Kintsugi and Zen

## It Begins with a Crack

When a vessel breaks, the first thing a person feels is helplessness.

And then, a moment later, something strange happens. Standing over the broken pieces, a person goes quiet.

Not anger, not sorrow — a particular kind of stillness. I have wondered for a long time what that stillness is.

On New Year's Day of 2024, the Noto Peninsula shook. I had a small studio in Noto. Or rather, I have to say "had," in the past tense. After the earthquake, what I found there was a heap of rubble and shards of pottery scattered everywhere.

Picking up the shards, I noticed something: no impulse to throw them away arose in me at all. Why couldn't I throw them out?

That question became the starting point for this essay.

There is a craft called kintsugi — the old Japanese technique of mending broken vessels with lacquer and gold. You build up layers of urushi along the line of the break, and at the end you dust the surface with gold powder. What was once a wound remains on the vessel as a line of shining gold. The damage is not erased. It is not concealed. If anything, it is brought forward.

A German philosopher named Eugen Herrigel studied Japanese archery in the 1930s. There is a slim book about that experience, *Zen in the Art of Archery*. In it, Herrigel discovers the heart of Zen inside the simple act of drawing a bow. The harder he tries to master the technique, the further the technique recedes. The arrow is loosed at the moment he gives up trying.

What I have learned through kintsugi resembles this. But there is a fundamental difference between the bow and the broken bowl. Archery aims at release. Kintsugi begins from what is already broken. Its starting point is loss.

## Learning to Break

I have always been uneasy about translating *kintsugi* as "repair."

The word kintsugi has been in English for some time now. In Europe and America it tends to be explained alongside "repair" and "restoration" — a technique for returning broken things to their former state.

But that isn't accurate.

A vessel that has been kintsugi'd never returns to what it was. A bowl with a gold line running across it is a different bowl from the one that existed before the break. It carries the memory of its injury and is born again in a new form. So I would rather call it not repair but rebirth — or transformation.

This idea is bound up with the Zen sense of impermanence.

Everything changes. You cannot step into the same river twice. That is Heraclitus, but Zen says the same thing. The difference is that Zen does not mourn the change; it accepts change itself as the nature of existence. In breaking, a vessel is given its occasion to change. Kintsugi fixes that change in the form of beauty. Fixes, though not forever. A mended bowl may break again. If it does, you mend it again.

When I ran a workshop at Sofia University in Bulgaria, a student asked me:

"If a kintsugi bowl might break again, where does its value come from?"

I thought for a while, then answered:

"I think its value comes from the fact that it might break again."

The student looked puzzled, and I saw that I had to explain further.

A vessel that cannot break stands outside time. To be incapable of injury is to have no history. Isn't it the same with people? Can a person without wounds have any depth? The damage is the evidence that this vessel has lived.

Kintsugi frames that evidence in gold. To call this repair is far too modest.

In Japan we have long used the word *keshiki* — landscape — for vessels. The markings and changes that appear on a surface are called its landscape. The fine crazing in the glaze of a well-used tea bowl is admired as landscape. So is the trace of a break that has been filled with gold.

A vessel acquires its landscape by being used. A vessel with a landscape tells a history all by itself.

This, I think, is the heart of kintsugi as an idea. It is not a technique but a way of seeing. Not fearing breakage, not hiding damage, accepting change as beauty — that attitude is what deserves the name kintsugi.

Zen, too, is not a technique. The posture of zazen, the questions of the koan, are only doorways. What Zen aims at is a transformation in the way one relates to the world. So kintsugi and Zen are not two separate things. They are two trees from one root.

## Waiting for the Lacquer: The Active Passivity of Waiting

The hardest thing in kintsugi is not the skill. It is the waiting.

Urushi takes a long time to dry. To be precise, it doesn't dry so much as harden. Urushiol, the principal component of lacquer, hardens by reacting with moisture in the air. Without humidity, lacquer will not set.

