Sabi (Japanese)

A poetic or aesthetic ideal blending the qualities of age, loneliness, resignation, tranquillity and colour. It is influenced by the Buddhist sense of the existential loneliness of individuals in which a subtle beauty is to be found. It blends the experience of two conflicting sets of aesthetic experiences, manifest beauty and that implicit in the desolation of age. A person awakened to the essential mutability of life accepts the waning of beauty and finds a subtler form of beauty in resignation to the experience of age.