The Book of Tea

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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9781600961984
ISBN: 1600961983
Item Dimensions:2285028550
Label: Waking Lion Press
Languages:EnglishUnknownEnglishOriginal LanguageEnglishPublished
Manufacturer: Waking Lion Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 90
Publication Date: August 03, 2006
Publisher: Waking Lion Press
Release Date: August 03, 2006
Studio: Waking Lion Press

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
This intriguing and enlightening volume discusses the history and meaning of the tea ceremony. A must-read for anyone who is interested in Japanese culture. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 5.5-by-8.5-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Amazon.com Review:
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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