This is counterintuitive. Ordinarily, for something to dry means for its moisture to evaporate. Lacquer is the opposite: it needs moisture in order to harden. It also needs the right temperature — too dry and it will not set, too hot and it will not either. The ideal is around twenty degrees Celsius and about seventy percent humidity.

For this, lacquer artisans use a cabinet called a *furo*, literally a bath. A wooden box, damp cloths laid inside, the lacquered piece placed within, the lid closed. Then you wait, for hours, sometimes for more than a day.

That waiting was painful at first. Time passes in which there is nothing you can do. Something must be happening inside the lacquer, but you can't see it. You can't open the box to check — opening and closing it too often changes the temperature and the humidity. You can only trust, and wait.

When Herrigel studied archery, his teacher Awa Kenzō told him: don't try to loose the arrow; wait until the arrow looses itself. For a long time Herrigel could not understand what this meant. Drawing a bow is plainly an act of will. Why be told not to will it?

Waiting for lacquer, I relived Herrigel's bewilderment. It isn't that the artisan does nothing while waiting. You manage the temperature, keep the humidity, think about how the light falls. But into the essential process — the hardening itself — you cannot intervene. Trying to intervene only gets in the way.

To call this passive isn't right. You wait actively.

There is a phrase carried into Zen from Laozi: *doing nothing, and yet nothing is left undone.* It is a paradox — when you let go of deliberate contrivance, things proceed more naturally of themselves.

Waiting for lacquer, I came to see, is a practice of that non-doing. I wait. Meanwhile the lacquer hardens. Inside my active passivity, the lacquer lives a time of its own.

Winters in Noto are cold, the season when lacquer sets slowly. After the studio was lost in the earthquake, I went on with my kintsugi work in Tokyo. But I still had a little of the lacquer I had used in Noto — Noto-grown lacquer — on hand. Every time I used it, I remembered the damp air of that coast.

Lacquer carries the memory of where it came from. Noto lacquer is tapped from trees that grew up in the Noto climate. When I put that lacquer into a furo in Tokyo and wait, I feel a strange overlapping of times. Noto's time and Tokyo's time mix together inside a small wooden box.

To wait is to feel time. And to feel time is to live. In our busy days we try to consume time — efficiently, without waste. That attitude gets you nowhere with lacquer. Lacquer has its own time, and it will not accommodate human convenience.

At first this frustrated me. Now I love it. The time spent waiting for lacquer has become a kind of meditation. I close the lid of the furo and go do something else. But part of my attention stays with the lacquer in the dark box. I cannot see it, and yet I feel it.

Isn't zazen the same? You sit, and something happens. The person sitting cannot intervene in that something directly. You simply keep sitting and wait for the change to arrive. Actively, passively.

The character for "wait," 待, is worth looking at for a while. On the left is the radical for a person walking a road; on the right, the character for temple. Someone at a temple, partway along a road, waiting for something. That image sits well over the lacquerer's hours.

## Facing the Whetstone: What Mastery Is

Of all the stages of kintsugi, the plainest and the most important is *togi*, the grinding. Once the lacquer has hardened, you level the surface with a whetstone. That is all it is, and it takes hours.

When I first learned kintsugi, I took grinding lightly. Applying lacquer has a certain drama to it. Moving the brush, dusting on the gold — those stages give you the feeling of making something. Grinding is different. You take what has already been formed and steadily wear it away. It is closer to erasure than to creation.

And yet grinding is the hardest part.

Whetstones come in grits. You start coarse and move gradually finer. At each stage you erase the scratches left by the stone before while leaving finer ones of your own. Only when nothing remains but scratches invisible to the eye can you move on to polishing.

What matters throughout is pressure. Grind too hard and you cut away the lacquer. Too soft and the scratches never come out. Even pressure, even speed, always in the same direction — it is astonishing how difficult that simple thing is.

There are several people I think of as my teachers in spirit. One of them watched my hands in silence for a long while as I ground, and then said: "You're thinking while you grind. Try stopping the thinking."

