The Japanese art is impossible to understand as long as customs and practices of its own people are incompletely discovered. It could be said, according to “The Book of Tea” by Okakura Kakuzō, that a philosophy, an ideal of beauty, a way of life stems from that beverage and related ceremonial use. Therefore, if someone does not acknowledge the tea ceremony – Cha no yu ( 茶の湯 ), as it is put in Japan, that means “hot water for tea” -, he could never understand the Japanese art.
This is about a traditional Zen art whose precise rules were encoded, namely collected and set, at the end of the sixteenth century by Sen no Rikyū, a Zen Buddhist monk which was a prominent tea master in the history of Japan. Sen no Rikyū’s tea ceremony is aligned with Zen monks Murata Shukō and Takeno Jōō, respectively lived in the 1500s and in the first half of 1600s.
The basic concept is referred to as wabi-cha, which translates as ritual simplicity and self-restraint, thus contrasting the luxury beauty promoted by daimyo and samurai Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1600s. Accordingly, can we argue that the tea ceremony codified by Sen no Rikyū has a political value? It can be, but it is not meaningful enough in relation to this essentially spiritual exercise.
The tea ceremony can be carried out according to different styles. This is the case for the disposition, which takes account of seasonal variations, of tea boiler. The Japanese people’s love of nature in its generic sense, and of the changing pattern of the seasons in particular, remarkably affects their artistic creativity.
Tea drinking is ruled according, on one hand, to simple canonical forms and to complex and lengthy ones on the other. In any case, use is made of the matcha, a sort of powdered green tea administered in hot water after being gently stirred by a suitable bamboo beater. The given result is rather a suspension than an infusion, in the sense that the tea powder is ultimately taken with water. The fact that this ritual also claims an aesthetic value can be appreciated observing, inter alia, how refined is the search for the green shade of the tea color in matching with the cup color.
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