Part 13 (1/2)
_The ”dewy path” to teahouse
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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 ident.i.ty 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.
Unlike its misty origins in China, the use of tea in j.a.pan is well authenticated. In the year 792 the j.a.panese emperor surprised the court by holding a large tea party at which Buddhist monks and other notables were invited to sample a curious beverage discovered by his emissaries to the T'ang court. Tea drinking soon became a fas.h.i.+onable pastime, occupying a position comparable to taking coffee in eighteenth-century Europe, but tea remained an expensive import and little thought was given to cultivation in j.a.pan. This changed early in the ninth century when tea drinking came to be a.s.sociated with the new Buddhist sects of Tendai and s.h.i.+ngon. Under the supervision of the court, tea growing was begun near Kyoto, where the emperor blessed the bushes with a special _sutra_ in the spring and autumn. Tea remained an aristocratic habit for several centuries thereafter and did not become really popular until the late twelfth century, when the famous Zen teacher Eisai ”reintroduced” the beverage upon his return from China. Eisai also brought back new seeds for planting, the progeny of which are still growing.
Chinese Ch'an monks had long been devoted to tea. In fact, a famous but apocryphal legend attributes the tea bush to Bodhidharma, relating that during his nine years of meditation outside Shao-lin monastery he found himself nodding and in anger tore off his eyelids and flung them to the ground, whereupon tea plants sprang forth. There was a reason for the legend. Tea had long been used to forestall drowsiness during long periods of meditation. (A cup of modern steeped tea contains an average three-quarters of a grain of caffeine, about half the amount in a cup of coffee.) The drinking of tea became ritualized in Ch'an monasteries, where the monks would congregate before an image of Bodhidharma and take a sacrament of tea from a single shared bowl in his memory. This ritual was gradually adopted by j.a.panese Zen monasteries, providing the forerunner of the solemn moment of shared tea which became the basis of the tea ceremony.
The j.a.panese aristocracy and the warrior cla.s.s also took up tea, and borrowing a custom from the Sung court, gave tea-tasting parties, similar to modern wine-tasting affairs. From the time of As.h.i.+kaga Takauji to As.h.i.+kaga Yos.h.i.+masa, these parties were an accompaniment to many of the courtly evenings spent admiring Sung ceramics and discussing Sung art theories. Although Zen monks played a prominent role in these aesthetic gatherings, the drinking of tea in monasteries seems to have been a separate activity. Thus the ceremonial drinking of tea developed in two parallel schools: the aristocracy used it in refined entertainments while the Zen monks drank tea as a pious celebration of their faith.
These two schools were eventually merged into the Zen-
inspired gathering known simply as the tea ceremony, _cha-no-yu_. But first there was the period when each influenced the other. Zen aesthetic theory gradually crept into the aristocratic tea parties, as taste turned away from the polished Sung ceramic cups toward ordinary pottery. This was the beginning of the tradition of deliberate understatement later to be so important in the tea ceremony. Zen ideals took over the warrior tea parties. During his reign, Yos.h.i.+masa was persuaded by a famous Zen monk-aesthetician to construct a small room for drinking tea monastery-style. The mood in this room was all Zen, from the calligraphic scroll hanging in the tokonoma art alcove to the ceremonial flower arrangements and the single cup shared in a sober ritual. After this, those who would serve tea had first to study the tea rituals of the Zen monastery. Furthermore, warriors came to believe that the Zen tea ritual would help their fighting discipline.
By the sixteenth century the discipline and tranquility of the ceremony had become fixed, but the full development of _cha-no-yu _as a vehicle for preserving Zen aesthetic theory was yet to come. Gradually, one by one, the ornate aspects of the earlier Sung tea parties were purged.
The idea took hold that tea should be drunk not in a room part.i.tioned off from the rest of the house, but in a special thatch-roofed hut constructed specifically for the purpose, giving tea drinking an air of conspicuous poverty. The elaborate vessels and interior appointments favored in the fifteenth century were supplanted in the sixteenth by rugged, folk-style pottery and an interior decor as restrained as a monastery. By stressing an artificial poverty, the ceremony became a living embodiment of Zen with its distaste for materialism and the world of getting and spending.
