The Book of Tea (Stone Bridge Classics)
by Kakuzo Okakura
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kakuzo OkakuraEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-04-01
ISBN: 1933330171
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Book Reviews of The Book of Tea (Stone Bridge Classics)
Book Review: For the love of tea
Summary: 5 Stars
This slim little book is not just an illustration of the history and preparation of tea, or a paean to a shared love of boiled leaves through the ages, although you'll find both inside. It's also a window into the culture and history of household ritual, of humble yet uplifting custom built around food that reaches back beyond a thousand years and into our own homes today. Everyone who has found solace in preparing a cup of tea will find this book speaks to them, and will find themselves touching and understanding something of the lives of people from the Victorian British to the ancient Chinese. The tradition of tea, as tradition is meant to, turns history into continuity.
Summary of The Book of Tea (Stone Bridge Classics)
?A seminal guide to Asian life and thought. . . . Very highly recommended.??Midwest Book Review
The classic 1906 essay on tea drinking, its history, aesthetics, and deep connection to Japanese culture. Kakuzo Okakura felt ?Teaism? could influence the world: ?Tea with us becomes more than an idealisation of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life.?
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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