical setting—it’s a metaphor for personal growth, rebirth, and the healing power of nature. As Mary tends to the garden, she also begins to heal emotionally, growing from a difficult, sour child into a compassionate, loving person. The garden’s revival is mirrored in the transformation of other characters as well, creating a powerful narrative about the connection between human well-being and the natural world.
Of all flora and fauna that make up “the whole world,” the young girl also mentions of another key ingredient, “magic”, which to me represents a synthesis of nature and human mind, altogether pointing to the ability of a garden to change our perspective and to find beauty and wonder in the world around us, while embodying the sentiment that gardens offer more than just plants—they provide renewal, inspiration, and a connection to nature.
So if this “magic” is a manifestation of the symbiotic relationship between nature and mind, with an infinite range of beauty and meaning in the eye of the beholder, the journey of Wabi Sabi is bound to offer a unique dimension of perspective through which to reflect on nature and oneself. With an added layer of awareness around us, the vibrant colors of autumn—reds, yellows, and oranges of maple and other leaves in our garden—become symbols of nature’s inevitable cycles and the transient splendor of life itself, inviting us to affirm our own “magic” within.
Welcome to our garden.
Aki Nakanishi leads all programming for Portland Japanese Garden and Japan Institute as the Institute’s Director and Arlene Schnitzer Curator of Culture, Art, and Education. Click here to learn more.
In the Tea Garden
The Tea Garden of Portland Japanese Garden is nestled against the scruff of a hillside, untroubled and hushed. On approach from the Heavenly Falls, a smooth walkway of granite gives way to stones laid out so each step must be taken slowly and methodically to avoid inadvertently damage across delicate moss. The verdant space is sometimes flecked with color—camellias and azaleas in spring and the crimsons and golds of autumn, but otherwise the garden is knitted with green both underfoot and under the height of Washington Park’s sentinels: Douglas fir and cedar. There are no marks of majesty here and no view that dazzles like the Mount Hood Overlook or the view of the Moon Bridge from the northernmost path of the Strolling Pond Garden. Though only participants in the tea ceremony are permitted to walk in the fragile Tea Garden, the natural style feels somehow familiar as if one is coming home.
In this humble space, a steppingstone path leads to the Kashintei, or “Flower-Heart Room,” a small, unassuming wooden structure that was handcrafted and assembled in Japan, disassembled, and then reassembled in Portland Japanese Garden in 1968. The sunny hue of fresh lumber has long since given way to the rustic patina of age. Throughout the building, muted tones of subtle color—yellows, browns, and rust— are only ever interrupted by accents of white on the translucent paper shoji doors that surround the raised platform on which tea is prepared. Four-and-a-half woven tatami mats—a space of about six square feet—comprise the floor in front of a tokonoma (alcove) with a scroll of calligraphy, and often, a simple vase of flowers. Ungilded and unadorned, this is the setting in which we can begin our journey to understanding the concept of wabi sabi, a term that is becoming almost as ubiquitous as the word Zen is now.
In Search of a Definition of Wabi Sabi
To help shape a more holistic understanding of the wabi sabi, we can turn to Diane Durston, Curator Emerita of Portland Japanese Garden. From 2007 to 2018, she was the Garden’s Arlene Schnitzer Curator of Culture, Art & Education. During this time, she initiated what is now one of the most cherished elements of its programming: world-class exhibitions featuring contemporary and traditional Japanese art. Durston, who was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays in 2022, is the author of numerous books, essays, and articles on Japanese culture, with a special focus on traditional Kyoto. Among her works is the book, Wabi Sabi: The Art of Everyday Life.
In the book, Durston writes that “Wabi has been defined variously in English as tranquil simplicity; austere elegance; unpolished, imperfect, or irregular beauty; rusticity; things in their simplest, most austere, and natural state, a serene, transcendental state of mind. Likewise, sabi has been interpreted as the beauty that treasures the passage of time, and with it the lonely sense of impermanence it evokes. It has also been defined as the patina that age bestows, or as that which is true to the natural cycle of birth and death. Based on shared assumptions about the nature of art and life, wabi and sabi are widely accepted concepts in Japan. With both aesthetic and philosophical meanings, they are perceived as too vast to explain or define precisely.”
Other definitions of the meaning of wabi sabi can be found in the writings of Leonard Koren, author of Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (1994). Koren described wabi sabi as an “aesthetic system” that combines the “ultimate nature of existence (metaphysics), sacred knowledge (spirituality), emotional well-being (state of mind), behavior (morality), and the look and feel of things (materiality).”
Aesthetics are approached differently in Japan than in the West. As scholar Mara Miller shares in her chapter in The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, many of the people of the nation see it as something with a range of values beyond the pleasure one gains from art, such as connections to awareness of poignancy, transience, astringency, mystery, and beyond, all of which serve to help uncover a greater social, emotional, and spiritual truth. Though Miller cautions that these aesthetic values are not unique to Japan, she does note that the country may be the only one that has tried to form a national identity based on aesthetics. For example, its aristocracy often relied on the arts to establish credibility and control.
The all-encompassing definition of wabi sabi appears to be confined to the “tacit dimension,” the realm that exists within all human minds where real knowledge remains beyond our articulation. And it is not simply a matter of having to be Japanese to express its meaning.
“There may be no Japanese capable of giving a definitive explanation of wabi, sabi,and suki,* perhaps because they represent concepts that are almost wholly dependent on context,” writes Itoh Teiji in Wabi Sabi Suki: The Essence of Japanese Beauty. “Those who try to explain wabi, sabi, or suki always seem to ‘beat about the bush,’ offering hints and helpful examples, but more often than not becoming tangled up in contradictions.”
