Yūgen: The Beautiful Yearning for Home

When I was 12 years old, I went on a backpacking trip with my scout troop in the Uinta Mountains. I don’t remember very much about this trip except that it involved a lot of fishing. The thing that stands out in my mind most was the day I got it into my head to climb up to a ridge above our camp. I think I simply wanted to see what was on the other side. In my rusty memory, this was a huge endeavor and no one was willing to do it with me. I felt like I was heading out to climb Mt. Everest alone. It probably only took me an hour or so to reach the top, but it seemed like a herculean effort at the time. There was no trail, just the loose, lichen covered rocks you see so often above tree line in these high mountains. When I finally reached the top, I was rewarded with a view that I have never forgotten. It was the first time in my young life that I had ever been confronted with such massive and overwhelming beauty. Nearly the whole of the High Uintas Wilderness spread out before me with its craggy peaks, snow fields, and sparkling blue-green lakes. It was as if the universe were expanding right before my eyes. I started to cry and then fell to my knees to thank God right there and then for such a miraculous gift. All that beauty… I didn’t know how to even begin to process it.

Not long ago, I stumbled onto the perfect word to describe that experience: Yūgen. This is a Japanese word that means “an experience of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and powerful for words.” Yūgen is a key aspect of Japanese aesthetics. It’s a word that they use to describe certain qualities of poetry, art, and theater that you can feel but can’t quite express. The word is often used to describe the beauty that is sometimes felt in sadness, suffering, or loss. Like so much of the Zen-based Japanese aesthetics, this is an extremely nebulous word that is left up to each individual to try and discover and define. The word itself is a journey; a beautiful and difficult journey full of yearning, full of longing.

Kamo no Chōmei, a famous 12th century Japanese poet and essayist, described yūgen like this: “It is like an autumn evening under a colorless expanse of silent sky. Somehow, as if for some reason that we should be able to recall, tears well uncontrollably.” 

As I set out on my own journey to better understand this word and, more importantly, the feeling it’s meant to express, I thought of a talk called “A Yearning for Home” by the apostle Marvin J. Ashton in the October 1992 L.D.S. General Conference. In it, he explained how we are children of our Heavenly Father and that we came to earth to “…experience a period of probation and testing, a period during which a veil would be drawn over our memories so that we would be free either to walk by faith and by the Spirit or to forsake our spiritual heritage and birthright.” He went on to say that “when we have a yearning and don’t know what it is for, perhaps it’s our soul longing for its heartland, longing to be no longer alienated from the Lord and the pursuit of something much higher, better, and more fulfilling than anything this earth has to offer.” How beautiful! A feeling of homesickness for a home we can’t quite recall, but our souls long for. To me, that sounds like Yūgen.

Certainly, this is the same thing that Philip Paul Bliss was describing in his hymn  “More HolinessGive Me” when he wrote:

“More purity give me,

More strength to o'ercome,

More freedom from earth-stains,

More longing for home.”

When I think of Yūgen in terms of beautiful suffering that’s beyond words to describe, then the ultimate example of this has to be Christ in Gethsemane. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First Presidency of the L.D.S. church, recently wrote about this in an article titled “Encircled in His Gentle Arms”. In this article, he writes, “I am overwhelmed with profound gratitude for what the sinless Son did for all mankind and for me… What the Savior did from Gethsemane to Golgotha on our behalf is beyond my ability to grasp.” Later he adds that when we are suffering, “if we will lift our hearts to the Lord during those times, surely He will know and understand. He who suffered so selflessly for us in the garden and on the cross will not leave us comfortless now. He will strengthen, encourage, and bless us. He will encircle us in His gentle arms.” The Yūgen-like paradox of beautiful suffering is clearly felt in the Savior’s atonement.

In this same article, Uchtdorf describes a painting by Frans Schwartz called “The Agony in the Garden”. It demonstrates the quality of yūgen perfectly. In fact, Uchtodorf described it as “achingly beautiful” and says “the longer I contemplate this painting, the more my heart and mind swell with inexpressible feelings of tenderness and gratitude.” This is exactly what yūgen is. Benito Ortolani, a leading scholar of Japanese theater explained yūgen as "a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe ... and the sad beauty of human suffering". Ponder this painting in a calm and quiet moment and see if it doesn’t make you feel that way.  

The Agony in the Garden, by Frans Schwartz

I’ve often tried, usually unsuccessfully, to infuse my own work with the quality of yūgen. The most recent example is a scene from my current novel-in-progress. In this scene, the protagonist, Kirby, is at school with his friend, Lily, when they discover another friend, “Big”, standing out in the rain. Here it is:

“Look!” Lily said and pointed out the window.

                I looked and there was Big. He was all alone, wearing a bright orange Hawaiian shirt, standing still, his eyes closed, a huge smile on his face, in the rain. “What’s he doing?”