Stop thinking. Easy to say, hard to do. As I ground, I was thinking constantly — a little harder, the angle is off, maybe it's time for a finer grit. That thinking was exactly what made the motion uneven.

So I tried stopping. No thoughts, just the hands moving. And something strange happened. My hands began to feel the curve of the bowl. Subtle undulations I had never noticed while thinking, my hands began to detect — the catch of the stone, the growing smoothness. By letting go of thought, my hands got smarter.

This, I thought, is what mastery really is. Mastery is not accumulated knowledge. When you accumulate knowledge you want to use it, and the knowledge — *here I should do this* — ends up binding the motion instead. A master craftsman stands somewhere past knowledge. Not the body remembering, but the body thinking.

It is close to what Zen calls *mushin*, no-mind. No-mind does not mean the absence of mind. It means a mind not bound to anything: a mind free of concepts and judgments, touching its object directly.

This is what Herrigel experienced with the bow. Intending to loose the arrow was what prevented the arrow from being loosed. When he let go of the intention, the arrow was loosed of itself.

Grinding is the same. Wanting to grind well is what keeps you from grinding well. When you are simply absorbed in the grinding, your hand senses directly what is happening between stone and vessel.

But a caution is needed here. A beginner cannot stop thinking. Unless a certain foundation of skill and knowledge has already entered the body, a hand that has stopped thinking is just a hand that can do nothing. The paradox of mastery can only be understood from the far side of mastery.

This resembles a Zen koan. A koan is a question that cannot be solved by logic. *Listen to the sound of one hand* — one hand makes no sound, so what could it mean to hear it? To realize that solving this by logic is a mistake, you must first exhaust logic. Only when you have pushed logic to its limit does another door of understanding open.

The craft of grinding is the same. Only after the right pressure, the right angle, the right choice of grit have all entered the body does "stop thinking" mean anything at all. If someone without knowledge stops thinking, what remains is merely ignorance.

Mastery is achieving the accumulation of knowledge and the release of knowledge at the same time. It sounds contradictory, but it isn't. Knowledge sinks into the body. It disappears from the surface of consciousness and dissolves into movement. When you reach that state, you can at last think without thinking.

Sitting before the whetstone, I am not there. I still grind while thinking. I try to stop thinking and catch myself thinking again. But that is all right, I have come to feel. Herrigel spent years learning the bow. The lacquer artisans of Noto spend ten and twenty years honing their craft. There is no need to hurry.

Moving my hand across the stone, I think: it is inside this repetition that something comes to dwell. By repeating the same thing, there comes a moment when the same thing looks different. I am waiting for that moment. Actively, passively.

The way I wait for the lacquer.

## Wabi, Sabi, and Gold: Why Should Something So Conspicuous Be Beautiful?

People seeing kintsugi for the first time are usually a little taken aback.

Couldn't it have been mended less conspicuously? The line of the break glitters in gold; far from hiding the damage, it seems to go out of its way to emphasize it.

That reaction is correct. Kintsugi does not hide damage. On the contrary, by framing it in gold, it sets the damage at the center of the object's existence.

But why should that be beautiful?

Japanese aesthetics has the paired concepts *wabi* and *sabi*, much discussed in tea and in haiku. Wabi is usually explained as the beauty found in what is simple and unadorned; sabi as the weathered beauty that comes with the passage of time. But the gold of kintsugi is neither unadorned nor weathered. If anything, it is showy.

Isn't that a contradiction? For a while I thought so — that kintsugi might be incompatible with wabi and sabi. Then one day I read an old text by a tea master, and my thinking changed.

The essence of wabi is not *being plain* but *having nothing superfluous*. Plainness and the absence of excess resemble each other, but they are not the same. To have nothing superfluous does not rule out having what is necessary. Laying gold along the line of a break is a necessary act — the act by which the break is honestly acknowledged. It is the hiding that would be the superfluous operation.

The same goes for sabi. Sabi is not oldness but the trace of time, the sensibility that receives as beauty the marks time has cut into things. The gold line shows, in the most honest form available, the trace of the time in which this vessel broke and was made whole again.

