Thoughts on The Book of Tea

When I was a wee lad, I was a bit of an “intellectual.” This was both an affectation, in that I tried very hard to be “smart,” and something that in retrospect was actually true. I was much more into thinking and learning than I was into doing anything productive. And, now, I’ve made a bit of a decent living out of that, so, thanks dorky young Jim!

That course lead me through a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, which did a couple of things to me. First, it made me by and large bullshit proof, as I was contending with some of the greatest bullshitters in history on a daily basis. I was trained to critically assess and question essentially everything, to accept nothing without vetting. Which is a pretty good skill to have in the age of disinformation.

Second, it made me approach things from basic principles (which is in many ways a restating of the first point). No idea, no system, no structure comes from nowhere. There is something guiding it, or which served as a basis, and philosophy is the pursuit of finding those principles so that we can understand. Anything. Everything. In other words, it is asking, “Why is this thing the way it is?”

This very long introduction is a way of getting to the point of saying, The Book of Tea offered me some shockingly good insight into “Why is the traditional Japanese aesthetic the way it is?”

But let me step back a moment. “What is The Book of Tea, anyway?”, you might be wondering. It’s a good thing to wonder. I heard about it from a Japanese podcast I listen to, called Nihon Bunka Radio. It’s a very frequently updated podcast that is basically one guy, who goes by the name of Sebastian Takagi, talking about Japanese literature, culture, and art with a rotating cast of potters, lacquerware artists, and other researchers. Takagi seems to have become recently fixated on this book, and talks about it a lot. And, since it was in English and out of copyright, I figured I’d get it off Project Gutenberg. Here’s a link.

It was written in 1906 by a Japanese man named Kakuzo (Commonly known in Japan as Tenshin) Okakura. It ostensibly addresses Japan’s tea ceremony culture for Western audiences, but what it truly does is contextualize Japanese culture in the grand historical tradition of China, and presents Asian culture as equal to European/Western, in an effort to bridge growing gaps between the two hemispheres.

That synopsis does not do the book justice, though. It is a work of incredible erudition. The idea that a man could successfully write a work referencing Chinese classical poetry and works of Taoist philosophy, tying them to Greek myth and Arthurian legend, and referencing Shakespeare, itself is astonishing. That he is doing it in his second language? And with a level of rhetorical flourish that most native speakers never achieve?

It beggars belief. I mean, read this paragraph, and tell me if you could have written it, in any language:

In the trembling grey of a spring dawn, when the birds were whispering in mysterious cadence among the trees, have you not felt that they were talking to their mates about the flowers? Surely with mankind the appreciation of flowers must have been coeval with the poetry of love. Where better than in a flower, sweet in its unconsciousness, fragrant because of its silence, can we image the unfolding of a virgin soul? The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute. He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the subtle use of the useless.

Okakura Tenshin, The Book of Tea

And the lessons it holds! It explains how Zen ideals inherited a Toaist view of the world, and that Zen’s development in Japan was a direct influence on tea ceremony culture, which then went on to dominate Japan’s traditional art through architecture, pottery, flower arrangement, and even painting. It is a masterful summary of centuries of philosophy that inform the traditional aesthetic of Japan that so many of us still find so alluring. Along the way, it offers lessons on art appreciation, moral rightness, and

It is a key to so much, and is inspiring so much further study (the mark of a truly good book), that I feel the need to trumpet it from the rooftops. It’s short, it’s free, and it’s highly accessible despite the age of it.

Read it!