“I guess he’s…” Lilly paused searching for an answer, shook her head and then said, “just being Big.”

“He’s going to be late for our presentation,” I said, “and very wet.”

“Yeah, we better go get him.”

Big was in the middle of a small courtyard that no one ever used. I didn’t even know you could go in there. It was just an ugly cement square with ugly cement benches surrounded on all sides by two stories of ugly glass windows. I suppose it could have been a nice garden or something, but the sun never found its way down into the narrow opening to the sky and some idiot decided to make the whole place concrete. It was about as inviting and comfortable as a Soviet era prison yard. And there was Big standing in the middle of it smiling.

We found a door to the courtyard and it was, in fact, unlocked. Who knew? Lily opened it and yelled, “Big! You’re going to be late to class. What are you doing?” Her voice echoed around the courtyard much louder than I expected.

Big turned and looked at us. It seemed like it took a few seconds for him to recognize who we were. Then he smiled even bigger and said, “Come here, you have to experience this.” His voice was quiet, almost reverent, but it carried so that we could hear it perfectly across the courtyard.

“Experience what? Rain?” Lily said. “I’ve felt rain before. Now come on, we have a presentation to do and you’re getting soaked.”

“No, really, come here. It’s beautiful.” Big beckoned to us with his hand and closed his eyes again.

“Let’s just go to class,” I said. “The late bell is going to ring at any second.”

Lily looked at me, down the hall towards our class, back to Big, then at me again. “You can go to class if you want. I’m going to go see what he’s talking about.”

“What? Why—” I started to complain, but she ran out into the rain to Big. I heard Big whisper something to her and she closed her eyes. There was a long pause as they both stood there getting drenched and then Lily laughed the most perfect, beautiful laugh, and that laugh fluttered around the ugly cement courtyard like a living thing, like butterflies, and the next thing I knew I was running out into the rain to join them.

I don’t know what the rain is like where you live, but in Utah it’s cold. It doesn’t rain much here, we are in a desert after all, but when it does, it’s always cold, even in the middle of summer. Usually the drops are huge things that smack you in the face and they are almost always accompanied by enough wind to knock you over. That whole “I like to go for walks in the rain” crap that you hear about people saying in personal ads is total garbage in Utah. Maybe other places it’s nice, but Utah rain, as a general rule, is not pleasant. Sure enough, this rain was cold, very cold, but it wasn’t the usual big drops that almost hurt to get hit by. Instead, it was made up of light, small drops that were coming down pretty thick, and there was no wind.

When I reached Big I said, “What are you doing? Let’s go back inside!”

Lily said, “Just close your eyes and listen.”

This was not what I expected. I thought maybe Big was just being all melodramatic and it was going to be like in the movies when you see some drought stricken farmer out in the field when it finally starts to rain and he knows his farm is saved and he looks up at the sky and savors the feel of the rain on his face, which, like I said, is total crap in Utah because it’s just cold and miserable. But, no, they wanted me to listen. To what?

I closed my eyes, concentrated, and I heard it. Ok, I know this is going to sound stupid, but just trust me when I say it was amazing. It’s one of those things where, really, you just had to be there. I’ll try to describe it and it will probably sound pretty lame, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. First of all, that ugly cement courtyard had the near magical ability to magnify even the tiniest of sounds and make them seem big, significant, and perfect. The water pooled on the ground everywhere making the entire place into a shallow pond that was no more than a centimeter deep. The little drops of rain hit the pooled water and the sound was amplified. Millions and millions of drops all hitting the water and all being amplified and it was as if I could hear each one of them individually and each one seemed important and beautiful and just right! While I could hear each of their unique voices, I could also hear the chorus they made together and they sang like a mother whispering to her baby, “hush, hush, hush.” Suddenly, I was crying and I didn’t understand why. Embarrassed, I jerked my eyes back open, but Big and Lily still had theirs closed and hadn’t noticed my boobing. I figured the rain would hide the one or two tears that had managed to leak out. All this only took 30 seconds at the most. I knew that I was experiencing something rare and unworldly. There’s a word for it I think, ephemeral maybe? Evanescent? No, they don’t quite capture it. Maybe no word can. Then the late bell was ringing. 

The funny thing is, now I know the word that Kirby was searching for. I hope I managed to give you a sense of yūgen in that little out-of-context excerpt. I think it’s a good sign if I can sum the whole scene up in a haiku:

I listen as the

rain whispers in my mother’s

still voice, “hush, hush, hush.”

Is that more yūgen? I don’t know. I do know that this concept of yūgen is something I’ve valued, sought after, and tried to emulate for as long as I can remember even though I never knew to call it by that name until just recently. Maybe it all started with that moment in the Uintas when I wept for the beauty of the mountains. But I would argue it started long before that. It started the moment I was born, always longing for my home beyond the veil, drawn to anything that reminded me of it, seeking to infuse just a little hint of it into my own creations.