The Book of Tea

Book of Tea, The

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Title: The Book of Tea
Author: Kakuzo Okakura
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The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura

i. The Cup of Humanity
Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the
eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite
amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion
of aestheticism--Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of
the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates
purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of
the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a
tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible
thing we know as life.
The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary
acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and
religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene,
for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in
simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry,
inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It
represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its
votaries aristocrats in taste.

The long isolation of Japan from the rest of the world, so conducive to
introspection, has been highly favourable to the development of Teaism.
Our home and habits, costume and cuisine, porcelain, lacquer,
painting--our very literature--all have been subject to its influence. No
student of Japanese culture could ever ignore its presence. It has
permeated the elegance of noble boudoirs, and entered the abode of the
humble. Our peasants have learned to arrange flowers, our meanest
labourer to offer his salutation to the rocks and waters. In our common
parlance we speak of the man "with no tea" in him, when he is
insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama. Again
we stigmatise the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane
tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one
"with too much tea" in him.
The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about
nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we
consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon
overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our
quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making
so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse. In the worship of
Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely; and we have even transfigured
the gory image of Mars. Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of
the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows
from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the
initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of
Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.
Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are
apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average
Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but
another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the
quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard
Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he
calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on
Manchurian battlefields. Much comment has been given lately to the
Code of the Samurai, --the Art