Wabi (Japanese)

An aesthetic and moral principle, emphasizing the experience of beauty as simple and austere through a serene and transcendental frame of mind. It originates in a notion of poverty and loneliness as a liberation from material and emotional worries, turning the absence of apparent beauty into a new and higher form of beauty. Richness is experienced through poverty and beauty through simplicity. In art it is associated with the beautiful, distinctive, aesthetic flaw that distinguishes the spirit of the moment in which an object was created from all other moments in eternity. It is the inspired limitation that gives elegance to the whole. Learning to perceive wabi in the environment is a process of aesthetic development.