“[P]erhaps the Zen doctrine bearing most directly on the tea aesthetic is the emphasis on the mundane as a sphere of action and a source of beauty. The Buddha nature, hence the path to Enlightenment, is to be found in every sentient being and in the most everyday activities. Extending this exaltation of the mundane to the aesthetic realm, Zen describes a fusion of opposites in which the beautiful and the ordinary are no longer distinct. This leads to the aesthetic appreciation of imperfection and poverty, of sabi and wabi. Inasmuch as the qualities can be defined, sabi is the beauty of the imperfect, the old, the lonely, while wabi is the beauty of simplicity and poverty.”

—Dorinne Kondo, The Way of Tea: A Symbolic Analysis, from Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 2005.