The guest of honor has the first taste. Taking the bowl, he salutes the host and then samples the preparation, complimenting the host on its quality. After two more precise sips, he wipes the lip with a napkin he has brought for that purpose, rotates the bowl, and passes it to the next guest, who repeats the ritual. The last to drink must empty the bowl. Curiously enough, only the host is denied a taste of his handiwork. After the formal drinking of koicha, the bowl is rinsed and a second batch of tea is made—this time a thinner variety known as usucha. Although it is also whipped Sung-style, it is considerably lighter in consistency and taste.
After the second cup of tea, the formal part of the ceremony is completed, and the guests are at liberty to relax, enjoy sweets, and discuss Zen aesthetics. The focus of conversation is usually the tea bowl, which is passed around for all to admire in detail. Comments on the flower arrangement are also in order, as is a bit of poetry appropriate to the season. What is not discussed—indeed, what no one wants to discuss—is the world outside the garden gate. Each guest is at one with himself, his place, and the natural setting. Values have been subtly guided into perspective, spirits purified, appreciation of beauty rewarded; for a fleeting moment the material world of dualities has become as insubstantial as a dream.
The tea ceremony is the great parable of Zen culture, which teaches by example that the material world is a tThef depriving us of our most valuable possessions—naturalness, simplicity, self-knowledge. But it is also much more; its underlying aesthetic principles are the foundation of latter-day Zen culture. It is a perfect blending of the three faces of Zen. First there are the physical art forms themselves: the tea ceremony deeply influenced architectural tastes, bringing into being the informal sukiya style to replace the rigid shoin formulas of the samurai house; the art of flower arrangement, or Ikebana, owes much to the floral arrangements required for the ceremony; painting and calligraphy were influenced by the understated decorative requirements of the tokonoma hanging scroll; lacquer ware developed in directions designed to complement the artistic principles of the ceremony utensils; and, finally, the growth of Japanese ceramic art from the fifteenth century onward was largely due to the particular aesthetic and practical needs of the tea ceremony.
The second face of Zen, tranquility in a troubled world, found its finest expression in cha-no-yu, which demonstrates as no sermon ever could the Zen approach to life.
The third face of Zen is that of aesthetics. By becoming a vehicle for the transmission of Zen aesthetic principles, cha-no-yu has preserved Zen culture for all times. It has given the people at large a standard of taste, guaranteeing that certain basic ideals of beauty will always be preserved against the ravages of mechanical civilization. And it is in this connection that we must examine the special features of the tea ceremony introduced by Hideyoshi's tea master, Sen no Rikyu. To the ancient Zen ideas of yugen and sabi he brought the new concept of wabi.
Yugen, the realization of profundity through open-ended suggestion, found its finest expression in No poetry. Sabi grew out of the Heian admiration for lovely things on the verge of extinction. By the period this curious attitude was extended to things already old, and so entered the idea of sabi, a term denoting objects agreeably mellowed with age. Sabi also brought melancholy overtones of loneliness, of age left behind by time. New objects are assertive and striving for attention; old, worn objects have the quiet, peaceful air that exudes tranquility, dignity, and character. Although there is no word in a Western language precisely equivalent to sabi, the ideal is well understood. For example, we say that the sunburned face of a fisherman has more character than that of a beardless youth. But to the Japanese sabi is first and foremost the essence of beauty, whether in a weathered house or temple, the frayed golden threads of fabric binding a Zen scroll, a withered bough placed in the tokonoma alcove, or an ancient kettle rusty with time. The ideal of sabi, which became part of the Zen aesthetic canon of beauty, was perfectly at home in the tea ceremony, where even the utensils were deliberately chosen for their weathered look.
Sabi, however, seemed an incomplete ideal to Sen no Rikyu. The fact that rich objects are old does not make them less rich. Sabi can still encompass snobbery. As tea master for both Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, Rikyu was so pained by their ostentation that he eventually revolutionized the tea ceremony and created a new aesthetic standard: wabi, a deliberate restraint, which is exemplified in his tea party of the single morning glory. Wabi, now a cornerstone of Zen aesthetic theory, is well described in a poem by Rikyu, which includes the lines:
How much does a person lack himself,
Who feels the need to have so many things.
In a sense, wabi is the glorification of artificial poverty, artificial because there must be the element of forced restraint and in genuine poverty there is nothing to restrain. The wabi tea ceremony permits no hint of wealth to be in evidence; those who enter the tea garden must leave their worldly status at the gate. Similarly, the sukiya-style teahouse must look like a rustic hut—not made out of something new, for that would destroy sabi, but not out of expensive antique woods, either. This ideal extends even to the floral arrangement, one or at most two buds; the clothes one wears, simple not dressy; the pots and cups, plain and undecorated.