{"id":49448,"date":"2026-09-09T15:10:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T15:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/how-to-break-free-from-the-tyranny-of-certainty-the-japanese-concept-of-ma\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T15:10:50","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T15:10:50","slug":"how-to-break-free-from-the-tyranny-of-certainty-the-japanese-concept-of-ma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/how-to-break-free-from-the-tyranny-of-certainty-the-japanese-concept-of-ma\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of \u201cMa\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever inspiration is, it\u2019s born from a continuous \u2018I don\u2019t know,’\u201d the Polish poet Wis\u0142awa Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech<\/a>. But despite all we know about the power of liminality and threshold states<\/a>, we yearn for a firm foothold on one side of every blurry line and move through the fundamental mystery of life armored in opinions, mistaking the magnitude of our surety for the measure of the truth, resisting with every fiber of our being the fertile, flickering in-betweenness that beckons us to not-know in order to touch the beating heart of reality with something greater than understanding.
\nCertainty is the dominant addiction of the modern mind.<\/p>\n

Japanese culture offers a potent antidote to it in the ancient concept of ma<\/em>, which Ann Tashi Slater details in her moving memoir Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

Ma<\/em> means \u201cinterval\u201d or \u201copening,\u201d both in space and time. Often referred to as negative (empty) space, it\u2019s positive in that it can birth something new. An invitation to heightened awareness, it\u2019s seen, for instance, as open space in rooms and gardens. With regard to time, it\u2019s a pause that invites contemplation. Ma<\/em> is found in unpainted areas on folding screens, void areas in a photograph, silence during conversation, the hush between breaking waves. It\u2019s about the vitality generated by emptiness, in the way a blank page gives rise to creative energy. It\u2019s about being in relationship, because our engagement with ma<\/em> allows fresh perspectives to emerge.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Winter Moon at Toyamagahara<\/em> by Hasui Kawase<\/a>, 1931. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Encoded in ma<\/em> is an ancient understanding of what modern science calls embodied cognition \u2014 the recognition that the body is the mind<\/a> and we think not with the brain but with the world<\/a>. Slater quotes architect Kengo Kuma:<\/p>\n

\n

In traditional Japanese space, the most important space is the void. We call that kind of void space ma. In the void, we can feel the change of light, the change of time, the change of smell, the change of temperature\u2026 The void and the human body are working together to feel something.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Drawing on one of my favorite books of all time<\/a>, she adds:<\/p>\n

\n

The character for ma<\/em> is \u201cgate\u201d (\u9580) together with \u201csun\u201d (\u65e5): \u9593. It evokes light filtering through a doorway, an idea suggested by Jun\u2019ichir\u014d Tanizaki in his essay about the Japanese aesthetic tradition, In Praise of Shadows<\/em><\/a>\u2026 \u201cThe light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors,\u201d Tanizaki writes, \u201cand it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It strikes me that ma<\/em> is literally written as light, for it carries the indeterminacy of light itself \u2014 how we have no way of knowing whether it will pass through the double slit as particle or wave, how consciousness may be the double slit of space and time through which reality passes between the everythingness we experience as life and the nothingness of the void, the interval repeating like a sunbeam flickering across a doorway. <\/p>\n

\n

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\n

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\u201cWhatever inspiration is, it\u2019s born from a continuous \u2018I don\u2019t know,’\u201d the Polish poet Wis\u0142awa Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all we know about the power of liminality and threshold states, we yearn for a firm foothold on one side of every blurry line and move through the fundamental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 12:15:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}