Why Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman Matters
Reflections on Beauty, Creativity, Zen, and the Mingei Philosophy

First published in English in 1972, The Unknown Craftsman introduced generations of Western readers to the writing of Soetsu Yanagi, founder of Japan's Mingei, or folk craft, movement. In essays written over several decades, Yanagi argues that the deepest beauty is more often found not in celebrated masterpieces but in objects made with humility, sincerity, and devotion to everyday use. The book has become a classic of Japanese aesthetics, yet its enduring appeal lies in its larger message: that beauty arises naturally when the maker, the work, and the rhythms of life are in harmony.

My reflections below are not translations, summaries, or scholarly interpretations. Rather, they are my own attempt to express those aspects of Yanagi's vision that have most shaped my work and understanding of the contemplative life.

I am indebted to Bernard Leach, whose work first opened a doorway through which I and many Western readers encountered Yanagi's thought. His friendship with Yanagi — sustained over decades of correspondence, mutual respect, and shared work on the mingei movement — is one of the most beautiful cross-cultural artistic connections of the twentieth century.

The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty
by Bernard Leach and Soetsu Yanagi

The book explores the relationship between beauty, freedom, humility, and the disappearance of the self. The authors reject the idea that beauty is produced through cleverness, intellect, novelty, ambition, or conscious striving. Beauty appears when something deeper is allowed to work through the maker. That beauty transcends intellectual explanation. In Taoist terms, the sage does not seek beauty, yet beauty appears. Again and again Yanagi suggests that beauty emerges when the maker forgets himself.

The beauty of a hand-shaped bowl reflects:

• the beauty of the maker's interior life

• the beauty of a culture

• the maker’s relationship with nature

• the maker’s spiritual life

The bowl is result of an evolving interior life — an inner compass that rejects fashion.

What follows are the passages I have returned to for fifteen years. They concern beauty, the mingei movement Yanagi founded, the dignity of useful work, the limits of the conscious mind in making art, and the strange grace by which ordinary objects sometimes become beautiful without their makers knowing it. These ideas have shaped how I paint, what I publish, and how I think about a life devoted to making things by hand.

. . . the purity of the wild flower and the unspoiled countryside so often puts to shame the high culture of town and court. There is a wild and untamable beauty in man when he is in harmony with nature.
- Bernard Leach, from the Introduction

Page 89

Every artist knows that he is engaged in an encounter with infinity, and that work done with heart and hand is ultimately worship of Life Itself. . .a degree of enlightenment wherein infinity, however briefly, obliterates the minor self.

Page 103-104

Sometimes, in the past, instead of heavy monetary taxes governments enacted a tax in kind, as, for example, in the case of the lovely textiles of the Ryukyu Islands, and yet those gay and harmonious fabrics continued to blossom forth. One wonders why. How does one explain the fact that after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the uplifting of this burden on the poor, such a change for the worse in the quality of their products took place? I think the answer is to be found in the spread of wholesale trading. The profit-making motive became uppermost, and the change from the age of the hand to the age of the machine took place; the two together have had a disastrous effect not only on the crafts but also on the way of natural life in which they had their roots. The new industrialized life is freer. Why, then, did the crafts flourish under social oppression? Apparently, despite its weight, the people were really more at liberty to live their country life supported by their Buddhist beliefs, and even by their superstitions. They accepted the picture of life as it was given to them, with its balance of good and evil under heaven, without question or protest. That made their struggle bearable and even left room for the play of the life spirit in their rice fields and the world of their hands, their crafts.

Religion is derided by Communists as an appendix of slavish ignorance, but what has Communism got to offer the hungry spirit? I have studied and thought about the flowering of crafts of mankind for a long time and always find that I come back to the mothering care of the beliefs of man. What a great debt we owe them. . .

I would like to believe that beauty is of deep import to our modern age. Without question, the intention of morality, philosophy, and religious belief is to bring hope, joy, peace, and freedom to mankind. But in our time religion has lost its grip. Intellectualism has undermined spiritual aspiration in most people. At this juncture I would put the question, might not beauty, and the love of the beautiful, perhaps bring peace and harmony? Could it not carry us forward to new concepts of life’s meaning? Would it not establish a fresh concept of nature? Would it not become a dove of peace between the various cultures of mankind?

107

The chief characteristic of handcrafts is that they maintain by their very nature a direct link with the human heart, so that the work always partakes of a human quality. Machine-made things are children of the brain; they are not very human.

