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| "Tea - A Mirror of Soul" |
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“Lu Yu & Tea: A Mirror of Soul”
(Introduction for SANTA FE OPERA premiere production of "Tea--Mirror of Soul" by Tan Dun)
by James Norwood Pratt
“The spirit of tea is a greeting that reaches out and seeks the
good in others. It is the wisdom that comes from applying knowledge
each moment in response to circumstances. It is the host inviting a
guest to share a bowl of tea.”
Sen Soshitsu XV
Urasenke School Grand Master
Once
upon a time in China a man discovered a Spirit inhabiting a plant. The
Spirit entered every one who imbibed the nectar of this miracle of
vegetation the Spirit inhabited. If you were cold it would warm you, if
you were hot it would cool you, if you were weary it would refresh you,
if you were stressed it would relax you. It protected you against
countless ills and ailments and provided endless hours of leisure,
friendship, sociability and conversation. What amazed the man most of
all was how the leaf and nectar--body and blood--of this plant affected
his senses in myriad ways with many different colors and forms and
flavors and aromas and sometimes transported him beyond the realm of
the senses altogether.
This vegetative Spirit gradually became
the man’s Familiar Spirit and from then on they remained inseparable.
Now this was a man with no other calling except to give utterance to
what exists in realms no word has ever entered. He longed to express
somehow the mysteries his Familiar Spirit revealed to him daily, but
how could he hope to succeed--how convey goodness the mouth discovers,
how boiling kettles sound like wind in the pines? Aided by the Spirit’s
patient inspiration, he found words or rather, since he was Chinese,
characters---just over seven thousand--which concealed as much meaning
as they revealed and thus perfectly expressed the gospel and mystery of
tea. After perhaps 26 years in the writing, Lu Yu completed “The Book
of Tea” about the Chinese Year 3458 or 760 AD.
Lu Yu was not
China’s first tea lover. The tea plant had already been known for over
three thousand years. At first it was food and medicine and then a
tonic of sorts before becoming a beverage. Tea became a drink only by
degrees, therefore, over centuries, and gradually the drink made from
the succulent leaf of this Camellia, like the plant itself, spread from
China’s interior down the length of the Yang-tse River to the Yellow
Sea. Like the farmers, Taoist and Buddhist monasteries throughout this
vast stretch of China took up tea cultivation much the way Roman
Catholic monastics planted the wine grape everywhere they went in
Europe. In Asian culture we may as well consider tea a sort of Taoist
and Buddhist communion: A shared yet wordless transmission of peace: A
Mirror of Soul.
An orphan raised in a Zen monastery where he
obviously did chores in the tea garden, Lu Yu recognized over a
thousand years ago that tea--like wine--is one of those agricultural
products which at its best becomes a work of art. Tea at its best was
what Lu Yu’s “Book of Tea” was all about--where it’s found and
produced, how to recognize and choose it, and--trickiest of all-- the
best way of preparing it for maximum enjoyment. Lu Yu treated these
“country matters” with a poet’s refinement and his primer of pleasures
made him a celebrity, as these things were measured in Tang-dynasty
China. Images of him soon appeared in every tea establishment, like
statues of a patron saint, and if business was bad the saint’s image
might be resentfully dowsed with boiling water. Mainly business was
good, however, as Chinese people increasingly discovered tea not as a
soup or salad or tonic but as “pure drinking.” Within decades the
practice grew so popular the emperor was able to tax it and non-Chinese
wanted to learn it. Tang emperors began to export tea beyond the Wall
in exchange for horses. Not too long after Lu Yu’s death, one of the
border tribes offered a thousand horses for a copy of “The Book of Tea”
itself and the Emperor of Japan demanded Japanese subjects present him
Tribute Teas such as the Tang Emperor received.