So the gold of kintsugi does not contradict wabi and sabi. Gold is, rather, their logical consequence. To hide damage is to hide time, and a vessel whose time has been hidden can possess no sabi. To frame a break in gold is to affirm that vessel's time. The time it broke, the time it was joined, all the time it was used before that — everything is concentrated in the gold line.

This is where Western conservation and kintsugi part ways at the root.

Western restoration aims, in principle, to be invisible. The ideal is to return an object so nearly to its original condition that no one can tell where the work was done. This rests on an ethic of protecting the purity of the work.

Kintsugi is the reverse. It declares where the object broke and where it was joined, because concealment is held to fall short of honesty.

A deep philosophical question hides here: what is "the original condition"? A vessel gets used, and to be used is to change within time. Is the original condition the moment it came out of the kiln? Or the state it reached after long use, once it had acquired its landscape? Both are original conditions, and neither is the present one.

Zen values the here and now. It counsels us to let go of attachment to past conditions and to future ideals alike. The vessel is broken now. That is the reality. Without turning away from that reality, you face the vessel as it is. Kintsugi is one answer to how that facing is done.

Gold shines. Because it shines, the damage cannot escape the eye. You cannot pretend not to see it. That is where the ethics of kintsugi lie: the gold is there so that you will not look away from the wound.

## The Break Does Not Lie: Visible Damage and the Honesty of Zen

A Zen master asks his disciple: "What is the Buddha?"

The disciple answers: "That which is pure and without defilement."

The master says nothing, and strikes him.

The exchange has come down to us as a koan. The master struck him because "pure and without defilement" was a pretty lie. To beautify the Buddha inside a concept is to move away from the Buddha — that, presumably, is what the master meant.

The break in a kintsugi vessel tells no pretty lies. When a vessel breaks, the fact of the break does not disappear. However skillfully it is joined, the memory of breaking stays inside it. To make that memory visible in gold is an honest way of facing the fact that this vessel broke.

For a long time I confused being honest with looking honest.

It was kintsugi that showed me the difference. Looking honest is sometimes a form of dishonesty. A perfectly restored vessel does not look honest — it behaves as though there had never been an injury. A kintsugi vessel is visibly damaged at a glance, and is beautiful nonetheless. In that paradox lies the power of honesty.

After the Noto earthquake, several acquaintances said to me, "That must have been terrible." Each time I answered, "Well, yes." I couldn't say what was true. It had been terrible, that was a fact, but I wasn't feeling the legible grief the phrase seemed to expect. What I felt was more complicated: sorrow for what was lost, attachment to the land, a sense of apology toward the people of Noto — I had been in Tokyo and escaped it — and, strangely, a kind of release, the release of having everything one has built up returned to zero. All of it mixed together.

The break in a vessel resembles that complexity. A break is never simple. A structural weakness, the direction of the impact, a change in temperature or humidity — many factors intertwine to produce it, and that complexity appears in the shape of the gold line. No two breaks are ever the same.

Singularity. What makes a kintsugi vessel beautiful is not only the shine of the gold but this singularity. This vessel broke in this way and was joined in this way. That history belongs to this vessel alone.

Zen uses the phrase *shigetsu*, the finger pointing at the moon. The finger is not the moon. Words are not the truth. But without the finger, you would not know where to look for the moon.

The gold line is that finger. The gold itself is not the beautiful thing. What is beautiful is the history and the time of this vessel, which the gold line points to. Gold is a finger for making the invisible visible.

One winter night I sat for a long time in front of a broken tea bowl — before mending it, still in pieces. Looking at a break gives you a strange sensation: the sense that this break is the most honest part of the bowl. The inner structure, invisible while the bowl was in use, becomes visible through it. By breaking, the bowl showed its inside.

Damage is an opening. A window joining outside and in. Kintsugi fits that window with a gold frame. It does not hide the fact that there is a window; it makes the window unmistakable.

This echoes the honesty of Zen. What is asked of a practitioner is not to conceal his interior. Before the master, no arranging of the face. Fear, doubt, anger — you bring them as they are, and the master meets them.

