The drinking of tea has always been associated with Zen, and from the earliest times the monks have used it to keep themselves awake during long periods of meditation. There is a gruesome legend as to its origin which tells that Bodhidharma once fell asleep during his meditations and was so furious that he cut off his eyelids. Falling to the ground they at once turned into the first tea-plants, and ever afterwards the drink made from its leaves has kept off sleep and purified the soul.
The elements of the tea-ceremony were brought to Japan from China, where the Zen monks used to pass a large bowl of tea from one to another while sitting in the Meditation Hall, and the T’ang poet Luwuh in his famous work the Cha-king (The Scripture of Tea) laid the foundations of the ritual and philosophy of tea. Okakura Kakuzo writes that he “was born in an age when Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism were seeking mutual synthesis. The pantheistic symbolism of the time was urging one to mirror the Universal in the Particular. Luwuh saw in the Tea-service the same harmony and order which reigned through all things.” Another poet of the same period said of tea:
The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my inmost being… The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration – all the wrongs 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. Where is Heaven? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.
Such were the feelings that became associated with tea-drinking, and by the time it came to Japan it was no mere commodity; it was something much more than a drink made from dried leaves, for a Zen master could say, “Mark well that the taste of Zen (Ch’an) and the taste of the tea (Cha) are the same.”
This was not only a pun; gradually all the aesthetic ideals of Zen had attached themselves to the ceremony of drinking tea, for while the monks used it to refresh themselves during their hard struggles with the Koan, they began to accompany it with all those things which bring quietness and peace of mind. It was not long before the practice of drinking it in the Meditation Hall was discontinued, and instead a special room was set apart for the purpose. From this evolved the Tea House (Chaseki), the “Abode of Emptiness,” a frail paper structure with a simple roof of rice-straw, hidden away in a corner of the garden.
In this way the tea-ceremony became recognised as the most satisfactory way of refreshing the spirit; essentially it was a temporary escape from all cares and distractions – a period of rest and contemplation, of absorption in all that was beautiful in nature and art.
In the tea-ceremony we find Zen in its most peaceful aspect, expressed as the highest spiritual freedom and detachment, as an absolute contentment with the natural sufficiency of things. It was an expression of poverty, of separation from earthly belongings, and its basic principles were an insistence on the evanescence of the objective world, a profound love of nature, of her unending changes, her infinite variety, her avoidance of repetition and symmetry, and lastly the indefinable quality called yugen, which is described as “the subtle, as opposed to the obvious; the hint, as opposed to the statement.”
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The above excerpts were taken from Alan Watts’ book The Spirit of Zen.
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