On Beauty and the Limits of the Intellect

110

Beauty is a kind of mystery, which is why it cannot be grasped adequately through the intellect. The part of it available to intellection lacks depth. This might seem to be a denial of aesthetics, but it is as Aquinas said: “No one shows such a knowledge of God as he who says that one can know nothing.” Aquinas was one of the greatest minds of medieval times and knew well how foolish his own wisdom was in the face of God. No one could rival the wisdom with which he acknowledged the poverty of his own mind. Though he is renowned as a theologian, he was surely still greater as a man of faith; without that fact he would have been a commonplace intellectual.

He who only knows, without seeing, does not understand the mystery. Even should every detail of beauty be accounted for by the intellect, does such a tabulation lead to beauty? Is the beauty that can be neatly reckoned really profound?

116

Most beauty is related to laws that transcend the individual. The power of that individual is puny compared with the power of the laws. The difference between former times and ours is that the individual remained unobtrusive until recently. All once used the same patterns without any question of jealousy. The separation of picture and pattern, arts and crafts, is one of the tragedies of modern times.

On Pattern and Vision

114

Pattern is not realistic depiction. It is a “vision” of what is reflected by the intuition. It is a product of the imagination, in the sense in which Blake used the word. Pattern is non-realistic. It may be called irrational. In a sense, it is an exaggeration. Pattern is not a scientific rendering of the original. Everyone knows that a bamboo grass pattern shows a plant that never could be. The pattern is a symbol of the plant, not the plant itself. It is an emblem of the bamboo, and yet the living bamboo is there in it. A pattern is a picture of the essence of an object, an object’s very life; its beauty is that of life. In fact, it would be truer to say that its beauty is that life staring the pattern maker in the face. A pattern may lie on a table inert, just ink on paper, but it is the child of vision. Springing thus from life it must itself be alive or it is nothing. From the bamboo leaf to the pattern there is a transformation, as from chrysalis to butterfly, taking life with it into a new form. This metamorphosis is the significance. A good pattern is pregnant with beauty. The maker of a pattern draws the essence of the thing seen with his own heartbeat, life to life.

Since pattern is a portrayal of essence, all non-essentials must be stripped away; the pattern is what remains. There is no wordy explanation. There must be the “speech without words” of Zen. Good patterns are simple; if they are cluttered, they are not yet patterns.

The kind of pattern I am speaking of is not primarily decorative; it comes of Zen emptiness, of mu (“void”), of “thusness”. The more the significance contained in a pattern, the more its vitality. In its placidity there must be movement; it lives in that no-man’s-land where eloquence and silence are one. Without both it dies.

115

Why should pattern be so beautiful? It provides unlimited scope for the imagination. Pattern does not explain; it leaves things to the viewer; its beauty is determined by freedom it gives to the viewer’s imagination.

Pattern may be compared to a spring of water that can be drawn on eternally. To provide a source of imagination that never dries up – that, for me, is true beauty. A beautiful pattern is always receptive to the spirit of the viewer. One never tires of looking at it. Through pattern, the world and our hearts are made beautiful. A country without pattern is an ugly country, a country that does not care for beauty. Beauty is the transformation of the world into pattern.

On Imperfection and Freedom

120

Why should one reject the perfect in favor of the imperfect? The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite. Beauty must have room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom.

The Buddhist aesthetician Shin’ichi Hisamatsu put forward a new idea. He says that the imperfect does not, in itself, constitute beauty. The imperfect is merely a negative concept. True beauty in the Tea ceremony must be more positive. It must go further, to the point of positively rejecting the perfect. . . . The shape of Raku Tea-bowls is deliberately deformed – by, for example, not using a wheel – and the surface is left rough. By such means the masters sought to give life back to beauty in the Tea ceremony.

150

Last year’s poverty was not yet true poverty.
This year’s poverty is at last true poverty.
Last year there was nowhere to place the gimlet.
This year the gimlet itself is gone.
- Zen monk Hsiang-yen

All works of art, it may be said, are more beautiful when they suggest something beyond themselves than when they end up being merely what they are.

151

Unlike other collectors, most Tea masters prefer the incomplete; they look for slight scars or irregularities of form. If carried to excess, this desire will, of course, become unhealthy, but that there is a close relation between beauty and deformation cannot be denied. Beauty dislikes being captive to perfection. That which is profound never lends itself to logical explanation: it involves endless mystery.

