RELATED TOPIC:
MEDIEVAL JAPAN

RELATED TOPIC:
AN ACCOUNT OF MY HUT, BY CHÔMEI

Donald Keene :: For example, he [Kenkô] speaks of the desirability of impermanence.

[Excerpt from Essays in Idleness]

Are we to look at flowers in full bloom, at the moon when it is clear? Nay, to look out on the rain and long for the moon, to draw the blinds and not be aware of the passing of spring — these arouse even deeper feelings. There is much to be seen in young boughs about to flower, in gardens strewn with withered blossoms.

 

Donald Keene :: We're familiar in the West with the Greek idea of "call no man happy until he's dead" and the lament that things don't last, even marble buildings don't last, and so on. But he's saying that is the source of beauty.

If things lasted all the time in pristine condition, we would never appreciate them. It is only the fragility of things, such as the Japanese favorite flower, the cherry blossom, which blooms just for two or three days and then falls. This is more precious than a flower like a zinnia which blooms for a month or two months at a time.

And this love of the impermanent, the transient, is authorized, shall we say, by Buddhism, which insists that everything is always changing, things are impermanent. We cannot trust in things because they don't last. This is given the opposite meaning. It is because things change, it is because they are not destined to stay forever in the world, that we prize them, that gives them their beauty, it gives them their value.

This kind of Buddhist aesthetic, which he [Kenkô] developed, I think has been true of the Japanese traditionally ever since then, certainly since the seventeenth century. In many different ways, one can find that.

Excerpt from Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Donald Keene, ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 239.