A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
yūgen
Yūgen is a Japanese aesthetic term for a profound, mysterious sense of the depth of things, suggested rather than stated. It is the quality of a landscape half hidden in mist, of a bird disappearing behind an island, of something enormous implied by a small part of it. What it names is not the thing seen but the depth the seeing opens onto, and the tradition holds it cannot be described directly without being lost.
Etymology
The word came into Japanese from Chinese philosophical writing, where the two characters mean faint or dim and dark or profound. It was taken into poetry criticism in the Heian period and became central to the aesthetics of nō theatre through the writings of Zeami in the fourteenth century, who treated it as the highest thing a performance could reach.
Notes
Zeami’s examples are the useful part, since they are all specific: sun setting behind a hill of flowers, wild geese seen and lost among the clouds, a boat vanishing behind a distant island. Each turns on partial concealment and on something continuing beyond what is shown. The site carries mono no aware, komorebi, and shizen from the same body of vocabulary.