The idea that the act of sipping tea could be a spiritual practice culminated in the Zen tea ceremony. Here the scrupulous attention to every physical gesture and material detail gave participants an opportunity to step outside the bustle and messiness of daily life, turning their minds instead to the Zen principles of reverence, purity, harmony, and tranquility. Approached in this spirit of transcendence, the tea ceremony held the power to change consciousness. As the seventeenth-century Japanese tea master Sen Sotan put it, “The taste of tea and the taste of Zen are the same.”