Just as there is no person without wounds, there is no vessel without them. To bear damage is the proof of having lived as a vessel.

## Having No Master: On Learning Outside a Lineage

Kintsugi has no formal schools.

Tea has Urasenke, Omotesenke, Mushakōjisenke. Flower arrangement has Ikenobō. Archery has the Heki school and many others. Kintsugi has no such codified lineage of transmission.

This is odd. Kintsugi is quite old even among Japan's traditional crafts. Records from the Muromachi period already show ceramics being mended with lacquer. There is a story that Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke a treasured Chinese tea bowl and sent it back to the continent for repair, only to be disappointed when it returned looking stapled together with metal, and so sought a mending method of Japan's own.

And yet kintsugi never formed schools. The technique passed from workshop to workshop, master to apprentice, but neither as closed secret transmission nor as open public instruction. It spread in a kind of organic way.

What came of that? Kintsugi is various. The kind of lacquer, the way the gold is laid, the order of the stages — these differ considerably from artisan to artisan and region to region. There is no single correct kintsugi.

Herrigel had a master, Awa Kenzō, an unshakable authority on the path of the bow. That Herrigel followed his master's words, trusted his master's method, and deferred to his master's judgment forms the structural skeleton of *Zen in the Art of Archery*. The vertical tension of the master–disciple relation drives the book.

I have no such master. Or rather, I do have something that stands in for one, but it isn't a person. It is the vessel itself.

A teacher can teach you technique. But beyond technique lies the judgment of how to mend *this* vessel, and no teacher can settle that, because there is only one of it. No two vessels break the same way. The right way to mend a given piece can only emerge from a dialogue with that piece.

This is the fundamental difference between kintsugi and archery. In archery you improve by repeating one motion. You loose the arrow thousands of times, and the body learns through repetition; the master provides the standard for correct repetition.

In kintsugi, no two jobs are ever identical. Every time, the vessel is different — a different break, a different material, a different finish required. The concept of correct repetition simply doesn't apply. Experience does sharpen the senses, certainly, but not by letting you apply past experience to the vessel in front of you. What rises is your sensitivity to this vessel, now.

Having no master is lonely. It is also free.

Teaching in Bulgaria, I was often asked for the correct method. Participants wanted to know which lacquer was best, how many minutes to grind, how much gold powder to use. The wish for answers was sincere, but I couldn't answer.

Not because answers don't exist, but because the answer is in the vessel — that was what I wanted to say, and it was hard to put into words.

One day I told the participants to rest a broken piece in their palms for a while. "Don't think about anything. Just hold it."

Five minutes, ten. The room went quiet. Afterward I asked how it had felt. One woman said, "It felt like the piece got lighter." Another said, "I started to see the shape of it — something I hadn't been seeing before."

That's it, I thought. The teacher is inside the vessel. Spend long enough facing it and you begin to hear the teacher's voice. That is how a masterless craft is learned.

Zen has the phrase *jitōmyō* — be a lamp unto yourself. These are said to be words the Buddha left his disciples at his death: do not lean on a teacher; take yourself as your ground.

The masterless learning of kintsugi is close to this. But it must not be mistaken for self-centeredness. Trusting your own senses and putting your own convenience first are entirely different things.

Facing a vessel, the kintsugi version of being a lamp unto yourself means asking not "what do I want to do?" but "what is this vessel asking for?" A quiet self, listening for the vessel's voice.

The absence of schools is sometimes inconvenient. When an argument breaks out over what counts as real kintsugi, there is no authority to appeal to. But inside that inconvenience lies the honesty of the craft: not relying on authority, always turning back to face the vessel itself.

When I picked shards out of the rubble in Noto, I had no thought at all, honestly, about how to mend them. I simply couldn't throw them away. Perhaps that inability was the teacher's voice. The vessel was saying: don't discard me.

A craft without schools produces learning without masters. Learning without masters produces dialogue with the vessel. And dialogue with the vessel turns into dialogue with yourself.

