If we could distill yugen into language, it might be with the single word, “whoah”.
A core part of the emotion of yugen, however, is that it is something that cannot be described in words. It is a feeling of awareness of the cosmos that is so deep that it stops our tongues, though it may leave our jaws gaping.
If you have lived, you have felt this. It is the feeling brought about through a vision of the world, not just the place where we happen to be in the moment but the entirety of the universe itself seen through our particular place in it, that is so profound that we are dazzled. We feel, in yugen a sense of the vastness of it all, with an overwhelming clarity.
Yugen is often described as an untranslatable emotion, but to me it sounds an awful lot like the feeling of awe. Perhaps I lack sufficient emotional granularity to notice the difference. That’s okay.
Yugen is, according to the Japanese playwright Zeami Motokiyo, “To watch the sun sink behind a flower clad hill, to wander on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds, and subtle shadows of bamboo on bamboo.”
To feel yugen is to enter into the power of an aesthetic vision and to become lost in its significance, to feel the smallness of our own individual identities, and to be blown away, as one mote of dust among countless motes, flowing upon the same cosmic breeze.
It is elegant. It is dark and deep. It is more, so much more than these things.
Whoah.
Yugen.
