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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.