The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty

This is one of the few great books. My copy is worn out, stained, covered with notes. It brings together in a new way ideas from Zen, Taoism, Pure Land Buddhism, and the crafts heritage of Morris and Ruskin. It is more than a book about craft: it is a book about enlightenment and the world "before duality". It deals in profound ways with the nature of tradition and what Yanagi saw as the roles of the ancient craft worker and the modern artist. Leach and Hamada (Yanagi's co-workers, and inheritors) have commented elsewhere that the only real thing missing from Yanagi's legacy is more emphasis on how the modern individual artist is to cope with the situation of modernity. This may be. But one can't have everything. It is the task of others to go on and figure it out: a task to be carried out in the daily work. Yanagi did his own work, and it's a blessing......

I know very little about pottery but I have spent a lot of reading time studying Buddhism and specifically Zen and its underlying life philosophy. I found these essays to be especially beautiful in showing the way for artists and craftsmen to embrace 'no-mindedness' in their creative efforts, effacing their own egos and personalities in order to let nature flow through them in the creative process. 'Objects born, not made' is an especially humbling concept to consider. To think that the objects are 'born' through nature and the craftsman is mostly a mere vehicle for that, his signature on 'his' work completely unncessary, the object itself being the 'signature'. I was pleased to see in the next to last essay in this collection, the author's references to the 'Way of Tea' and its demonstration of the same principles embodied in this work. I strongly recommend 'The Book of Tea' by Okakuro Kakuzo as an adjunct to this material, amplifying his ideas and further reflecting the beauty of Zen. My only objection, and this is really minor, is this work's subtitle 'A Japanese Insight into Beauty'. As many Japanese are not Buddhist and do not embrace the Zen philosophy, nor understand it, this insight is not so much 'Japanese' as 'Zen'. Thus the finer subtitle could have been 'A Zen Insight into Beauty'.

This book was written by the father of the crafts movement in Japan, Yanagi Soetsu. He encouraged the Japanese to appreciate their national arts at a time of modernization and Westernization in Japan. The book covers areas of craft such as cermaics and lacquers.

Yanagi's words are so dense, packed, and rich with meaning. He has keen insights into what real 'seeing' is, and how necessary it is in discerning beauty. But Yanagi's words run beyond insight, and have some of that deep ring of eternal 'Truth' to them. I highly recommmend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about what true 'seeing' is, and how it relates to the perception of beauty.