The Tea Ceremony
Chazen ichimi (Zen and tea are one.) Traditional Japanese expression
The “dewy path” to teahouse
The tea ceremony combines all the faces of Zen—art, tranquility, aesthetics. It is in a sense the essence of Zen culture. Yet this Zen ritual has been explained to the West in so many volumes of wordy gush that almost any description, including the above, deserves to be met with skepticism. There has to be more to the tea ceremony than meets the eye—and there is. But before unraveling the unseen threads of this Zen fabric, let us pause for a moment to consider the beverage itself.
The drinking of tea seems almost to have been the world's second oldest profession. One legend claims that tea was discovered in the year 2737 b.c., when leaves from a tea bush
accidentally dropped into the campfire cauldron of a Chinese emperor-aesthete. Early Chinese texts are sometimes vague about the identity of medicinal plants, but it is clear that by the time of Confucius (around 500 b.c.) tea was a well-known drink. During the Tang dynasty (618-907), tea leaves were treated with smoke and compressed into a semimoist cake, slices of which would subsequently be boiled to produce a beverage—a method that was perpetuated for many centuries in Russia. The Chinese spiced this boiled tea with salt, a holdover from even earlier times when a variety of unexpected condiments were added, including orange peel, ginger, and onions.
The refined courtiers of the Sung dynasty (960-1279) apparently found brick tea out of keeping with their delicate tastes, for they replaced it with a drink in which finely ground tea leaves were blended with boiling water directly in the cup. Whipped with a bamboo whisk, this mixture superficially resembled shaving lather in texture, although the color could be a fine jade green if fresh leaves were used. (This green powdered tea was the drink one day to become enshrined in the Zen tea ceremony.) The Chinese chronicle of tea ends with the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), which saw the rise of the familiar steeping process, now the commonly accepted practice worldwide. Our ignorance of the earlier methods of tea preparation may be attributed to the West's discovery of China after the older methods had been discarded.