A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics

Japan presented during its integrated periods the still surprising spectacle of a people who in the most natural way made art a way of life.
In the Edo period, aestheticization reached extraordinary heights It was now that bushido, the way of the warrior, was first rationalized and codified. Specific mention of bushido as a readiness to die a beautifully noble death (an aesthetic decision) first came at a time when there was no longer a military need for any samurai to die by the sword

Kato Shuichi. His thesis is that during the long years of its seclusion Japan became so internalized that the artistic impulse, aesthetics, quite took the place accorded religion in other countries. “Japanese culture became structured with its aesthetic values at the center. Aesthetic concerns often prevailed even over religious beliefs and duties.” In the later Buddhist sculpture of the Heian period, writes Kato, “the art was not illustrating a religion, but a religion becoming an art.” Later, under the influence of Zen, there was “a process of gradual dissolution of this originally mystic discipline into poetry, theater, painting, the aesthetics of tea, . . . in one word, into art.

The three-part formula is referred to as shin-gyo-so. The first term, shin, indicates things formal, slow, symmetrical, imposing. The third is so and is applied to things informal, fast, asymmetrical, relaxed. The second is gyo and it describes everything in between the extremes of the other two

Yugen] means ‘what lies beneath the surface’; the subtle, as opposed to the obvious; the hint, as opposed to the statement. It is applied to the natural grace of a boy’s movements, to the gentle restraint of a nobleman’s speech and bearing. . . . ‘To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest with no thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that goes hidden by far-off islands’ . . . such are the gates of yugen.”

In Japan the concept became (in Brower’s words) “the ideal of an artistic effect both mysterious and ineffable, of a subtle, complex tone achieved by emphasizing the unspoken connotations of words and the implications of a poetic situation.”

Aware is applied to the aspects of nature (or life, or art) that move a susceptible individual to an awareness of the ephemeral beauty of a world in which change is the only constant. His or her reaction may be a resigned melancholy or an awe, or even a measured and accepting pleasure. There have been various valiant attempts to translate the term aware into English, a language that has no way of doing so

Indeed, one might venture that the aesthetic urge to be simple was based in part upon some kind of reaction to otherwise ornate and complicated lives.

Aesthetic terms indicate an attempt to define the otherwise indefinable. They are part of a net of words through which we would capture and control our feelings. But the task—the definition of feeling—is difficult. So, other means are sometimes attempted—those that indicate rather than state

One etymological explanation of sabi translates it as “the bloom of time.” This reading of sabi—cold and chill but beautiful—agreed well with a Buddhist-influenced ethos that recognized loneliness as a part of the human lot and therefore sought to become resigned to it and to find a kind of beauty in it

Of its implications the aesthetician Yanagi Sotetsu has written: “It is this beauty with its inner implications that is referred to as shibui. It is not a beauty displayed before the viewer by its creator . . . viewers must seek out the beauty for themselves. As our taste grows more refined we will necessarily arrive at the beauty that is shibui.”