The World of Caffeine (25 page)
Read The World of Caffeine Online
Authors: Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg
Japan
The sense of an infinitely expanded present is nowhere stronger than in cha-no-yu, the art of tea. Strictly, the term means something like, “Tea with hot water,” and through this one art Zen has exercised an incalculable influence on Japanese life, since the
chajin,
or “man of tea,” is an arbiter of taste in the many subsidiary arts which cha-no-yu involves—architecture, gardening, ceramics, metalwork, lacquer, and the arrangement of flowers
(ikebana)
.
—Alan Watts,
The Way of Zen
(1957)
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In the Chinese tea ceremony, which arose from the intermingling of Buddhist and Taoist traditions, the mundane was ennobled by the otherworldly loftiness of aesthetic ideals, and the quest for salvation was brought down to earth by contemplation of the commonplace. Its practitioners had discovered an austere beauty and a code of conduct conducive to
peace and joy and, ultimately,
satori,
or enlightenment. In Japan, the spirit and practice of
chanoyu
maintained this spiritual identity, and, in consequence of the ceremony’s popularity, Japanese art, architecture, and social mores were imbued with the flavor of Zen.
Zen traditions shone through
chanoyu
in the secular spirituality of the tea ceremony itself, which entirely lacked the liturgical character of a service in a church, synagogue, or mosque. However, politics, business, and money were not discussed at the ceremony. Sometimes a friendly exchange about a philosophical topic was acceptable, but the preferred subjects of conversation were nature and art. Discretion was the guiding principle for the participants. As the host brought the tea utensils, offered the guests sweets, and whipped each serving of powdered tea within its cup, ideal conversation consisted of praising the beauty and inquiring after the provenance of the serving implements.
In Japanese tradition, following a Way leads to
makoto,
or ultimate truth. There is a Way of Flowers, a Way of Painting, a Way of Poetry, and many others. However, of all the innumerable Ways, it is the Way of Tea that has affected Japanese culture the most deeply. Over the centuries in Japan, architects, painters, gardeners, and craftsmen have worked under the stylistic guidance of the tea masters in creating the houses, gardens, and utensils of the tea ceremony. As a result of this tutelage, Japanese artists and artisans could not help but impart the flavor of Zen tastes to the surroundings and objects of everyday use, including such ordinary items as kitchen implements, teapots, cups, and floor mats, fabric design, and bottles and jars.
A type of pottery originally devised for the tea ceremony as codified by Rikyu became the source of some of Japan’s most revered art objects. It received its name after Hideyoshi, who, as we have seen, was a great patron of tea-related culture, rewarded an artisan with a gold seal engraved with the word
“raku”
or “felicity.” Because Rikyu’s ceremony was characterized by
“wabi,”
which means “simplicity” or “tranquillity,” this
raku
ware was made in a simple style: Wide, straight-side bowls placed on a narrow base, originally with a dark brown glaze.
Raku
wares were molded by hand, not modeled on a wheel, so that each piece is more elaborately differentiated than is typical for ceramic work. As time went on, the choice of glazes expanded to include light orange-red, straw color, green, and cream. The glazed ware was placed in a hot kiln for about one hour then removed and cooled rapidly, as opposed to the usual process of warming the pottery slowly in a cold kiln. This rapid cooling and, an additional special process unique to the production of
raku
ware, reduction firing, multiplied dramatic, random surface variations in the glaze.
In Hideyoshi’s day, the tea master Hon’ami Koetsu (1558–1637) established a colony of Nichiren Buddhist artists and craftsman northwest of Kyoto dedicated to expressing the philosophy of teaism. It had a major influence on the development of Japanese art and style. Koetsu himself, a man of many parts, connoisseur of swords, landscape gardener, as well as artisan of lacquerwork and pottery, calligrapher, and poet, is sometimes called “the Leonardo of Japan.” He created what is often regarded as the finest
raku
Japanese tea bowl ever made, today esteemed a national treasure. In the words of art critic Joan Stanley-Baker in
Japanese Art,
“Its taut, straight lines taper slightly towards the bottom, the reddish body is covered entirely in a blackish matt slip with opaque white glaze over the upper half, leaving the darker glaze for the bottom: the effect produced by firing is that of gently falling snow. The vigour and grandeur of Mount Fuji are suggested…. The impression is of monumentality.” Today this bowl is part of the Sakai Tadamasa Collection in Tokyo.
From Koetsu’s artist’s colony arose a major school of decorative painting, dedicated to expressing the philosophy of teaism. It later became known as the Korin school, after Ogata Korin (1658–1716), a relative of Koetsu and descendant of the Ashikaga family, who was one of its most illustrious practitioners. Korin is especially esteemed for his screen paintings and lacquerwork executed in an abstract, asymmetrical style and based on the close observation of nature.
No stylistic traditions better illustrate the minimalist motto “Less is more” than the Zen temples and the tea gardens that surround them. In
kare-sansui,
or “dry landscape” gardens, a few stones and sand are all that remain to conjure the sense of the traditional ornaments of ponds, waterfalls, and flowering plants. Zen monks were primarily interested in the balance of form and were therefore, like the Chinese Sung painters, sparing in their use of color. Therefore, unlike English gardens, tea gardens are not primarily designed around masses of color. Despite their simplicity, celebrated sand gardens, each with its own aesthetic character, present changing faces to visitors coming at different times, as they are meant to be experienced successively in rain, sun, moonlight, and covered in snow, and are designed to present themselves differently with alterations in light and shadow.
