Abstract
This article refers to a research on wabi-sabi aesthetics, whose development was based on Zen Buddhism and Chinese artistic treatises and gradually improved with genuine Japanese aspects, such as yūgen and yojō, present in poetic literature and nō theatre. As it had been consolidated in the art of tea ceremony by tea master Sen no Rikyū, wabi-sabi was selected by the government as the representative aesthetics of Japanese culture, and in the mid-twentieth century it become one of the most well-known Japanese artistic “concepts” in the West. Due to this intricate trajectory of cultural displacement and agglutinations, it is our purpose to verify some basic differences between bibliographies on the theme produced in Japanese and in a few Western languages.
Keywords:
Japanese aesthetics; wabi; sabi; wabi-sabi; yūgen
