How Impermanence Became Central to Japanese Thought

“SEE THE TREE there? It’s turning red, right?” I looked to see what Kotaro Nishibori, the last manufacturer of paper umbrellas in Kyoto, was pointing at. On our left was a line of cherry trees, their leaves oxblood on that sunny November morning. On our right was Nijo Castle, where, Nishibori informed me, the Meiji Restoration began. It was here, in 1868, that the last shogun, Yoshinobu Tokugawa, returned political power to Emperor Meiji, ending the nearly 700-year shogunate. Overnight, it seemed, Japan was open to the world and, as the curtain fell on its medieval past, the country entered a period of transformational change.

“It looks like it will die,” Nishibori said of the cherry tree, “but it’s not going to die. The next spring, there will be another flower blooming on that same tree.” Then, drawing a line between nature, men and history, he gestured to the castle and said, “All the power fading and passing to the next generation.”

The notion of impermanence has long held a special place in Japanese thought, ranging from religion and philosophy to aesthetics and architecture. That essential belief in the transience of all physical things is Buddhist in origin and has generated a vast vocabulary of words surrounding its philosophical implications. Mujo is one term for impermanence, but so is mono no aware, which has been translated variously as “the pathos of things” or “the beauty of transience” but is simply an awareness of mujo. Buddhist teaching would have us live in proximity to this knowledge — that everything we love and become attached to must pass from the earth in its material form — allowing it to impart grace and humility to our lives, even as we forgo those things such as ego and hubris that advance the illusion that death will not come for us all.

To live in the nearness of death is not a recipe for inaction or even fatalism. Yet it does require us to hold seemingly contradictory ideas. One of the ways in which Japan enshrines the subtle meaning of these concepts is through the realm of art. Beauty in old Japan, as everywhere in the premodern world, was a vessel of knowledge. Nothing, not in Asia nor in pre-Renaissance Europe, was ever beautiful for beauty’s sake; it was beautiful because it lighted the way to truth.