It remained for a sixteenth-century Zen teacher to bring all the aesthetic ideas in the tea ceremony together in a rigid system. He was Sen no Rikyu (1521-1591), who began as the tea instructor of n.o.bunaga and continued to play the same role for Hideyos.h.i.+. Hideyos.h.i.+ was devoted to the tea ceremony, and under his patronage Rikyu formalized the cla.s.sic rules under which _cha-no-yu _is practiced today.
The most famous anecdote from Rikyu's life is the incident remembered as the ”tea party of the morning glory.” As the son of a merchant in a port city, Rikyu developed a taste for the new and exotic. At one time he began the cultivation of imported European morning glories, a novel flower to the j.a.panese, which he sometimes used for the floral display accompanying the tea ceremony. Hideyos.h.i.+, learning of these new flowers, informed Rikyu that he wished to take morning tea with him in order to see the blossoms at their finest. On the selected date, Hideyos.h.i.+ arrived to find that all the flowers in the garden had been plucked; not a single petal was to be seen. Understandably out of temper, he proceeded to the tea hut--there to discover a single morning glory, still wet with the dews of dawn, standing in the _tokonoma _alcove, a perfect ill.u.s.tration of the Zen precept of sufficiency in restraint.
Tea ceremonies today are held in special backyard gardens, equipped for the purpose with a waiting shelter at the entrance and a tiny teahouse at the far end. When one arrives at the appointed time, one joins the two or three other guests in the garden shed for a waiting period designed to encourage a relaxed state of mind and the requisite Zen tranquility. The tea garden, known as the _roji_, or ”dewy path,”
differs from conventional j.a.panese temple gardens in that it is merely a pa.s.sageway between the waiting shelter and the teahouse. Since the feeling is meant to be that of a mountain path, there are no ponds or elaborate stone arrangements. The only natural rocks in evidence are the stepping stones themselves, but along the path are a carved stone in the shape of a water basin and a bamboo dipper, so that one can rinse one's mouth before taking tea, and a stone lantern to provide illumination for evening gatherings. The unpretentious stones of the walkway, set deep in natural mossy beds, divide the garden into two parts, winding through it like a curving, natural path. Dotted about the garden are carefully pruned pine trees, azalea bushes clipped into huge globes, or perhaps a towering cryptomeria whose arching branches protect guests against the afternoon sun. Although the garden floor is swept clean, it may still have a vagrant leaf or pine needle strewn here and there. As one waits for the host's appearance, the garden slowly begins to impose a kind of magic, drawing one away from the outside world.
When all the guests have arrived, they sound a wooden gong, and the host silently appears to beckon them to the tea room. Each guest in turn stops at the water basin for a sip. At closer range, the teahouse turns out to be a rustic thatch-roofed hut with gray plaster walls and an asymmetrical supporting framework of hand-hewn woods. The floor is pitched above the ground as in the traditional house, but instead of a doorway there is a small square hole through which one must climb on his knees--a psychological design feature intended to ensure that all worldly dignity is left outside. Only the humble can enter here, for each must kneel in the sight of the others present.
The interior of the tea room may feel cramped at first. Although the room is virtually bare, there seems little s.p.a.ce left after the other guests have knelt about the central hearth. The room is in the _sukiya _style favored by Rikyu, with the walls a patchwork of dull plaster, raw wood, a few _shoji _rice-paper windows, and a small _tokonoma_ art alcove. The only decoration is a single object on the _tokonoma_ dais and the hanging scroll against the back wall. This impression of simple rusticity is deliberately deceptive, however, for the tea room is actually fas.h.i.+oned from the finest available woods and costs considerably more per unit area than the host's home. It is ironic that the sense of poverty and anti-materialism pervading the tea room can be achieved only at enormous expense, yet this deceit is one of the outstanding creations of Zen culture. The room and its psychological impact have been eloquently a.n.a.lyzed by the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki.
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As I look around, in spite of its obvious simplicity the room betrays every mark of thoughtful designing: the windows are irregularly inserted; the ceiling is not of one pattern; the materials used, simple and un-ornamental . . . the floor has a small square opening where hot water is boiling in an artistically-shaped iron kettle.
The papered _shoji_ covering the windows admit only soft light, shutting out direct suns.h.i.+ne. . . . As I sit here quietly before the fireplace, I become conscious of the burning of incense. The odor is singularly nerve soothing. . . . Thus composed in mind, I hear a soft breeze pa.s.sing through the needle leaves of the pine tree; the sound mingles with the trickling of water from a bamboo pipe into the stone basin.1