Keep at kintsugi long enough and your own interior comes into view. Why did I want to mend that one? Why can I let this one go? What you value is reflected in those judgments.

The vessel is a mirror. Facing a broken one, there are moments when you realize the vessel is not the only thing that is broken.

## What Gets Passed On: Impermanence and Continuity

The lacquer tree gives its sap because it is wounded.

That is the basis of lacquer tapping. Through the summer, the tapper cuts fine incisions into the trunk, and the sap that seeps from them is *ki-urushi*, raw lacquer. The tree reacts to the injury and moves to protect itself, and that defensive response yields the finest natural coating material in the world.

The wound produces the material.

Here is a deep correspondence with kintsugi. A vessel becomes the material of kintsugi by being damaged; a tree produces lacquer by being wounded. Injury is not an end but the beginning of something.

The Noto Peninsula once had many lacquer trees. Noto lacquer was known for its quality. But in the postwar boom years, as synthetic coatings spread, demand collapsed. The number of tappers fell, the trees were cut, and the lacquer groves vanished from the hills.

I began the lacquer project in Noto because I saw this. Replant lacquer trees in Noto — a simple thing, and difficult precisely because it is simple. A lacquer tree takes twenty years to mature enough to tap. Lacquer from a tree planted today will be harvested twenty years from now.

After the earthquake of 2024, the project's meaning changed. So much was lost — buildings, vessels, memories. But the soil remained. Noto's soil is still Noto's soil after an earthquake. To plant lacquer trees in that soil is both a mourning for what was lost and a promise made to a point twenty years away.

Lacquer carries the memory of its place, I wrote earlier. That is not only metaphor. Its composition varies subtly with climate and soil. Wajima lacquer, Jōbōji lacquer, Yoshino lacquer — each has its character, and artisans feel the differences and choose accordingly.

Materials carry the memory of where they grew. Perhaps people do as well. I grew up in Tokyo and have kept a studio in Ogikubo since 2008. But since meeting Noto, Noto's memory has layered itself into me. Its air, its sea, the way time moves there — those things soaked into my senses and changed something.

When the studio was destroyed, my first thought was not that Noto was finished. It was that Noto would go on.

I can't explain well why I was able to think that. Perhaps because I knew about the lacquer tree. The tree gives lacquer because it is wounded. What will this deeply wounded land give? I wanted to see it.

Zen has the phrase *sansen sōmoku shikkai jōbutsu*: mountains, rivers, grasses, and trees all attain Buddhahood. Even things without life have something dwelling in them.

The lacquer tree answers its wounds. Noto's soil raises what is planted in it. Materials are silent, but in their silence they keep something going.

Choosing lacquer for kintsugi, I have come to think about where that lacquer grew — to use Noto lacquer to mend a vessel broken in Noto. When material and vessel share a memory of the same ground, something particular seems to settle into the joint.

"Seems to" is a vague way of putting it. But Zen takes such seeming seriously. Something that cannot be demonstrated and yet is unmistakably felt: not discarding that is part of the Zen sensibility.

There is little Noto lacquer now. The trees we planted need another ten years before they can be tapped. Until then I will use lacquer from elsewhere. But I handle it while thinking of Noto's soil and Noto's trees.

Waiting is a form of hope.

## Teaching Kintsugi in Europe

When I held the kintsugi workshop at Sofia University in Bulgaria, I ran into a fundamental question: can kintsugi exist apart from its Japanese context?

The participants were mostly students of the university. For nearly all of them it was the first time touching lacquer or seeing kintsugi done. What should I convey to them?

Technique can be conveyed. How to apply lacquer, how to grind, how to dust on the gold — these can be taught as procedure. But the spirit of kintsugi, the philosophy of framing damage in gold: how do you convey that in words?

In the first workshop I tried starting with the philosophy. Wabi and sabi, impermanence, Zen. I explained, and it didn't land. The students listened politely, but their eyes wandered.

