WHAT DOES  Yūgen MEAN?

“A deep, mysterious understanding of the beauty of the universe.”

Yūgen (幽玄) is a concept in the traditional Japanese aesthetic movement in art and culture. It refers to an understanding of the universe that triggers emotional reactions that are too mysterious and profound to put into words. In moments when we feel intensely alive and connected to everything, there is often only one thing left to say: “Woah”!

The term is believed to originate from Chinese philosophy, in which 幽玄 (Pinyin: yōuxuán) means “calm, still” and “deep, mysterious”. Yūgen has also been referred to as “mysterious grace”, “subtle profundity”, and “beauty of the unseen”. It's more about the power to evoke something than to describe it in a mundane way.

You experience Yūgen when you feel overwhelmed by the sight of the starry sky on a clear night. When you realize how long it took for the universe to create the world we live in; or if you think about the fact that our body is made up of so many billion cells that if you lined them all up, you would reach around the earth 60 times. And even if you lined up one cell after the other every second, the end would only be reached after more than three million years.

Yūgen is the experience of a healthy sense of awe and an amazed grace that makes us feel how small we are in the grand scheme of things and yet that we are all part of the big cycle of life. It is not an allusion to another world. It's about awakening to the beauty of this world, to this unique experience of life, right here and now...