The Book of Tea

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a drink. China made it poetry in the eighth century; in the fifteenth, Japan raised it into something close to a religion, which Okakura calls Teaism.

His definition is worth reading slowly. Teaism, he says, is founded on adoring the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.

Notice where he puts the beauty. Not in a temple, not on a mountain, not in some better life that starts once the dishes are done. It sits in the middle of the ordinary: the tired afternoon, the kettle that needs scouring, the guest who arrives late. Teaism does not ask you to escape the day you actually have. It asks you to find the one thing in it worth adoring, and to take that thing seriously.

Then comes the line the whole book hangs on. Teaism is essentially a worship of the Imperfect.

It is easy to hear that as a pretty paradox and move on. It is more practical than that. Perfection is not on offer in this life, and a practice that waits for it never begins. So Teaism aims at something smaller and truer: it is, in Okakura's words, "a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life."

The word to hold on to is tender. The tea-master is not resigned, and he is not settling for second best. He knows the afternoon will end and the guests will go home, and he makes something whole out of exactly that.

When Okakura calls Teaism "a worship of the Imperfect", what is he claiming?

• That no one should try to make beauty, since every attempt falls short
• That something beautiful can be made within life's limits, not after them✓Correct answer
• That everyday life is too sordid for beauty, so tea offers a way out of it
• That the Japanese ceremony is an imperfect copy of an older Chinese rite

He calls Teaism a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in an impossible life: you make something whole inside the limits instead of waiting them out. The escape reading gets it backwards, since the beauty is found among the sordid facts, not away from them.

If this sounds like a taste for pretty objects, Okakura heads you off. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism, he says, because ethics and religion travel inside it: a whole view of people and nature.

Then he puts it in plain terms. It is hygiene, because it enforces cleanliness. It is economics, because it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly. And it is moral geometry, because it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.

That last phrase is the one to keep. Sitting with one bowl in a small room is an exercise in knowing your size. And because simplicity costs so little, anyone can practise it, which is why he says tea makes all its followers aristocrats in taste.

Okakura describes the Philosophy of Tea as a form of economics, because it finds comfort in simplicity rather than in what is costly.

True✓Correct answer

True. He lists tea as hygiene, economics and moral geometry at once, and the economics is exactly this. A reader expecting pure aesthetics tends to smell a trap here, but the claim is his, stated flatly.

Okakura insists this was never a hobby for a few refined people. In Japan, he says, tea shaped the home and its habits, dress and cooking, porcelain, lacquer, painting, even literature.

It moved out of noble houses and into the abode of the humble. Peasants learned to arrange flowers; the poorest labourer learned to offer his greeting to the rocks and the water.

Take that last image literally for a moment. A man who owns nothing of value stops on his way somewhere and acknowledges a stone. Nothing is bought and nothing is displayed, and yet something has been appreciated. That is the democracy Okakura means: taste is not a question of what you can afford, but of whether you notice what is already in front of you.