Lin Yutang and Kakuzo’s proficiency in English meant they could write eloquently without losing meaning in translation. They were instrumental in opening utzon and perriand’s eyes to Asian thought. Charlotte Perriand read ‘The Book of Tea’ while she lived in Japan during the WWII. Both the book and her exile in Asia had a huge impact on her ideas and her design skills. In her autobiography, Perriand describes ‘encounters’ or her experiences that led her toward aesthetic discoveries. In japan, she found that the concepts integral to Zen philosophy and Japanese culture were strongly in line with her own worldview. Perriand is French, but acquired and enhanced her Japanese design operating system. In 1993, over 50 years after her first visit to Japan, perriand was commissioned to design a Teahouse to be part of the Japanese Cultural Festival held in Paris in 1993. Her proposal reflected her lifelong meditation on Japanese culture and zen philosophy and was located on the rooftop of the UNESCO headquarters.
I’m not a big drinker of tea or any beverage really. I tend to operate like a camel in a semi-dehydrated manner, extracting most of the liquid I need to survive from the food I eat or a couple accidental sips of water, so kakuzo’s analysis of eastern culture and religion through the lens of this beverage is interesting. Published in 1906 “The Book of Tea” is an essay broken down into 7 diverse chapters: tea’s importance within the context of Asian and western culture, the evolution and Schools of Tea, Taoism and Zennism, the architecture of Tea Room, art appreciation, flower arrangement, and Tea-Masters.
Since I have no knowledge in any of these realms, I will accept kakuzo’s analysis as true till proven otherwise. “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….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.”
“Like Art, Tea has its periods and its schools. Its evolution may be roughly divided into three main stages: the Boiled Tea, the Whipped Tea, and the Steeped Tea….The Cake-tea which was boiled, the Powdered-tea which was whipped, the Leaf-tea which was steeped, mark the distinct emotional impulses of the Tang, the Sung, and the Ming dynasties of China. If we were inclined to borrow the much-abused terminology of art-classification, we might designate them respectively, the Classic, the Romantic, and the Naturalistic schools of Tea.”
“The tea-plant, a native of southern China, was known from very early times to Chinese botany and medicine. It was highly prized for possessing the virtues of relieving fatigue, delighting the soul, strengthening the will, and repairing the eyesight. It was not only administered as an internal dose, but often applied externally in form of paste to alleviate rheumatic pains. The Taoists claimed it as an important ingredient of the elixir of immortality. The Buddhists used it extensively to prevent drowsiness during their long hours of meditation.”
The word zen is derived from the Chinese word ‘chan’ or 禅which was derived from the Indian (the original culture of Buddhism) word for mediation ‘dhyaan’ or ध्यान. not surprisingly, the practice of zen is centered around meditation. Breathe in with full awareness. savor the breath. Appreciate it. breathe out, slowly, with equal appreciation. Blow it all away; hold onto nothing. Breathe in with gratitude; breathe out with love. this is what zen monks do each time they inhale and exhale. They do this for hour after hour, day after fucking day, drinking tea to stay awake from boredom in a state of heightened conscious awareness while I operate like a semi-dehydrated camel trying to look for a job in futility during a global pandemic.
Throughout his book, kakuzo presents many interesting theories. Again, without any knowledge, I accept kakuzo’s theories like the connection between tea culture and Chinese historic dynastical ceramic color preferences unquestioningly, “it is interesting to observe in this connection the influence of tea on Chinese ceramics. The Celestial porcelain, as is well known, had its origin in an attempt to reproduce the exquisite shade of jade, resulting, in the Tang dynasty, in the blue glaze of the south, and the white glaze of the north. Luwuh considered the blue as the ideal colour for the tea-cup, as it lent additional greenness to the beverage, whereas the white made it look pinkish and distasteful. It was because he used cake-tea. Later on, when the tea masters of Sung took to the powdered tea, they preferred heavy bowls of blue-black and dark brown. The Mings, with their steeped tea, rejoiced in light ware of white porcelain.”
These interesting side-theories give the reader an entertaining rest as he delves back into the main subject matter of tea in great poetic detail. A lot of rituals in japan are based on Chinese precedents. Kakuzo focuses on the history of tea to show how Japanese customs and ideas developed.
On Tang tea preparation, he writes “the mountain spring is the best, the river water and the spring water come next in the order of excellence. There are three stages of boiling: the first boil is when the little bubbles like the eye of fishes swim on the surface; the second boil is when the bubbles are like crystal beads rolling in a fountain; the third boil is when the billows surge wildly in the kettle. The Cake-tea is roasted before the fire until it becomes soft like a baby's arm and is shredded into powder between pieces of fine paper. Salt is put in the first boil, the tea in the second. At the third boil, a dipperful of cold water is poured into the kettle to settle the tea and revive the "youth of the water." Then the beverage was poured into cups and drunk. O nectar! The filmy leaflet hung like scaly clouds in a serene sky or floated like waterlilies on emerald streams. It was of such a beverage that Lotung, a Tang poet, wrote: "The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some five thousand volumes of odd ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration,—all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The seventh cup—ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves. Where is Horaisan? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither."
For Sung tea preparation, kakuzo writes, “In the Sung dynasty the whipped tea came into fashion and created the second school of Tea. The leaves were ground to fine powder in a small stone mill, and the preparation was whipped in hot water by a delicate whisk made of split bamboo. The new process led to some change in the tea-equipage of Luwuh, as well as in the choice of leaves. Salt was discarded forever. The enthusiasm of the Sung people for tea knew no bounds. Epicures vied with each other in discovering new varieties, and regular tournaments were held to decide their superiority. The Emperor Kiasung (1101-1124), who was too great an artist to be a well-behaved monarch, lavished his treasures on the attainment of rare species. He himself wrote a dissertation on the twenty kinds of tea, among which he prizes the "white tea" as of the rarest and finest quality.
“The tea-ideal of the Sungs differed from the Tangs even as their notion of life differed. They sought to actualize what their predecessors tried to symbolise. To the Neo-Confucian mind the cosmic law was not reflected in the phenomenal world, but the phenomenal world was the cosmic law itself. Aeons were but moments—Nirvana always within grasp. The Taoist conception that immortality lay in the eternal change permeated all their modes of thought. It was the process, not the deed, which was interesting. It was the completing, not the completion, which was really vital. Man came thus at once face to face with nature. A new meaning grew into the art of life. The tea began to be not a poetical pastime, but one of the methods of self-realisation. Wangyucheng eulogised tea as "flooding his soul like a direct appeal, that its delicate bitterness reminded him of the aftertaste of a good counsel." Sotumpa wrote of the strength of the immaculate purity in tea which defied corruption as a truly virtuous man. Among the Buddhists, the southern Zen sect, which incorporated so much of Taoist doctrines, formulated an elaborate ritual of tea. The monks gathered before the image of Bodhi Dharma and drank tea out of a single bowl with the profound formality of a holy sacrament. It was this Zen ritual which finally developed into the Tea-ceremony of Japan in the fifteenth century.”
Having read the Book of Tea, I can now watch japanese tea ceremonies online with a better understanding how the Japanese came to their peculiar tea preparation rituals and ceremonies. Click to see tea ceremony Over the next few posts, we'll delve back into perriand's tea house, wabi sabi, taoist philosophy, and i guess architecture, the main subject of this blog.
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