In slow motion,
therefore, tea exploded across Asia much the way Gutenburg’s invention
of printing was to explode across Europe--and nothing was ever to be
the same again. Consider the countless number of times per day print in
some form enters our lives. This is exactly how Asian people have
experienced tea ever since Lu Yu and this is why they esteem him a
culture hero, perhaps one of the immortals. Thanks to Lu Yu, simple,
healthful tea became one of the arts of civilized living for all
Asians, from the village to the palace. And just as wine as a cash crop
evolved from antiquity’s terracotta amphorae to the medieval barrel and
Renaissance invention of the bottle, so too tea evolved with time as
ways to process tea leaf and prepare the drink continued to develop and
change. Under the Tang dynasty Lu Yu boiled tea leaf, but Sung dynasty
tea lovers learned how to powder the leaf and whip it with a bamboo
whisk in hot water that you drank with the leaf in suspension the way
Japanese drink Matcha, the powdered tea used in chanoyu or “Japanese
tea ceremony.” This Sung-era style of tea was preserved in Japan as if
in a time capsule while the Mongols destroyed Sung tea culture utterly
in China. By the time the Ming drove out the Mongols in the 1300’s,
China was producing loose leaf tea like ours today while Japan
persisted in the ancient way of tea manufacture, preparation and
ceremony. Both the teapot and the practice of steeping our familiar
loose tea leaf are thus relatively recent Chinese innovations.
Japan’s
chanoyu, an aristocratic “high tea” in rustic disguise, acquired its
final form from the Zen practitioner Sen no Rikyu, a Japanese
contemporary of Shakespeare’s. Rikyu’s cult of tea may appear insanely
refined to outsiders but it remains the ultimate practice of
mindfulness—tea as medium for a religion-free form of Buddhism
practiced long before Japan’s first encounter with a teapot. It seems
only fair to conclude, however, that In Japan it’s the ceremony that’s
the most important aspect of any tea ceremony, while in China the tea
itself remained most important. China developed the guywan, or covered
cup method of steeping and imbibing leaf tea, and also invented the
teapot. The first teapots were tiny earthenwares used for steeping
oolong tea leaf, a new type of semi-oxidized tea. These were the new
ways of tea prevailing in China by the time Europeans made the first
direct contacts by sea with China and, inevitably, got their first sip
of tea. In 1608 the first tea ever sent for sale in Europe arrived in
Amsterdam, half a world away from its origin. Tea had already been
known over 4000 years in Asia, therefore, when the West got its first
taste just 400 years ago.
Tea, in a short four centuries, has
now drenched every culture on earth: Mankind drinks more tea than any
other beverage but water following traditions that range from Japanese
tea ceremonies to Russian samovars to Scottish scones in the
afternoon---India chai, China green, Tibet butter tea—you name it! The
heirs to all these traditions are America’s new tea lovers. They have
forced our sleepy old tea trade to wake up and made the US the most
interesting tea scene in the world today. Tea sales, which are growing
over 100 percent per decade and will reach US$8 billion in 2008, show
that America is on its way to becoming a tea-consuming society in the
same way it has recently become a wine-consuming society. Americans
today are like Lu Yu’s contemporaries in Tang dynasty China: We also
are now ready to discover tea as an everyday Necessity and Work of Art.
The world-wide progress of this famous plant has always
required a Lu Yu and a “Book of Tea.” As times and teas changed in
China, successors authored almost a hundred re-writes of “the Book of
Tea” to describe new ways of enjoying the new forms of tea.
Apparently, tea has from the first been a practice whose enjoyment must
be learned from a guru, a foreign practice from somewhere beyond the
border, like an acquired language or art or skill. And in every culture
it has entered, tea has inspired the best loved of all the applied
arts---tea wares. Whether you think of Chinese porcelains, Japanese
earthenware, or English silver, it seems safe to say the cult of tea
has produced the world’s finest artisan craftswork---objects intended
for us to hold as well as to behold, things to love.
Each
culture learned ways to love teatime as a moment of relaxation amidst
the demands of daily life and tea as the ultimate leafy green vegetable
and the most healthful beverage known. But from the ancient Asian point
of view—a Lu Yu might say—there is more to tea than the mental and
physical refreshment it confers. Tea is also a sort of spiritual
refreshment, an elixir of clarity and wakeful tranquility. Respectfully
preparing tea and partaking of it mindfully creates heart-to-heart
conviviality, a way to go beyond this world and enter a realm apart. No
pleasure is simpler, no luxury cheaper, no consciousness-altering agent
more benign. In every culture, taking tea somehow evolves into a ritual
re-enactment of communion, a spiritual practice in other words, and by
gradual degrees this becomes a Way—a Mirror of Soul-- in its own right.
The first priest of this secular Way of Tea was the author of China’s
unfathomable “Book of Tea” Lu Yu.
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