Words: Yugen

Etymology: Made up of two Japanese characters. The first, “yu,” means dim or difficult to see. The second, “gen,” originally described the dark, tranquil color of the universe—something calm and deep.

Meaning: The meaning depends on the context; the explanation most commonly offered is an awareness of the universe that triggers an emotional response too deep and mysterious for words. You may find that definition opaque, but it is an attempt to explain in words something that is fundamentally ineffable. Or you may feel a spark of recognition somewhere deep within. This is likely a feeling you’ve experienced but never before had a word for.

To best wrap your head around a word that words fail, it’s better to contemplate less its literal meaning and more the situations that might inspire it. Looking to the cosmos, for example, can resonate in a profound way. Perhaps you’ve experienced yugen when you’ve gazed at stars, and really seen them, with a clarity that only comes from being away from the city and its halo of light pollution. And maybe the feeling deepened when you realized that the light you’re seeing is years old and has traveled across trillions of miles to reach you.

“Wandering along through pine trees beside a stream,” is how 20th-century British philosopher Alan Watts begins his own musing on the quality of yugen. Best known for popularizing eastern philosophy for western audiences, Watts continues: “Where is he going? Where is the stream going? Where are the clouds going? Where are the birds going? We don’t really know. They are wandering on.”

A fundamental concept in Japanese art and culture, this sense of unknowability and mystery is reflected in the description offered a few centuries earlier by playwright Zeami Motokiyo: “To watch the sun sink behind a flower clad hill… To contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.”

Yugen, then, has to do not with a world that exists beyond our own, but with the depths of the world we live in. And if we can learn to flex our imaginations, it’s a feeling that all of us can experience anytime, any place.