Colors: Their Connotations and Perceived Meanings

Throughout the ages, colors have been used to evoke unavoidable emotions, and an exam of the history of color offers arresting insights into the human condition, as well as showing how separate cultures have advanced separate attitudes about color. Here are a few examples of what various colors have come to rehearse over the years:

Colors: Their Connotations and Perceived Meanings

Colors: Their Connotations and Perceived Meanings

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Colors: Their Connotations and Perceived Meanings

Colors: Their Connotations and Perceived Meanings

Red

Red has traditionally been connected with courage and love in Western culture, but in China, red is the color of happiness and good fortune. In fact, white has traditionally been the color most beloved for wedding dresses in America, but the Chinese prefer to dress their brides in red.

Orange

Orange is determined a warm color, perhaps because it has evoked the feeling of fire, all the way back to mankind's earliest beginnings. Painting walls a subtle orange, leaning toward a warm brown, stimulates the appetite and can reduce tension. However, as the orange color becomes brighter, it begins to take on a high energy feel and can lead to anxiety.

Brown

Brown is other warm and comforting color, stimulating the appetite and beyond doubt making food taste better. That makes coffee brown, in all intensities, with or without the cream, an ideal candidate for dining rooms.

Yellow

Since it's all the time been connected with the sun, yellow has traditionally been determined a cheerful color. Yellow is also the first color most citizen see in early spring, when the daffodils begin to bloom. However, there seems to be an East/West cultural contrast when it comes to yellow. The Chinese revere yellow enough to have determined it the imperial color since the 10th century, yet several Western studies have shown that yellow is many people's least favorite color.

Green

Green is other color that has both an up and down side. It's connected with the new growth of spring, prosperity, and clean, fresh air, yet it can also carry a negative connotation, in terms of mold, nausea, and jealousy. Throughout the ages, green has most often been determined to rehearse fertility, and during the 15th century, green was the most favorite selection of for the wedding gowns of European brides.

Blue

Because it's connected with the color of the sea and the sky, blue has come to symbolize serenity and infinity. That's especially true of the more greenish shades of blue, such as aqua and teal. On the other hand, cooler shades of blue can have a tendency to cause feelings of sadness.

Purple

Over the millennia, purple has been connected with royalty in Western civilizations, due to the difficulty and expense complicated in producing purple dye, which was made from a particular species of mollusk shell. Even today, when purple can be produced just as inexpensively as any other color, the use of purple is still determined to rehearse elegance and sophistication.

There are stories and connotations for every color, and separate cultures assign separate meanings to colors. For instance, American brides commonly prefer white wedding dresses, while many Asian cultures dress their brides in black, reserving white for funerals. But regardless of what culture on is from, one thing is certain: colors will all the time have effects on human beings and should be determined determined when decorating a home.

(c) Copyright 2004, Jeanette J. Fisher. All proprietary reserved.

Colors: Their Connotations and Perceived Meanings

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Mono No Aware: The Essence of Japan

Mono no aware: the Japanese attractiveness aesthetic

Mono No Aware: The Essence of Japan

Mono No Aware: The Essence of Japan

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Mono No Aware: The Essence of Japan

Mono No Aware: The Essence of Japan

Meaning unmistakably "a sensitivity to things," mono no aware is a conception describing the essence of Japanese culture, invented by the Japanese literary and linguistic expert expert Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth century, and remains the central artistic imperative in Japan to this day. The phrase is derived from the word *aware*, which in Heian Japan meant sensitivity or sadness, and the word mono, meaning things, and describes attractiveness as an awareness of the transience of all things, and a gentle sadness at their passing. It can also be translated as the "ah-ness" of things, of life, and love.

Mono no aware gave name to an aesthetic that already existed in Japanese art, music and poetry, the source of which can be traced directly to the introduction of Zen Buddhism in the twelfth century, a spiritual religious doctrine and practise which profoundly influenced all aspects of Japanese culture, but especially art and religion. The fleeting nature of attractiveness described by mono no aware derives from the three states of existence in Buddhist philosophy: unsatisfactoriness, impersonality, and most importantly in this context, impermanence.

According to mono no aware, a falling or wilting autumn flower is more gorgeous than one in full bloom; a fading sound more gorgeous than one clearly heard; the moon partially clouded more intelligent than full. The sakura or cherry blossom tree is the epitome of this conception of beauty; the flowers of the most celebrated variety, somei yoshino, nearly pure white tinged with a subtle pale pink, bloom and then fall within a single week. The subject of a thousand poems and a national icon, the cherry blossom tree embodies attractiveness as a transient experience.

Mono no aware states that attractiveness is a subjective rather than objective experience, a state of being finally internal rather than external. Based largely upon classical Greek ideals, attractiveness in the West is sought in the greatest perfection of an external object: a celebrated painting, exquisite sculpture or intricate musical composition; a attractiveness that could be said to be only skin deep. The Japanese ideal sees attractiveness instead as an sense of the heart and soul, a feeling for and appreciation of objects or artwork--most ordinarily nature or the depiction of--in a pristine, untouched state.

An appreciation of attractiveness as a state which does not last and cannot be grasped is not the same as nihilism, and can good be understood in relation to Zen Buddhism's religious doctrine of earthly transcendence: a spiritual longing for that which is infinite and eternal--the source of all worldly beauty. As the monk Sotoba wrote in *Zenrin Kushū* (Poetry of the Zenrin Temple), Zen does not regard nothingness as a state of absence, but rather the affirmation of an unseen that exists behind empty space: "Everything exists in emptiness: flowers, the moon in the sky, gorgeous scenery."

