Kirstine's Reviews > The Book of Tea

“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.”

It’s not a book about tea, in the sense that it’s not about how to drink your tea, what sorts you can get and what fancy properties they have and should you put milk in it or not. However, it does explain why this golden beverage might hold such sway over us, even today:

“There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self- consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.”

Having been written in 1906 you’d think it’d be a bit dated, but it could just as well have been written today. What Okakura has to say about art, philosophy, nature, and the gap between Eastern and Western civilizations, and how to bridge it, is as relevant and as spot on today as it was a hundred years ago. It’s a bit scary really, but goes to show, perhaps, how delicate a thing it is to understand a different culture, and how delicate and slow you have to go in order not to ruin it. He simply does it all by talking about tea, and how it can help you understand all these things.

A few teasers on some of the things he has to say about art;

“We must remember, however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies. Our finite nature, the power of tradition and conventionality, as well as our hereditary instincts, restrict the scope of our capacity for artistic enjoyment. Our very individuality establishes in one sense a limit to our understanding; and our aesthetic personality seeks its own affinities in the creations of the past. It is true that with cultivation our sense of art appreciation broadens, and we become able to enjoy many hitherto unrecognised expressions of beauty. But, after all, we see only our own image in the universe,—our particular idiosyncracies dictate the mode of our perceptions. The tea- masters collected only objects which fell strictly within the measure of their individual appreciation.”

human nature, our culture and nature itself;

“Scratch the sheepskin and the wolf within us will soon show his teeth. It has been said that a man at ten is an animal, at twenty a lunatic, at thirty a failure, at forty a fraud, and at fifty a criminal. Perhaps he becomes a criminal because he has never ceased to be an animal. Nothing is real to us but hunger, nothing sacred except our own desires. Shrine after shrine has crumbled before our eyes; but one altar is forever preserved, that whereon we burn incense to the supreme idol,—ourselves. Our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him. We boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is Matter that has enslaved us. What atrocities do we not perpetrate in the name of culture and refinement!”

philosophy;

“The usefulness of a water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, not in the form of the pitcher or the material of which it was made. Vacuum is all potent because all containing. In vacuum alone motion becomes possible. One who could make of himself a vacuum into which others might freely enter would become master of all situations. The whole can always dominate the part.”

and so on, and so on. It is on the whole a very enlightening read on many subjects, all of them centered around tea and its many abilities.

“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.”

So if you want to know about the history of tea, the cultural significance it had and still has, and the philosophy that surrounds it and that it’s cultivated through the ages, then this is what you need to read.

Even if you are an avid coffee drinker and would never dare look upon a cup of tea, then you will learn a thing or two from this.