On the Eternal Now

131

All art movements tend to the pursuit of novelty, but the true essence of beauty can exist only when the distinction between the old and new has been eliminated. The Sung dynasty pottery of China reveals a beauty that is forever new, that is still alive today. It is like a fountainhead from which one may draw water a thousand times, and still find fresh water springing forth. Its beauty belongs, in the words of Jesus, to the realm of “I am”, not to that of “I have been”’, or “I shall be”. A man who considers Sung ware to be “old fashioned”, who brands it a thing of the past, is himself superannuated. Passing time cannot affect an object that is truly beautiful. All that there is, is the Eternal Now.

153

A monk had for long been living away from the society of men in a hut in remote mountains. One day a visitor who had found his way there asked him, “How many years have you been living here?” The monk replied simply, “There are no days on the calendar in these mountains.” A man who lives where time can be measured on a calendar is living in a secular world; a monk should live in a world where there is neither passage of time nor length of time. He should live a life that is not measured by the calendar. A sense of beauty, similarly, is timeless: it may be said to exist at this very instant, unbounded by past or future, and a beautiful object may be said to exist on this very spot, unbounded by right or left.

On Repetition, Grace, and the Forgetting of Self

134

In Tz’uchou where Sung pottery was produced in great quantity, the task of drawing pictures on pottery was almost always relegated to young boys. No famous painters of the day were hired to work for the kilns. The job was performed by boys around the age of ten, children of poor families, many of whom no doubt disliked the work and had to be forced by their parents to do it. Occasionally, as they worked, their eyes would be blinded by tears. Others of the children were probably what we would now call juvenile delinquents, quarrelsome and naughty. Most of the children were illiterate; the Chinese characters that we sometimes see written in the pictures would, then, have been meaningless to the young writers. Like all children, they laughed and sang sometimes as they worked; at other times they fought, but, no matter what kind of children they may have been, no matter what kind of pictures or characters they drew, the result was invariably one of marvelous beauty.

Obviously, this was not because each of the children was endowed with rare talent. If the hand of genius was needed, how could such a large number of boys have drawn equally good pictures? The answer may have lain partly in the nature of the materials used, but chiefly it lay in the endless repetition that was demanded of the children. The easy use of the brush and the boldness of the composition resulted from the fact that each child had to draw the same picture hundreds of times a day. This repetition produced an amazing dexterity and a quickness of hand that must have been miraculous to watch. Hesitation had no place in it; neither had anxiety or ambition. Oblivious to all these, the children worked with total disengagement.

The repetitive monotony that today would be regarded with horror; the hard work that the young were forced to accept as their inevitable destiny: those two factors possessed the compensatory quality of imparting beauty to their work. The obligation to draw the same picture hundreds of times a day will make a painter forget what he is drawing; he will be liberated from the dualistic opposition of dexterity and clumsiness; no longer will he need to consider the distinction between beauty and ugliness: all that he will do is move his brush quickly and unhesitatingly, without even being aware of what he is drawing. The children of Tz’u-chou may have been thinking of chrysanthemums while drawing bamboo plants; more remarkable still, they actually drew animals they had never seen and they inscribed characters they could not read. Such factors had no inhibiting effect on them. They forgot themselves as they worked, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that they worked in a world so free they were able to forget themselves. . . .

How does it happen then that we cannot produce works of equal beauty? Buddhists would say that the answer lies in the fact that our minds are bound by obsession, by some attachment that deprives us of freedom; most particularly it is our enslavement to the ego that forces us into thralldom and binds us to duality. The favorite Buddhist admonition – “Give up your own self” – clearly expresses the means by which the root of duality must be torn out. But since this is not so easily done as said, our existence usually remains trammeled by obsession, from which it cannot escape.

Yi potters, however, had nothing to be attached to. They had little learning and no high-flown theories; they had no thought of seeing their work displayed at exhibitions or sold at inflated prices; nor did they look upon their products as works of art. Their commonplace and matter-of-fact attitude was what brought salvation to beauty. Yi pottery is immaculate because it was produced before there was any reason for impurity or shadow; it is, therefore, extremely natural. To be sure, there is a kind of beauty in the extraordinary and the unnatural, but these do not constitute a realm where a man may abide peacefully and contentedly. There is always an awareness of morbidity. Only an object that is natural and wholesome manifests the truest beauty, and this “natural beauty” is the Buddhist ideal. Objects that reveal ambition, objects in which lack of taste is knowingly simulated, objects where some quality such as strength or cleverness is exaggerated – these will not be universally admired for long, although they may create a momentary fervor.

