The Book of Tea
by Kakuzo Okakura
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kakuzo OkakuraEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1964-06-01
ISBN: 0486200701
Number of pages: 76
Publisher: Dover Publications
Book Reviews of The Book of Tea
Book Review: The Philosophy Of Tea
Summary: 5 Stars
Japanese green tea has recently been touted as health drinks having lots of nutrious ingredients including catechin and Teanin.
This book by the late 19th century artist Tenshin Okakura whose disciples include Daikan Yokoyama ,one of the painters who well describe the beauty of Mt. Fuji, is not about benefits of tea.
The book by narrating how the tea philosophy and ceremony tradition developed in Japan, tries to take us into the beauty of Japanese minds refined by Tea traditon of Japan and the lure of Budhisim or Taoism upon which the tea philosophy is based. One particular icon representing the tea religion is Rikyu Sen the very founder of the tea phlosophy in Japan. The scene of the death of Rikyu is just brilliantly written.
So for some Japanese tea is beyond health drinks. It is a way of our philosophical backbone.
Verdict: Excellent work describing what Japanese should be proud of
Rating: 90 out of 100 Some of the anecdotes are hard to come by unless you are highly educated.
Recommended for: Anyone who loves the beauty of Japan and Bushido fans.
Summary of The Book of Tea
Minor classic of the Orient. Perhaps the most entertaining, most charming explanation and interpretation of traditional Japanese culture in terms of the tea ceremony. Introduction, notes by E. F. Bleiler. "Provocative and entertaining, this edition is particularly pleasing in format." ? Guide to Asia Paperbacks.
That a nation should construct one of its most resonant national ceremonies round a cup of tea will surely strike a chord of sympathy with at least some readers of this review. To many foreigners, nothing is so quintessentially Japanese as the tea ceremony--more properly, "the way of tea"--with its austerity, its extravagantly minimalist stylization, and its concentration of extreme subtleties of meaning into the simplest of actions. The Book of Tea is something of a curiosity: written in English by a Japanese scholar (and issued here in bilingual form), it was first published in 1906, in the wake of the naval victory over Russia with which Japan asserted its rapidly acquired status as a world-class military power. It was a peak moment of Westernization within Japan. Clearly, behind the publication was an agenda, or at least a mission to explain. Around its account of the ceremony, The Book of Tea folds an explication of the philosophy, first Taoist, later Zen Buddhist, that informs its oblique celebration of simplicity and directness--what Okakura calls, in a telling phrase, "moral geometry." And the ceremony itself? Its greatest practitioners have always been philosophers, but also artists, connoisseurs, collectors, gardeners, calligraphers, gourmets, flower arrangers. The greatest of them, Sen Rikyu, left a teasingly, maddeningly simple set of rules:
Make a delicious bowl of tea; lay the charcoal so that it heats the water; arrange the flowers as they are in the field; in summer suggest coolness; in winter, warmth; do everything ahead of time; prepare for rain; and give those with whom you find yourself every consideration.A disciple remarked that this seemed elementary. Rikyu replied, "Then if you can host a tea gathering without deviating from any of the rules I have just stated, I will become your disciple." A Zen reply. Fascinating. --Robin Davidson, Amazon.co.uk
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