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"Tea: A Mirror of Soul"
Article for Santa Fe Opera Spring 2007 Magazine
by James Norwood Pratt
“Tea:
A Mirror of Soul” takes as its theme a mystery which is as commonplace
in Asia as it is unknown to the West—the secret of that miracle of
vegetation called “tea.” In search of this secret, the composer Tan
Dun takes us from the Japanese tea ritual to its more ancient Chinese
predecessor and then yet further back to the age-old shamanic origins
of tea-drinking presided over by the ghost of Lu Yu himself, for it was
Lu Yu, as author of “the Book of Tea,” who revealed tea for the first
time to the world outside the plant’s habitat in southern China. The
book made him a celebrity in his own lifetime in Tang dynasty China, an
intimate of the Emperor and a revered figure to the commons in whose
eyes he became the patron saint of all the tea in China. That tea is
mankind’s favorite beverage throughout the world today is only one
result of his composing “The Book of Tea.”
Born in 733 AD, Lu
Yu was an orphan who had been adopted and brought up by a famous Zen
master who was also a tea master, tea being one of the chief products
of Taoist and Buddhist monasteries in Tang China in the 700’s AD. Monks
had learned to use tea as an aid to meditation and, unlike common
people, knew how to enjoy and taste tea for its own sake and not as a
sort of soup or tonic. At age twelve, Lu Yu ran away from the monastery
and joined a theater troupe as a performer but before long he found
another mentor, a scholar who gradually transformed the disobedient
novice monk and apprentice comic into a young man of letters. But tea,
a country matter far beneath the notice of cultivated scholars, proved
to be an enduring obsession for Lu Yu and at age 21 he set out to learn
all that could be discovered about it. Questioning villagers, sampling
different leaves and waters, keeping notes and sometimes even dancing
and singing to the trees, Lu Yu spent two years in the vast wilderness
area along the Yang-tze River where it was believed tea had first been
discovered growing wild.
Soon after returning to civilization,
Lu Yu was forced to flee south along with everybody else who hoped to
escape the civil war that consumed north China. In Zhejiang province he
found refuge in a Zen monastery which was presided over by another “tea
monk” sympathetic to his obsessions and well versed in tea cultivation
and production. The two years they spent together were years of
hands-on experience for Lu Yu in writing as well as tea production and
experimentation and at last he entered seclusion to begin composing
“The Book of Tea.” After six years of writing, however, he still felt
there was something missing. He put the book aside, to be shown only to
friends, and found a job manufacturing tea but his literary abilities
changed his life once again. The governor of the province, a respected
scholar in his own right, employed Lu Yu on a major historical and
literary project for the imperial library. In this work he discovered
many historical records and documents dealing with tea and related
matters which would have remained unknown to him if not for the
imperial library project. This historical information was that
“something missing” from his book for which he had searched for so
long. He returned to work on his book and in 780, twenty years after
he’d begun it, completed the first comprehensive compilation of tea
lore ever attempted by any writer in history, the Cha Ching or “Book of
Tea.”
Lu Yu taught how best to enjoy tea with nothing added,
drunk pure so that the three elements of which it consists, Heaven,
Earth and Man, may be appreciated. Heaven is the climate and weather,
earth the location and soil, and man is the human factor in cultivation
and manufacture. Another major variable determining how tea tastes is
water and this too Lu Yu studied and illuminated. Thanks to him, tea
was rescued from both the peasantry and the priests to become one of
the arts of civilized living accessible to all. It is the only plant in
all nature whose effect is both to stimulate and also to soothe the
human system, both physically and mentally. It is the only leaf capable
of yielding so many different appearances, tastes and aromas, depending
on whether it is processed into white, green, yellow, oolong, black or
Pu-Er types of tea, all of them among most healthful substances we
know. And it is one of the age-old foundations of life and culture in
Asia, an unfailing source of health, happiness and sociability from
palace to cottage first in China, then Japan, Tibet, Korea and even
beyond the Wall. Lu Yu’s contribution can only be compared with
Gutenburg’s for the pervasive way it changed life ever after. It is
hard to name another who has contributed as much to human well-being.
Though tea is a secular, not religious, communion, ever since Lu Yu an
indefinable spirituality has clung to tea rituals and attitudes and
been transmitted to every culture which has adopted the drink.
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