The Book of Tea
Okakura Kakuzō published this English-language essay in 1906. It connects the Japanese tea ceremony with Taoism, Zen, architecture, flowers, and the appreciation of art.
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The opening
I
The Cup of Humanity
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. 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.
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. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste.
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About this edition
- The words
- The author's text, copied word for word.
- Copied from
Standard Ebooks; local corrected EPUB source, dedicated under CC0; its imprint and colophon identify the underlying transcription and digitized print sources.
- Left out
- The title page and opening pages before chapter 1, in 2 places
- Pictures and their captions
- Standard Ebooks' imprint
- Notes and pages added by translators, editors or publishers
- Note numbers and their links
- Notes about a stage production
- Standard Ebooks' public-domain dedication page
- Kept as written
Written in 1906: its comparisons of Eastern and Western peoples and its account of ritual death are kept as the author wrote them.