It was a failure. From the next workshop on, I reversed the order. First, touch the vessel. I handed each person a new piece and said, "Start by holding it." Beginning from there, the understanding was different.

A Ukrainian student told me afterward: "Mending a broken vessel felt like accepting my own wounds."

I said nothing. Her words were right, and she had understood through her hands what I had tried and failed to explain in words.

Kintsugi is universal, I have come to think. But it becomes universal when it is presented not as the essence of Japanese culture but as a human act of facing what is broken.

There was also the matter of lacquer allergy. Urushi can cause a rash, and the risk is highest for those touching it for the first time. In European workshops, synthetic lacquer is sometimes used for safety. It is not real lacquer, but the process is the same.

Which forced me to ask: if the material changes, is it still kintsugi?

Probably, yes. The essence lies not in the material but in the idea of making damage visible. As long as that idea carries over, the material is substitutable — just as Zen is not bound to any particular language or form.

But there is also a case for insisting on real lacquer. Lacquer is alive. It responds to humidity and temperature, its character shifts with the season, and it is said to be affected even by the state of the person handling it. That delicacy is what gives kintsugi its aspect of discipline. Synthetic lacquer lacks the difficulty. Remove the difficulty and you may remove something that was there to be learned.

When Herrigel studied archery, the choice of bow mattered. Without the Japanese *yumi*, that experience would not have arisen. Tools are vessels for ideas.

Teaching in Europe, I found myself re-examining the essence of kintsugi from the outside. Being looked at from outside makes things visible. What you cannot see while taking your own culture for granted rises to the surface through another culture's eyes.

I was not teaching the students at Sofia. They were teaching me.

This too resembles the master–disciple relation in Zen, where the disciple chooses the master and the master learns from the disciple at once. Learning runs both ways. To teach is to be taught.

## A Cosmology of Kintsugi: Light Enters Through the Break

The Canadian poet Leonard Cohen left us these lines: there is a crack in everything — that's how the light gets in.

When I first read them, I thought of kintsugi. Cohen surely knew nothing of the craft. But his words state the heart of the kintsugi idea in another language.

A crack is not a defect. It is where the light comes in.

Cosmology may sound grandiose as a heading. But the longer I practice kintsugi, the more I feel that an entire way of seeing the world is concentrated in this small technique.

Let me take it in order.

First, kintsugi holds a philosophy of time. A vessel exists in time. It is used, damaged, broken, joined, used again. Through this cycle it inscribes time into its body. A kintsugi vessel is a thing made of several layers of time: the time it was fired, the time it was used, the time it broke, the time it was joined.

The Buddhist view of time is not linear. Past, present, and future do not stand in a straight line; they circle and overlap. A kintsugi vessel is that circling time made material.

Second, kintsugi holds a philosophy of relation. When a vessel breaks, it never breaks alone. Someone dropped it, it struck something, there was a difference in temperature — the cause always lies within a relation. It is joined in relation too, in relation with the artisan. A vessel is not an isolated object but a knot where countless relations meet.

The Zen concept of *engi*, dependent origination, overlaps here. Every existence stands within its relations to others; nothing exists on its own. The break is the trace of those relations.

And kintsugi holds a philosophy of imperfection. A perfect vessel is one with no relations. A vessel touched by nothing, used by nothing, unmarked by a single flaw may be perfect, but it is dead. Imperfection is the evidence that an existence is alive.

Japanese aesthetics includes the idea of the beauty of imperfection. Tea bowls are deliberately warped, chipped stones are set in gardens, calligraphy treasures its empty space. A beauty that does not aim at perfection. Behind it lies the recognition that perfection is an ending: the moment perfection is reached, no room for change remains.

Kintsugi loves the imperfect. Because there is a break, the vessel is still in the middle of changing. Because it is joined, a new story begins.

Back to Cohen. Light cannot enter a closed space. No light enters a perfectly sealed vessel. But a cracked vessel, a broken one, takes the outside light in. That is fragility and openness at once.

