Peace and I am not a professor nor a scholar and the words that I put forward for your consideration may utterly fail:
We westeners, many of us may have or have had difficulty to get grips on anything, even accept as real what we cannot understand through thoughts. Japanese culture traditionally has a different approach to reality through individual perception, attentiveness, awareness and discipline. imo the important references below clearly show that:
Wabi Sabi of course needs underlying understanding but cannot be 'merely' understood. Beyond understanding Wabi Sabi requires awareness, discipline and a cultivation through practice.
the very first sentence of the Stanford article on Japanese Aesthetics: ( linked earlier, here again:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-aesthetics/ )
"Two preliminary observations about the Japanese cultural tradition to begin with. The first is that classical Japanese philosophy understands the basic reality as constant change, or (to use a Buddhist expression) impermanence. The world of flux that presents itself to our senses is the only reality: there is no conception of some stable “Platonic” realm above or behind it. The arts in Japan have traditionally reflected this fundamental impermanence—sometimes lamenting but more often celebrating it...
..The second observation is that the arts in Japan have tended to be closely connected with Confucian practices of self-cultivation, as evidenced in the fact that they are often referred to as “ways [of living]”: chadō, the way of tea (tea ceremony), shōdō, the way of writing (calligraphy), and so forth."
quote from the Wikipedia article on Japanese Aesthetics: ( also linked earlier, once again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aesthetics )
"Wabi and sabi refers to a mindful approach to everyday life...
..In this, beauty is an altered state of consciousness and can be seen in the mundane and simple. The signatures of nature can be so subtle that it takes a quiet mind and a cultivated eye to discern them.[6] In Zen philosophy there are seven aesthetic principles for achieving Wabi-Sabi.
..Each of these things are found in nature but can suggest virtues of human character and appropriateness of behaviour. This, in turn suggests that virtue and civility can be instilled through an appreciation of, and practice in, the arts. Hence, aesthetic ideals have an ethical connotation and pervades much of the Japanese culture.[8]"
and again from the Stanford article:
"Wabi means that even in straitened circumstances no thought of hardship arises. Even amid insufficiency, one is moved by no feeling of want. Even when faced with failure, one does not brood over injustice. If you find being in straitened circumstances to be confining, if you lament insufficiency as privation, if you complain that things have been ill-disposed—this is not wabi” (Hirota, 275)."
naturally I failed, quote: "Maadhyamika philosophy is an attempt to think in terms of the otherness of ultimate meaning, to develop philosophical discourse in constant awareness of the primary wonder of ultimate meaning, and in recognition of the failure of language to encapsulate that meaning. Maadhyamika is the central focus of Mahayana Buddhist thought, lying barely concealed behind iconoclastic zen aphorisms..." from:
https://books.google.com.vn/books?i...v=onepage&q=dependent co-arising engi&f=false