The most famous sand gardens are in Kyoto, the finest example of which may be Ryonan-ji’s garden, comprising five groups of rocks laid out on a rectangular plot of raked sand, surrounded by a low stone wall and trees. In Alan Watts’ words:
It suggests a wild beach, or perhaps a seascape with rocky islands, but its unbelievable simplicity evokes a serenity and clarity of feeling so powerful that it can be caught even from a photograph. The major art which contributes to such gardens is
bonseki,
which may well be called the “growing” of rocks.
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Among the simplest of these sand gardens is the tea garden, the
roji,
or “dewy path,” the functional garden path that leads to the teahouse. As with much else in the tea ceremony, Rikyu’s designs set the standard for future excellence. A
roji
comprises
the
soto roji,
the outer part near the garden entrance, and the
uchi roji,
or the inner part, near the teahouse. The intention of the Zen designers is not to create the illusion of a landscape, but to pursue a more abstract ambition: to evoke its general atmosphere in a confined space.
The teahouse, the
cha-shitsu,
is a small, one-room hut with a thatched roof, set apart from the main dwelling, featuring a charcoal pit covered with straw mats and paper walls supported by wooden rods. On one side is a tiny alcove, or
tokonoma,
in which is hung a single painted or calligraphed scroll below which is placed a rock, bouquet of flowers, or other simple decorative object. Much care is devoted by the tea master to choosing the object to place in the
tokonoma,
as the contents of this niche are intended to set the mood for the ceremony to follow.
Although the Zen masters lavish great care and hard work on designing, building, and maintaining these houses and gardens, as with everything pertaining to Zen, they are ambivalent about acknowledging their individual intellectual and artistic contributions. Their goal is to execute designs with such a light touch that they appear to have been merely helped, rather than governed, by human agency. With this in mind the Zen architect or gardener attempts to follow the “intentionless intention” of the natural forms themselves, achieving his results in a way that could be called “accidentally on purpose.”
Restoring the Traditions: The Okakuran Campaign
Kakuzo Okakura (1862–1913), curator of Chinese and Japanese art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, undertook a lifelong mission to preserve, purify, and introduce the West to Japanese art, ethics, and social customs. He brought to this work an integrated, original vision of entire artistic movements in China and Japan, and it is said that under his direction “the study of Oriental art attained its first maturity.”
12
The Boston Museum’s collections became world-famous, attracting a small community of Japanese artisans who settled in the area to perform restorations. Today Okakura is most famous for his
Book
of Tea
(1906), a turn-of-the-century apology to the West for Japanese tea tradition as exemplified in the cult or philosophy of teaism. Written in English, it was read by hundreds of thousands of Americans as their introduction to Japanese culture. In adducing the pervasive importance of tea, Okakura mentions a locution that has entered general use:
In our common parlance we speak of the man “with no tea” in him, when he is insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama. Again we stigmatize 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.
13
There is no question about the identity of Okakura’s favorite among the leading beverages:
There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealization…. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.
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Okakura explains the great influence the tea masters have had on the customs and conduct of Japanese life. Preparing and serving delicate dishes, as well as dressing and decorating in muted colors, have encouraged what he believes is the nation’s natural aspiration for simplicity and humility. Okakura states that despite the Western disdain for most Eastern customs, the West has fallen under the spell of
chado
and
chanoyu.
The English ceremony of afternoon tea is no more than a Western imitation of the great tea ceremony of Japan:
Strangely enough, humanity has so far met in the tea-cup. It is the only Asiatic ceremonial which commands universal esteem. The white man has scoffed at our religion and our morals, but has accepted the brown beverage without hesitation. The afternoon tea is now an important function in Western society. In the delicate clatter of trays and saucers, in the soft rustle of feminine hospitality, in the common catechism about cream and sugar, we know that the Worship of Tea is established beyond question. The philosophic resignation of the guest to the fate awaiting him in the dubious decoction proclaims that in this single instance the Oriental spirit reigns supreme.
15
The example he gives is of the English essayist Charles Lamb, an ardent tea lover, who seemed to evince the authentic spirit of teaism. For Lamb “the greatest pleasure…was to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.” As Okakura explains, “For Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal.”
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Nevertheless, like the first boil of tea in Lu Yü’s recipe, Okakura’s passionate prose should be taken with a grain of salt. In his view teaism is, in effect, coextensive with human wisdom, irrespective of whether the wise men who authored the wisdom in question were thinking of, were inspired by, or had even ever heard of tea:
Japanese women performing the traditional tea ceremony, from a 1905 photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942). (University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia, negative #s4–142240)
It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humor itself,—the smile of philosophy. All genuine humorists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers,—Thackeray, for instance, and, of course, Shakespeare.
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The ideals of religious and cultural movements are often poorly realized in the institutions and activities that advance under their banners. For example, Christ’s ideals of poverty, self-denial, and the primacy of the spirit were not well represented in the opulence, self-indulgence, and depravity of Renaissance papal courts. What of the traditional ideals of
chanoyu?
To what extent are they faithfully represented in the current practice of teaism and the tea ceremony in Japan? And to what extent does the use of the drug caffeine play a part in the tea ceremony experience?