Can the same not be said of people? No light from outside reaches a person without wounds, a person perfectly closed. It is because we are damaged that another's words can get in. It is because we are damaged that a surface of contact with the world exists.

The strange sense of release I felt after the Noto earthquake may have been this. What I had built up collapsed, and a crack opened. Through that crack, things I had not been able to see became visible.

This is not an uplifting story. What was lost is lost, and that fact does not change. But a crack is also an opening. Grief and release existing at once is no contradiction — no more than a mended vessel possessing at once the beauty of a gold line and the history of a break.

Zen has the saying *mountains are mountains, waters are waters*. At the entrance to practice, mountains look like mountains and waters like waters. As practice deepens, mountains are no longer mountains and waters no longer waters — the concepts dissolve, existence is called into question. Go further still and mountains are mountains again, waters are waters again. But you are seeing them differently. The same mountain, through another set of eyes.

A kintsugi vessel is the same. Before mending, it was just a broken bowl. After mending it becomes "a kintsugi bowl" — the concept changes. But go on using it and it becomes, again, just a bowl. The gold line turns ordinary, and the vessel returns to daily life as a vessel.

And that vessel has a crack. In the middle of ordinary life, the light keeps coming in.

## The Vessel Is Never Finished

I planted lacquer trees.

In the summer of 2024, six months after the earthquake, I planted lacquer saplings in the soil of Noto. Small saplings, in ground that had shaken.

As I planted, I thought about twenty years from now. When these trees mature and give their first lacquer, how old will I be? What will the world be like? What will Noto be like?

There is no knowing. But it matters, I think, that the not-knowing remains as a question.

When Herrigel wrote *Zen in the Art of Archery*, he did not write down an answer to archery. He recorded what passed between master and disciple and kept asking what the experience meant. The answer is left open, handed to the reader.

I would like this essay to be the same. The answer to kintsugi is inside the vessel. And the vessel goes on being used after it is joined, goes on changing. It is never finished.

Zen practice has no end. Awakening is not a destination but a turning point at which the quality of practice changes. Afterward, practice continues. You go back to the mountain, split firewood, carry water. Ordinary life goes on — seen, now, with different eyes.

Kintsugi doesn't end either. A mended vessel will be used again and may be damaged again. If it is, you mend it again. With each mending it gains a new layer. History accumulates.

The shards I picked out of the rubble in Noto are still with me. I haven't mended them yet. I am waiting for the moment. There's no need to hurry. Lacquer has its own time, and a vessel has its own.

Sometimes I think about the people I met in the workshops. The students in Bulgaria. The ones who went quiet with a broken piece resting in their palms. The woman who said the piece felt lighter. Are they using vessels somewhere now? Standing over something broken, wondering whether to throw it away?

Someone who knows kintsugi can choose not to throw it away. That alone, I think, is enough.

All through the writing of this essay, one thing has stayed with me: why do we try to mend what is broken?

If efficiency were all that mattered, throwing it out and buying a new one is faster, and sometimes cheaper. And yet people keep things they cannot throw away. Broken, and still they cannot discard them. What is that feeling, exactly?

Attachment, if you want an easy word. But I suspect there is more to it.

When you mend something broken, you are engaging with time. The time you spent with that vessel, the place and the season in which it stood — the wish not to let those go. To mend is to hold time back.

But Zen warns against holding time back. Accept impermanence, it says.

It sounds contradictory, and it isn't. Kintsugi does not hold time back; it inscribes time. The time of breaking, the time of joining — it cuts them into the vessel as a line of gold. Not detaining, but recording. And carrying that recorded time, the vessel lives in the present.

To live now while carrying the past. Isn't that true of people as well?

The lacquer trees planted in Noto's soil are growing. I cannot see them. But they are growing. Ten years from now, lacquer will be tapped from them. With that lacquer, someone may mend a vessel. That vessel may pass into someone's hands, be used, be damaged, and be mended again.

I planted a seed at the beginning of that chain. That is enough.

The vessel is never finished. And so it continues.

Light comes in through the break. Today, too, somewhere.