The fact that, in general, practical objects of wholesome and natural beauty are those intended for daily use suggests that it is this particular circumstance that imparts those qualities to them. Just as men who work hard are usually healthy, so objects that fulfill the daily functions of life are necessarily wholesome. Conversely, a lack of strength and sanity usually characterizes objects that are excessively embellished or too complicated in form, since they are unfit for daily use.

Utility does not permit unsoundness or frailty, for between use and beauty there is a close relation. Utility demands faithfulness in objects; it does not condone human self-indulgence. In creating an object intended for practical use, the maker does not push himself to the foreground or even, for that matter, to the surface. With such objects, self-assertion and error – if present at all – are reduced to a minimum. This may be one reason why useful goods are beautiful. Objects whose makers remain anonymous have, it seems to me, an easy access to beauty; the fact that the finest examples of functional art existing in the world are mostly those that have had no opportunity to be marked by the maker’s signature is worthy of very careful consideration.

Most useful objects of the present day are too superficial to answer our daily inner need: they are victims of the commercialism that characterizes the contemporary artistic world, for commercialism is the enemy of man, extirpating all beauty from his culture. This disaster has become so widespread that a number of awakened people are seeking to counter it by working with their own hands. This is the raison d’etre for individualism in art. But since all artists are men of aesthetic sensibility, they necessarily dwell in a world where beauty has already been separated from ugliness; thus, they are heavily burdened from the start. To reach their goal they must overcome great perils, correct gross errors, and endure extreme hardships.

174

The hake-Mishima Tea-bowls, moreover, were the everyday ware of the time, being produced rapidly in great numbers. This rapid process of endless repetition is, in itself, conduscive of forgetfulness of the self, of the transcending of the self, and of a state, eventually, where the work “does itself”. How unthinkable that a potter should ever have signed his name to a piece of Korean hakeme! How different they are from the Japanese pots on each of which is careful inscribed the maker’s name! It is the humble on whom heaven’s grace falls in full measure. In this sense, hake-Mishima is a typical example of work that depends on grace.

However, if someone else, startled by its beauty, tries to create that beauty for himself, he will find himself obliged to depend not on grace but on conscious effort. He must rely on his own skill in making it. How different the two pictures this suggests, the peasant quietly repeating the process of production; and the potter struggling to give birth to a work of art. This in not to say that the results of the latter are without worth, but the way is perilous, and the work produced tends to become too self-assertive. The marks of the brush strive so hard after freedom that they become constrained in the effort. This, it would seem, is why the resulting hakeme is never anything but unnatural. It is difficult to transcend the self through conscious effort. The man of great spiritual experience may occasionally achieve naturalness; but by then he will probably have experienced for himself the essential ordinariness of hakeme, have reached that instant where conscious effort at least comes into contact with grace. The Tea masters’ greatest oversight was that they perceived the hakeme’s beauty, but not the grace that glowed within it; if they had done so, they would not have placed such an overweening trust in themselves.

155

In an ardent lover of Sung pottery, the pottery recognizes its own home; conversely, the lover recovers his home in the pottery.

On Grace, Not Effort

173

The beauty of the Korean hakeme (pottery) is inexhaustible; one may look at it indefinitely without tiring, and it is no wonder that the Tea masters with their keen perception of beauty were instantly captivated by it. What is the nature of that beauty? One may sense in it the essential rhythms of human life, in their most unadorned form, appearing in constantly undulating curves. They are the spontaneous pulsations of life, recalling the natural rhythms of the winds that blow, the streams that flow, and the clouds that rise into the air. They could be called a direct manifestation of the natural life lived by those who made the pots, of the placid frame of mind in which they rose and lay down in harmony with nature. Compared with theirs, how unnatural are our lives today, how they fly in the face of nature. True humanity and naturalness have become distressingly remote from our existence.

On Seeing

177

They saw; before all else, they saw. They were able to see. Ancient mysteries flew from this well-spring of seeing.

Everyone looks at things, but people do not perceive in the same manner. Some are able to penetrate into the depths of things, but most see only the surface, and objects are usually categorized as right or wrong. To misapprehend is no better than not to notice. Though everyone says he sees things, how few can see things as they are. Among these few are found the early masters of the Way of Tea. They had deep-seeing eyes. They could comprehend intuitively. And with this penetration, they saw truth.