Aesthetics and Nature
Anything and everything that is art or resembles art is, ultimately, a distillation of nature. A Japanese garden is among the most immediately obvious examples of this idea, but what are netsuke but miniatures carved from wood or bone? What are ukiyo-e but pigments derived from plants and soil printed on paper from a block of carved wood? The land influences how humans move and think. Art and aesthetics across all cultures reflect this even if it was not consciously done by its creators.
The late Lynn Jacobsen Katsumoto, curator of Japanese art, explained that “Japan is a country of harsh natural realities. Much of the land is mountainous, dotted with volcanoes and uninhabitable terrain. Earthquakes are common, seasons are marked by torrential rains, disastrous typhoons, and extremes of temperature. The surrounding oceans pose navigational hazards and natural resources are scarce. Yet in Japanese art, a cultural prism refracts the natural surroundings and unveils a tranquil world where the cycle of the seasons discloses the universal order and illuminates the impermanence of existence. In nature, there is a birth and flowering, fading and decay. By referring to nature, Japanese artists and poets since antiquity have expressed their profound emotions about the brevity of life and all its passing stages, finding their daily natural surroundings potent metaphors for contemplating the constancy of change.”
Some of the earliest known thoughts captured on wabi sabi show just how influential the land is. Urasenke School of Tea Grandmaster Soshitsu Sen XV writes in Tea Life, Tea Mind that Japan’s greatest tea master, Sen no Rikyu, felt the following nature-steeped poem by Fujiwara no Ietaka (1158-1237) “most clearly revealed the spirit of wabi”:
To those who long for the
Flowers of spring
Show the young grasses
That push up among the snowy hills.
Kamo no Chomei (c. 1153-1216), whose poetry made him an acclaimed figure in Japan in the Heian (794-1185) and Kamakura (1185-1333) eras, also turned to the natural environment to explain wabi: “Wabi is like the feeling of the evening sky in autumn, somber of color, hushed of all sound. Somehow, as if for reasons one should be able to call to mind, tears begin to flow uncontrollably.”
The Historic Roots of Wabi Sabi
The phrase wabi sabi is actually a marriage of two words that have origins in ancient Japan. Leonard Koren, quoted above, notes that the words originally had different meanings: “’Sabi’ originally meant ‘chill,’ ‘lean,’ or ‘withered.’ ‘Wabi’ originally meant the misery of living alone in nature, away from society, and suggested a discouraged, dispirited, cheerless emotional state.” He notes that both words can be found in Manyoshu, an eighth-century anthology of poetry that may be the oldest known tome of its kind.
Related: Learn more about the relationship between wabi sabi and tea by clicking here.
The combination of wabi and sabi as one colloquial term is a more recent practice. “After considerable reflection it appeared that wabi-sabi was the present-day conceptual heir to wabi-tea—with or without the tea,” Koren shares, noting that some scholars use the words interchangeably but never actually combined them. “Obviously wabi-sabi derives from wabi-tea, but it has metamorphosed into something a bit different, something more inclusive, more democratic. Just as wabi-tea had once subsumed all the meanings of sabi, so now had wabi-sabi subsumed all the meanings of wabi-tea, and then some.”
Recognizing Wabi Sabi
Yanagi Soetsu, founder of the mingei folk craft movement that took place in the 1930s, perhaps had the best approach for those who seek to understand the art and aesthetics of Japan, advice that lends itself well to those who come to Portland Japanese Garden seeking better understanding of wabi sabi in the world’s most authentic Japanese garden outside of Japan.
“I would like to give them three pieces of advice,” he notes in The Unknown Craftsman (1976). “First, put aside the desire to judge immediately; acquire the habit of just looking. Second, do not treat the object as an object for the intellect. Third, just be ready to receive, passively, without interposing yourself. If you can void your mind of all intellectualization, like a clear mirror that simply reflects, all the better. This nonconceptualization—the Zen state of mushin (‘no mind’)—may seem to represent a negative attitude, but from it springs the true ability to contact things directly and positively.”
A passage from Diane Durston’s book captures a moment where she experienced the feeling of wabi sabi in a Kyoto garden, a passage that feels attuned to the approach Soetsu offered.
“The painter’s garden belongs in the rain,” Durston writes. “Not a place of brilliant sunlight, it is often sadly gray—an older woman who causes one to remark how beautiful she must once have been. Today a sense of melancholy clings like crows to wet pine branches. In the midsummer rain, the leaves are greener and the moss fluorescent against stones hewn two centuries ago by masons forgotten in their own time. Kempt, but unkempt, the garden has a mind of its own. The trees are taller now than planned. Things die and are replaced. Branches break and fish get old and scarred. A crane appears like a ghost in a dream, rests on the bridge for an instant and is gone. Sit on the porch for a while and watch rain drizzle across the silent pond. The master, long gone, designed it for days like this. He understood the beauty of the fleeting moment. Feel the rain. Let it dampen your hands and face. Watch it drip from the roofs of thatched tea huts into the muddy pond. Sit here in silence on a damp autumn afternoon, surrounded by poetry and art, frozen in this moment—enough to make a young girl cry.”
To experience a moment of wabi sabi’s quiet beauty, visit Portland Japanese Garden. Take time to linger in the Tea Garden. Attend a presentation of tea ceremony in the Cathy Rudd Cultural Corner. There’s no better place outside of Japan to realize this sensation.
* Suki is another Japanese term worthy of discussion but remains outside the scope of this one article. For now, we will commit the crime of flattening its nuance by paraphrasing Teiji and describing it as the subtle elegance that arises from idiosyncrasy.