Quotes about Tea

In Japan, I took part in a tea ceremony. You go into a small room, tea is served, and that’s it really, except that everything is done with so much ritual and ceremony that a banal daily event is transformed into a moment of communion with the universe.

The tea master, Okakura Kakuzo, explains what happens:

“Tea ceremony is a way of worshipping the beautiful and the simple. All one’s efforts are concentrated on trying to achieve perfection through the imperfect gestures of daily life. Its beauty consists in the respect with which it is performed. If a mere cup of tea can bring us closer to God, we should watch out for all the other dozens of opportunities that each ordinary day offers us."

"One sip of genmai and life becomes a beautiful sigh."

I am not at all interested in immortality, only in the taste of tea.

there is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.

"Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on."

The definition of the Japanese words wabi sabi has changed over the years. At one time when the Japanese language was young, wabi meant "poverty," and sabi meant "loneliness." During the first major flowering of Japanese culture, "wabi" came to refer to the ideal hermit's life, lived in contemplation of nature and appreciation of the spiritual and aesthetic values underlying a solitary existence. His was a wabi way. The Japanese tea masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries developed a wabi style of tea ceremony as an alternative to the ornate and ostentatious ceremony in which the aristocracy would show off their valuable tea objects and forge political alliances. "Sabi" was refined over the years to emphasize a state of receptivity, fostered in remote natural settings. This positive aloneness was joined to the wabi appreciation of the understated and unrefined to form a phrase with deep resonance for the contemplative mind. People would dream of living in simple enlightened appreciation of nature.