With its roots in Zen Buddhism, *mono no aware* is bears some relation to the non-dualism of Indian philosophy, as linked in the following story about Swami Vivekananda by Sri Chinmoy:

*"Beauty," says [Vivekananda], "is not external, but already in the mind." Here we are reminded of what his spiritual daughter Nivedita wrote about her Master. "It was dark when we approached Sicily, and against the sunset sky, Etna was in tiny eruption. As we entered the straits of Messina, the moon rose, and I walked up and down the deck beside the Swami, while he dwelt on the fact that attractiveness is not external, but already in the mind. On one side frowned the dark crags of the Italian coast, on the other, the island was touched with silver Light. 'Messina must thank me,' he said; 'it is I who give her all her beauty.'" Truly, in the absence of appreciation, attractiveness is not attractiveness at all. And attractiveness is worthy of its name only when it has been appreciated.*

The founder of *mono no aware*, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), was the pre-eminent expert of the Kokugakushu Movement, a nationalist Movement which sought to take off all outside influences from Japanese culture. Kokugakushu was enormously influential in art, poetry, music and philosophy, and responsible for the revival while the Tokugawa duration of the Shinto religion. Contradictorily, the affect of Buddhist ideas and practises upon art and even Shintoism itself was so great that, although Buddhism is technically an outside influence, it was by this point unable to be extricated.

Meaning unmistakably "a sensitivity to things," mono no aware is a conception describing the essence of Japanese culture, invented by the Japanese literary and linguistic expert expert Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth century, and remains the central artistic imperative in Japan to this day. The phrase is derived from the word aware, which in Heian Japan meant sensitivity or sadness, and the word mono, meaning things, and describes attractiveness as an awareness of the transience of all things, and a gentle sadness at their passing. It can also be translated as the "ah-ness" of things, of life, and love.

Mono no aware gave name to an aesthetic that already existed in Japanese art, music and poetry, the source of which can be traced directly to the introduction of Zen Buddhism in the twelfth century, a spiritual religious doctrine and practise which profoundly influenced all aspects of Japanese culture, but especially art and religion. The fleeting nature of attractiveness described by mono no aware derives from the three states of existence in Buddhist philosophy: unsatisfactoriness, impersonality, and most importantly in this context, impermanence.

According to mono no aware, a falling or wilting autumn flower is more gorgeous than one in full bloom; a fading sound more gorgeous than one clearly heard; the moon partially clouded more intelligent than full. The sakura or cherry blossom tree is the epitome of this conception of beauty; the flowers of the most celebrated variety, somei yoshino, nearly pure white tinged with a subtle pale pink, bloom and then fall within a single week. The subject of a thousand poems and a national icon, the cherry blossom tree embodies attractiveness as a transient experience.

Mono no aware states that attractiveness is a subjective rather than objective experience, a state of being finally internal rather than external. Based largely upon classical Greek ideals, attractiveness in the West is sought in the greatest perfection of an external object: a celebrated painting, exquisite sculpture or intricate musical composition; a attractiveness that could be said to be only skin deep. The Japanese ideal sees attractiveness instead as an sense of the heart and soul, a feeling for and appreciation of objects or artwork--most ordinarily nature or the depiction of--in a pristine, untouched state.

An appreciation of attractiveness as a state which does not last and cannot be grasped is not the same as nihilism, and can good be understood in relation to Zen Buddhism's religious doctrine of earthly transcendence: a spiritual longing for that which is infinite and eternal--the source of all worldly beauty. As the monk Sotoba wrote in Zenrin Kushū (Poetry of the Zenrin Temple), Zen does not regard nothingness as a state of absence, but rather the affirmation of an unseen that exists behind empty space: "Everything exists in emptiness: flowers, the moon in the sky, gorgeous scenery."

With its roots in Zen Buddhism, mono no aware is bears some relation to the non-dualism of Indian philosophy, as linked in the following story about Swami Vivekananda by Sri Chinmoy:

"Beauty," says [Vivekananda], "is not external, but already in the mind." Here we are reminded of what his spiritual daughter Nivedita wrote about her Master. "It was dark when we approached Sicily, and against the sunset sky, Etna was in tiny eruption. As we entered the straits of Messina, the moon rose, and I walked up and down the deck beside the Swami, while he dwelt on the fact that attractiveness is not external, but already in the mind. On one side frowned the dark crags of the Italian coast, on the other, the island was touched with silver Light. 'Messina must thank me,' he said; 'it is I who give her all her beauty.'" Truly, in the absence of appreciation, attractiveness is not attractiveness at all. And attractiveness is worthy of its name only when it has been appreciated.

The founder of mono no aware, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), was the pre-eminent expert of the Kokugakushu Movement, a nationalist movement which sought to take off all outside influences from Japanese culture. Kokugakushu was enormously influential in art, poetry, music and philosophy, and responsible for the revival while the Tokugawa duration of the Shinto religion. Contradictorily, the affect of Buddhist ideas and practises upon art and even Shintoism itself was so great that, although Buddhism is technically an outside influence, it was by this point unable to be extricated.

Mono No Aware: The Essence of Japan

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