how the ache at passing things became three of the world's most refined ideas of beauty — and never stopped flowing
They are not three rival ideas. They are the same awareness of impermanence, seen from three distances.
What you feel when you notice a thing is passing — the tender ache, turned inward.
What lies beneath the passing surface — the dim, suggested, unspeakable more.
How the passing shows on the thing itself — the worn, plain, imperfect object.
The lineage is real but tidied. These ideas overlap and bleed across the centuries; the dates mark where each flourished, not clean borders. And the feeling always ran ahead of the word — most of all with mono no aware, whose sensibility lived in the Heian court a thousand years ago but whose name was given much later, by the scholar Motoori Norinaga in the 18th century, looking back at The Tale of Genji. So "where the phrase originated" is two different moments: the feeling's, and the naming's.
Calling these the "three fundamentals" is a useful framing, not an ancient decree — Japanese tradition holds others too (iki, ma, and more). And the reach "to now" — Ozu, minimalism, global wabi-sabi — is interpretation, not doctrine.
This piece is the spine the rest of the set hangs on: mono no aware and wabi-sabi each have their own pamphlet, the ensō is this awareness drawn in one breath, kintsugi is it answered in gold, and Rikyū's tea is it made into a practice. One current; many names.