Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage

I'm dedicating January 2022 to Japanese culture (and am even trying to learn some Japanese). I'm also a self-confessed tea monster, and after reading the opening line above I was intrigued by the concept of an entire book dedicated to the topic. How?!

The Book of Tea is a short meditation on tea, published in 1906 and comprising seven chapters and 82 pages in my library-sourced edition. Its Japanese author wrote the text in English, and it is aimed squarely at informing the Western reader of the history of tea's popularity in China and Japan, and of the philosophy and ritual around the Zen-inspired Japanese tea ceremony.

"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 ... 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."

There are additional chapters on the design and layout of the tearoom (sukiya) itself, on art appreciation and on flowers, so its a guide to aesthetics, too. There is even a formal appreciation of the sound of the boiling kettle on its bed of carefully arranged pieces of iron.

A single picture or piece of art is placed inside the tearoom, and the author notes the strange practice of stuffing Western homes with pictures:

One cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time, a real comprehension of the beautiful being possible only through concentration upon some central motive ... To a Japanese, accustomed to simplicity of ornamentation and frequent change of decorative method, a Western interior permanently filled with a vast array of pictures, statuary, and bric-a-brac gives the impression of mere vulgar display of riches.

Even for me, in my South London terrace, a world away from a 19th century Japanese tea ceremony, there are ritualistic and meditative elements to tea-making and tea-drinking (and in 1946 George Orwell wrote a whole essay on making the perfect cup). The act of making tea and waiting for it to cool allows for a pause from work or general busy-ness and for a temporary release from the strictures of time and everyday pressures, like smoking a cigarette did when I did that.

Brilliantly, Kakuzo Okakura was director of the Tokyo Fine Art School, and would apparently arrive for work each day on a white stallion, dressed in a white robe (Okakura, not the horse).

As you can probably imagine, The Book of Tea doesn't exactly race along, despite its length, but I must say it is extremely quotable.

"Lu T'ung, a T'ang 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 immortals. The seventh cup - ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves'."