tea ceremony
The Courtesan Karahama of Yamashiroya Performing the Tea Ceremony, Isoda Koryūsai, late 1770s.
One of the more commonly known examples of an art system, at least among people with a passing familiarity with Asian culture, is the Japanese tea ceremony. Many cultures around the world have formally ritualized the serving and sipping of hot herbally infused beverages. The Japanese have developed what’s known as chanoyo or sado - “the way of the tea”, an artful cluster of elements inspiring for its beauty, complexity, and continuity of practice.
The “way of the tea” involves an astounding mix of so much more than serving hot water with powdered green matcha tea. Imagine highly trained practitioners in beautifully patterned traditional clothes, fine ceramic teaware chosen specifically for the guests, ritualized tea preparation, etiquette, seasonal meals, dessert, and snack pairings, flower arrangements, architecture, painting, calligraphy, poetry, landscaping, space for politics and open discussion, historical and literary allusions, and Zen spirituality all bouncing off of one another in a tiny room for four hours. It’s immersive, transformative, and no one element stands alone.
My wife is from Japan. Each of the two times I’ve traveled there, I’ve had the tremendous honor of participating in a tea ceremony. As I understand it, for people who are more familiar with the ritual and know how to play their role competently (I’m a newbie), it can be a deeply satisfying interaction for everyone, like dancing the tango with a great partner (which I can’t do either, but always looks like a hoot) plus food and drinks in a mini nature-inspired art installation. As a foreigner, participating in a tea ceremony is like entering into another era in which every element inside and out is an aesthetic act.
Tea room layout:
“The idea of the traditional tea ceremony cottage was to create an atmosphere of calm and meditation. Tea cottages designed by the great 15th-century architect Senno Rikyu (1522-1591) were small and contained a bamboo ceiling, bare walls, sliding doors covered with snow-white translucent paper, and pillars made with wood still containing their bark. The only adornment was a hanging scroll with calligraphy or a flower arrangement in the tokonoma, an alcove in a traditional Japanese home intended for displaying flowers or art.
The goal was to create a facsimile of a hermit's hut with a sense of wabi (quiet taste) and shibumi (sobriety). Hedges, stepping stones, a hand-washing basin, and stone lanterns were placed along the path to prepare one's spirit for the ceremony.”
In and of itself, it’s not specifically about activism or changing the world, but it could be. If we consider resilience in the face of climate change and the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence which underlies this 500-year-old ceremony, what can we glean from this practice? Masako Konishi, a tea ceremony expert who is also, it turns out, a climate change program officer for the World Wildlife Fund, has suggested the next Kyoto Protocol conference be held in a Japanese tea ceremony room.
"[What if we] got rid of all the prizes and honors and swords and modern weapons?" Konishi says. "Prime ministers [from] all around the world can get in the tea ceremony room and really talk [about] what should be done. ... Might be a very good idea."
Warlords in Feudal Japan would gather in tents or temporary bamboo huts on the battlefield and participate in chanoyo for a brief but focussed moment of calm before heading out to war. Later, the tea hut was the place to be for sensitive political maneuvers among elites. One can imagine the subtle and oblique communication as guests limited their conversations to the meaning of the scroll on the wall, the seasonal flower arrangements, or the craftsmanship of utensils used in the ceremony all the while basking in the setting and admiring the view into a carefully tended garden. “The ceremony is equally designed to humble participants by focusing attention both on the profound beauty of the simplest aspects of nature such as light, the sound of water, and the glow of a charcoal fire (all emphasized in the rustic tea hut setting)---and on the creative force of the universe as manifested through human endeavors, for example in the crafting of beautiful objects.”
The practice is both restorative and profoundly relational. One feels more interconnected and alert afterward (the caffeine and sweets help). The entire ceremony has a meditative quality but also feels like a private performance. The host strives to offer the perfect experience for each guest for the brief time you are together.
If you removed any particular cup or scroll or tiny sculptural dessert and considered it separately (as one might in a museum), it could inspire and be appreciated for its fine craftsmanship and beauty, metaphorical qualities and function. Together, however, these elements combine to support a complex and transformative experience in which the garden outside the window, the wood-framed window, the wall hanging, the flower arrangement, the flavors and steam rising up off the tea, the graceful movements of the tea host and guests, the elegant pacing of the ceremony all interweave magically. It is so much more than the sum of its parts. Even the way the ceremony is taught, the infrastructure to maintain this practice over centuries, and the training in each of the crafts and arts at every level, plus access to the resins, pigments, fine woods, and biodiversity they each depend on, permeate the community context around the tea hut. The existence of the ceremony helps retain and support a vast community of artisans and farmers and nonhuman relatives, plus the infrastructure required to train practitioners of all ages throughout Japan and internationally.
What can we learn from this that might relate to contemporary articulture? For one, it shows perfectly how food, tea, and a ceremony can anchor this type of experience. I have a hunch that cultural systems need some kind of anchor to hold them all together. It could be some kind of theme or practice someone wants in their lives and then chooses to assemble a suite of elements to support it. It could be very specific or open. Religions are particularly good at this. Think incense, food and wine, costumes, architecture with stained glass, books, music, rituals, spiritual themes, and a couple of hours together in contemplation. Now consider what might help us live a low-carbon lifestyle and adapt or midwife us through the Great Turning. What beautiful systems can we come up with? Here are some variables for all this.
I imagine Japanese calligraphers might well think about how their scrolls might be hung, near a view of the garden, in a teahouse with steam and ceramics and find that collective spirit infuses their aesthetics. Do the experts and craftspeople who make each part imagine the whole? Does the existence of the tea ceremony shape the larger culture? I’d like to think so. I’d also, like to think that the spaces in between all of these elements are another expressive aesthetic act. This is the part that excites me most. It’s a bit like improvisational music or immersive theater, or those perfect moments that pop up now and then where everything seems to hum with meaning and purpose.
Where else have you experienced this in-between space of creative expression? A skilled curator can do this, an MC, a shaman?
