10/03/2022
Japan scholar Horst Hammitzsch in his book, Zen in the Art of the Tea Ceremony describes wabi and sabi as the result of the fleeting moment depicted by mono no aware. More distinctly different from the typical vibrant and rich beauty of the Heian era, Hammitzsch describes sabi as “the absence of obvious beauty” and contrasts the beauty in the colorless, the old, and the fragile with the rich,
exuberant, energetic and labile beauty.
Horst Hammitzsch, Zen in the Art of the Tea Ceremony, trans. Peter Lemesurier
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988), 46