If the eye is clear, it functions promptly. As it penetrates, it is free of doubt. Doubt begets thought; thought bedims the eye. To see full in the face is to see clearly. If we see clearly, there is no time to hesitate. Thus, seeing is at once believing. We believe because we can see clearly; the revelation of the reality of the thing induces belief. Those who see directly are quick in their apprehension. The working of the eye transcends time. Discernment of the good from the bad is instantaneous. People free of doubt are bold. The seers, therefore, made discoveries; diverse things were born of the Tea masters’ eyes.

On Shibui and What the Tea Masters Saw

183

The world may abound with different aspects of beauty. The lovely, the powerful, the gay, the smart – all belong to the beautiful. Each person, according to his disposition and environment, will feel a special affinity to one or another aspect. But when his taste grows more refined, he will necessarily arrive at the beauty that is shibui. Beauty cannot rest until it reaches this point. If one seeks depth in beauty, this stage must be attained some day. Many a term will serve to denote the secret of beauty, but this is the final word. Our Tea masters expressed their conception of consummate beauty with this word as standard.

The Japanese are fortunate in that they comprehend this word. Of this precious adjective they make everyday use. Even the ignorant continually utter this word in their casual talk. They often go so far as to apply it to test the quality of their own taste. Even those who pursue the gay and gaudy are aware, deep down in their hearts, of the profundity of shibui beauty. This is the canon for beauty of all Japanese people. Do other peoples possess an equivalent? The lack of the word will mean the lack of the idea and fact. With the exception of this little Japanese word shibui, there is no such word, in the vocabulary of any nation, to indicate the criteria for the highest beauty. And that word is not expressed by difficult Chinese characters. Neither did the masters borrow an abstract word of the intellect. They employed a simple adjective, shibui, to describe a profound, unassuming, quiet feeling. Such a connotation was possible in the Orient alone, perhaps.

185

If what the masters had marveled at had been something merely unusual, they would have been nothing exceptional. Anyone could have done that. But the masters eyes were more penetrating. They did not see the extraordinary in the extraordinary. Therein lies their merit. They did not draw their cherished treasures out of the valuable, the expensive, the luxurious, the elaborate or the exceptional. They selected them from the plain, the natural, the homely, the simple, and the normal. They explored the uneventful, normal world for the most unusual beauty. Can anything be more uncommon than to see the commonplace?

Truth always nestles close to us. The Tea masters cast their caressing eyes upon their surroundings. Their vision encompassed articles of everyday use, the things everybody ignores. We might say that the Tea masters had great boldness. Yet nothing was more natural. Even the common articles made for daily use become endowed with beauty when they are loved. The humble are receptive to love. These articles were born pure in heart and were nurtured with nature’s blessing. They are sound both in mind and substance. If they had been too delicate, or too showy, they could not have served as utensils. Is not sincerity their primary virtue? It is no wonder they radiate pure beauty. To such is the kingdom of heaven promised; the humble are closely related to beauty. These masterpieces were once humble household utensils. Their beauty shines forth from their natural simplicity. Those articles that lack the noble quality of humility cannot be made into good Tea things.

188

To study beauty in Tea is to face the direction of Absolute Enlightenment. If we want to realize in ourselves the Communion of Love and Reverence and practice Cleanliness and Sincerity, we must be immaculate in spirit. Tea is, after all, a way of self-discipline. To the self-conceited, the haughty, the luxurious, the impure, the affected – to all these the sacred gate of beauty is inaccessible. How numerous are those who covet things, and how few are those who devote themselves to the enlightenment of their spirits. But without the latter it is impossible to practice Tea. The Way of Tea is indubitably a self-disciplinary way.

194

It is impossible to believe that those Korean workmen possessed intellectual consciousness. It was precisely because they were not intellectuals that they were able to produce this natural beauty. The bowls were not products of conscious effort by the individual. The beauty in them springs from grace. Ido bowls were born, not made. Their beauty is a gift, an act of grace. The seven rules evolved by the masters of Tea were born by nature rather than made by man. They did not own the laws of beauty. Laws exist in a realm that transcends the self and ownership. Laws are the work of nature, not the product of human ingenuity.

Closing: Laozi

216

When Great Reason is obliterated,
We have benevolence and justice.
When wisdom and sagacity appear,
We have much hypocrisy.
When family relations are no longer harmonious,
We have filial piety and paternal love.
When a nation is in disorder,
We have loyalty and allegiance.
- Laotze

This page was compiled by Roderick MacIver, artist, author and publisher whose work has been shaped by Yanagi's important book over the last thirty years. Heron Dance / Zen Mountain Studio publishes contemplative art journals including The Tao Te Ching Journal. More of my work can be found on this website and on the Zen Mountain Journal Substack.