The Book of Tea

by Kakuzō Okakura

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

It has not the arrogance of wine, the self- consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.

Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities.

Confucius said that "man hideth not." Perhaps we reveal ourselves too much in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal.

Among the Buddhists, the southern Zen sect, which incorporated so much of Taoist doctrines, formulated an elaborate ritual of tea. The monks gathered before the image of Bodhi Dharma and drank tea out of a single bowl with the profound formality of a holy sacrament. It was this Zen ritual which finally developed into the Tea-ceremony of Japan in the fifteenth century.