So I swung by the Spoonbill & Sugartown Bookstore in Brooklyn today while running errands and some cool books. The bookstore itself was fascinating and had a lot of cool, eclectic titles, including the Atlas Obscura and the new Non-Stop Metropolitan. There was a surprising amount of stuff on magic and mysticism, which caught my eye. In the end, though, I picked out these two to help me with my Buddhist-inspired fantasy worldbuilding.
Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, and Philosophers
“An updated version of the seminal 1994 classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”
Wabi-sabi is something I’ve always wanted to read more about, but all I could ever find was the Wikipedia page. I’m really interested in its connection to Zen Buddhism.
Wabi-sabi, as I understand it right now, is an aesthetic and life philosophy that centers on incompleteness, flaws, and authenticity. It has a lot in common with Daoism and Buddhism, and can be extrapolated to everything from dishware to clothing and architecture. I’ve always thought it was cool how people found ways to turn living into an art, especially when the that ‘art’ is tied up with the inevitability of death and decay.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
“A newly revised and updated edition of the internationally bestselling spiritual classic, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche, is the ultimate introduction to Tibetan Buddhist wisdom. An enlightening, inspiring, and comforting manual for life and death that the New York Times calls, “The Tibetan equivalent of The Divine Comedy.”
I’m kind of wary of bestselling books written by self-identified Buddhist monks (especially the Dalai Lama), but I thought this would be a good reference point for creating a philosophy about life and death for my world. One of the things I’ve realized is that I don’t have much in mind for burial procedures or rituals, let along day-to-day philosophy.
Tibetan Buddhism also produced the Bardo Thodol, which I still haven’t read, but want to.