About a thousand years ago millions of Chinese, emperors, scholar-officials, businessmen, wandering monks, reclusive priests, lovely ladies, artists and poets, peasants, craftsmen, and tribesmen, started to drink tea on a daily basis. The Chinese writer and scholar Lin Yutang wrote: “More than any other human invention of this nature, the drinking of tea has colored our life as a nation. People drink tea in their homes and in the teahouse, alone and in company, at committee meetings and at the settling of disputes. They drink tea before breakfast and at midnight. With a teapot, a Chinese is happy wherever he is.” (Lin Yutang: 342)
Chinese are known as practical people, they are nevertheless obsessed with the idea of seeking the Tao or the Ultimate Reality in their own terms at the same time. From antiquity, the early Chinese Yellow Emperor sought the Tao from the Taoist Master Guang Chengzi 5000 years ago. Then, 2500 years ago, Laozi, the Chinese Taoist master and philosopher—a contemporary of Socrates—declared: “the Tao can be spoken about is not the ultimate Tao”. The Zen Master Nanquan Puyuan (748-834 CE) spoke: “To remain in an ordinary mind is the Tao.” Subsequently, to all the questions such as “What is the Tao or the Way?” “What is the Buddhahood?” “What is the true human nature?” through unmemorable times, the prompt and single answer still seems to be: “Go have some tea” affirmed by Zen Master Zhao Zhou (778-897 CE).
The Yellow Emperor sought the Tao from the Taoist Master Guang Chengzi in Kongtong Mountain
detail ink on silk, Ming dynasty, Palace Museum, Taiwan
The largest stone statue of Laozi from the 11th century in Qingyuan Mountain, Fujian Province
Nanquan Puyuan (748-834 CE)
Zhao Zhou (778-897 CE)
As ostentatious as it sounds to the Westerners, John Blofeld, one of the Western Chinese scholars who truly grasped the subject, explained: “There is no possible way of dealing with your question in words, but the Way is all around and within you, for you to experience by direct perception.” (Blofeld, 115) The drinking of tea has always played an essential role in approaching awakening for Confucians, Buddhists, and Taoists in China. Thus Lin Yutang had it: “With a teapot, a Chinese is happy wherever he is.”
Unlike Japanese, Chinese never developed an intricate tea ceremony similar to Chanoyu, which, in the eyes of Chinese, is an over elaborate stylization quite contrary to the common Taoistic sense of spontaneity, and the carefree informality associated with the art of tea drinking and Chinese arts in general. However, Chinese did write the first Cha Jing, or the Tea Classic, the most exclusive book on tea as early as the mid 700 AD, and countless books on tea onward. Still there has definitely been a Chinese art of tea.
The Chinese art of tea embraces the history, knowledge, and practice of tea, including medicinal properties, growing and processing, storage, knowing how to brew fine teas so as to extract the maximum flavor and aroma, cultivating a taste for the delightful ceramics and other accessories, learning ancient philosophies, allusions, poems, songs, and stories related to tea. Above all, knowing how to relax and savor a brew in pleasant surroundings, a tea session becomes a short spiritual and energetic retreat from the stress and strain of daily life.
In addition, the Chinese art of tea involves large expenses, the building of a personal teahouse, landscaping of the surroundings, a natural source of good water, and the collecting of highly artistic Zisha tea vessels and historical ceramic tea wares to make a perfect setting. Although naturally only a few people acquire a full knowledge or possession of all these components, it does not stop common people from making the drinking of tea one of “the seven most important matters in life.”
About 1200 years ago, the Chinese poet Qian Qi (722-780 CE) from the Tang dynasty expressed:
Looking at each other without words but drinking tea in the bamboo grove, We are blissful as clouds in the sky. Our worldly desire and worry wan away, Our spirits remain high while cicadas are chirping in the afterglow of sunset.
Hearing the chirping cicadas in the sunset, the host and guest drink tea in the bamboo grove and forget about their words, along with all the mundane worries and desires. The constant battle of our sense of loss or gain dies down in the quiet moment of drinking tea.
About 1200 years later, the Westerner Blofeld from America experienced:
Sitting quietly attentive to the soft crackle of a charcoal fire, to the kettle's song and the sound of liquid being poured from one vessel to another, one may find that these echo the wind soughing among the pines, the musical creak of bamboo or the sound of water falling from a height or chattering among pebbles in a shallow stream. Such sounds arouse a sense of kinship with totality of being, a true appreciation of the Here and Now. (Blofeld, 114)
The time, the place, and the cultural backgrounds are very different, but the spiritual inspirations and the physical-psychological experiences are very much the same. The chattering sound of water in and out of teapots and teacups, the running sound of spring water, and the shuffling sound of bamboo in the sunset can calm all the hubbub and uproar of the world.
The fact is that there is only one-way of a real life: the practice of living. The true spiritual life is only situated in the practice of living, and it must depend on something more solid than faith or belief. True spiritual life is true living, it has to be the direct apprehension and experience of reality that cannot be processed by thinking or conveyed by words, which again only lies in the moment of living itself. As we have seen from both sides, regardless of the cultural differences, the art of tea drinking is a highly poetic and spiritual practice that leads intuitively to the recognition of reality as an intimate relationship with the practice of living. The art of tea drinking illuminates the trivialities of life from moment to moment, so that one grasps directly the reality through the practice of time, place, tea and tea wares.
Blofeld advised that the magic is the special tea attitude:
The key to this attitude is mindfulness. The world today is so full of distractions that mindfulness, which must have come about spontaneously in times gone by, has to be cultivated. Once this has been achieved, a thousand hitherto unnoticed beauties will reveal themselves. For example, there is music in the hiss and bubble of a kettle, the spring freshness in the fragrance of the steam rising from teacups, and a gentle exhilaration—too subtle to be apparent to a distracted mind—results from certain mysterious properties inherent in tea itself. When the mind, having freed itself from the trammels of past and future, is fully concentrated on the Here and Now, a whole range newly of pleasures involving ears, eyes, nose, palate, and mood can be enjoyed by two or three people who have come together to make and drink fine tea. (Blofeld, Preface ix)
The spirit of tea is like the spirit of Tao. Tao flows spontaneously, roaming here and there manifesting itself in objects and events. The spirit of tea flows as time going by, with a tranquil contentment shaping and storing itself within the Zisha teapot. Certainly, a pot of tea can never deliver Enlightenment directly, but its ritual and aesthetic experience shows one that life is not futile, however limited, and at the same time, boundless. The heavenly and the earthly, union and departure, joy and suffering, contentment and craving all are washed away in the drinking of tea, a Zisha teapot thus is a spiritual vessel. As Lin Yutang had it: “With a teapot, a Chinese is happy wherever he is,” we may well say that with a Zisha teapot, one may be truer, calmer, and happier wherever one is in the world of simulacra. It does not imply that tea and the Zisha teapot are the Chinese ancestral almighty prescription for every problem, it may not be helpful for the Westerners, and it may not even be helpful for the contemporary Chinese themselves.
Nevertheless, only if we can sit down calmly having a pot of tea and experiencing the totality of being (not just in our mind, or in our body), a true appreciation of the Here and Now, instead of forcing ourselves into the internal “Mind of War,” or the external promotion of the “Eastern Great Virtue,” or the “Western Democratic Freedom” to the world, we may just simply live in peace with each other.