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.
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. It has permeated the
elegance of noble boudoirs, and entered the abode of the humble. Our
peasants have learned to arrange flowers, our meanest labourer to offer his
salutation to the rocks and waters. In our common parlance we speak of
the man "with no tea" in him, when he is insusceptible to the seriocomic
interests of the personal drama. Again we stigmatise the untamed
aesthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy, runs riot in the
springtide of emancipated emotions, as one "with too much tea" in him.