Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the
eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite
amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion
of aestheticism--Teaism. 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.
The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary
acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and
religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene,
for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in
simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry,
inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It
represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its
votaries aristocrats in taste.
The long isolation of Japan from the rest of the world, so conducive to
introspection, has been highly favourable to the development of
Teaism. Our home and habits, costume and cuisine, porcelain, lacquer,
painting--our very literature--all have been subject to its influence.
No student of Japanese culture could ever ignore its presence. It has
permeated the elegance of noble boudoirs, and entered the abode of
the humble. Our peasants have learned to arrange flowers, our meanest
labourer to offer his salutation to the rocks and waters. In our
common parlance we speak of the man "with no tea" in him, when he is
insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama.
Again we stigmatise the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane
tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one
"with too much tea" in him.
The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing.
What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small
after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears,
how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity,
we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind
has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too
freely; and we have even transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not
consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm
stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within
the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of
Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni
himself.
Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are
apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average
Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but
another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the
quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard
Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he
calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on
Manchurian battlefields. Much comment has been given lately to the Code
of the Samurai,--the Art of Death which makes our soldiers exult in
self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism,
which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain
barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the
gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect
shall be paid to our art and ideals.
When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We
Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies
which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the
perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either
impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality
has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese
patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less
sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our nervous
organisation!
Why not amuse yourselves at our expense? Asia returns the compliment.
There would be further food for merriment if you were to know all
that we have imagined and written about you. All the glamour of the
perspective is there, all the unconscious homage of wonder, all the
silent resentment of the new and undefined. You have been loaded with
virtues too refined to be envied, and accused of crimes too
picturesque to be condemned. Our writers in the past--the wise men who
knew--informed us that you had bushy tails somewhere hidden in your
garments, and often dined off a fricassee of newborn babes! Nay, we had
something worse against you: we used to think you the most impracticable
people on the earth, for you were said to preach what you never
practiced.
Such misconceptions are fast vanishing amongst us. Commerce has forced
the European tongues on many an Eastern port. Asiatic youths are
flocking to Western colleges for the equipment of modern education.
Our insight does not penetrate your culture deeply, but at least we are
willing to learn. Some of my compatriots have adopted too much of
your customs and too much of your etiquette, in the delusion that the
acquisition of stiff collars and tall silk hats comprised the attainment
of your civilisation. Pathetic and deplorable as such affectations
are, they evince our willingness to approach the West on our knees.
Unfortunately the Western attitude is unfavourable to the understanding
of the East. The Christian missionary goes to impart, but not to
receive. Your information is based on the meagre translations of our
immense literature, if not on the unreliable anecdotes of passing
travellers. It is rarely that the chivalrous pen of a Lafcadio Hearn
or that of the author of "The Web of Indian Life" enlivens the Oriental
darkness with the torch of our own sentiments.
Perhaps I betray my own ignorance of the Tea Cult by being so outspoken.
Its very spirit of politeness exacts that you say what you are expected
to say, and no more. But I am not to be a polite Teaist. So much harm
has been done already by the mutual misunderstanding of the New World
and the Old, that one need not apologise for contributing his tithe
to the furtherance of a better understanding. The beginning of the
twentieth century would have been spared the spectacle of sanguinary
warfare if Russia had condescended to know Japan better. What dire
consequences to humanity lie in the contemptuous ignoring of Eastern
problems! European imperialism, which does not disdain to raise the
absurd cry of the Yellow Peril, fails to realise that Asia may also
awaken to the cruel sense of the White Disaster. You may laugh at us for
having "too much tea," but may we not suspect that you of the West have
"no tea" in your constitution?
Let us stop the continents from hurling epigrams at each other, and be
sadder if not wiser by the mutual gain of half a hemisphere. We have
developed along different lines, but there is no reason why one should
not supplement the other. You have gained expansion at the cost
of restlessness; we have created a harmony which is weak against
aggression. Will you believe it?--the East is better off in some
respects than the West!
Strangely enough humanity has so far met in the tea-cup. It is the only
Asiatic ceremonial which commands universal esteem. The white man has
scoffed at our religion and our morals, but has accepted the brown
beverage without hesitation. The afternoon tea is now an important
function in Western society. In the delicate clatter of trays and
saucers, in the soft rustle of feminine hospitality, in the common
catechism about cream and sugar, we know that the Worship of Tea is
established beyond question. The philosophic resignation of the guest
to the fate awaiting him in the dubious decoction proclaims that in this
single instance the Oriental spirit reigns supreme.
The earliest record of tea in European writing is said to be found in
the statement of an Arabian traveller, that after the year 879 the main
sources of revenue in Canton were the duties on salt and tea. Marco Polo
records the deposition of a Chinese minister of finance in 1285 for his
arbitrary augmentation of the tea-taxes. It was at the period of the
great discoveries that the European people began to know more about
the extreme Orient. At the end of the sixteenth century the Hollanders
brought the news that a pleasant drink was made in the East from the
leaves of a bush. The travellers Giovanni Batista Ramusio (1559), L.
Almeida (1576), Maffeno (1588), Tareira (1610), also mentioned tea. In
the last-named year ships of the Dutch East India Company brought the
first tea into Europe. It was known in France in 1636, and reached
Russia in 1638. England welcomed it in 1650 and spoke of it as "That
excellent and by all physicians approved China drink, called by the
Chineans Tcha, and by other nations Tay, alias Tee."
Like all good things of the world, the propaganda of Tea met with
opposition. Heretics like Henry Saville (1678) denounced drinking it as
a filthy custom. Jonas Hanway (Essay on Tea, 1756) said that men seemed
to lose their stature and comeliness, women their beauty through the
use of tea. Its cost at the start (about fifteen or sixteen shillings
a pound) forbade popular consumption, and made it "regalia for high
treatments and entertainments, presents being made thereof to princes
and grandees." Yet in spite of such drawbacks tea-drinking spread with
marvelous rapidity. The coffee-houses of London in the early half of the
eighteenth century became, in fact, tea-houses, the resort of wits like
Addison and Steele, who beguiled themselves over their "dish of tea."
The beverage soon became a necessity of life--a taxable matter. We are
reminded in this connection what an important part it plays in modern
history. Colonial America resigned herself to oppression until human
endurance gave way before the heavy duties laid on Tea. American
independence dates from the throwing of tea-chests into Boston harbour.
There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible
and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle
the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance
of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence
of cocoa. Already in 1711, says the Spectator: "I would therefore in a
particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated
families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter;
and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to
be punctually served up and to be looked upon as a part of the
tea-equipage." Samuel Johnson draws his own portrait as "a hardened and
shameless tea drinker, who for twenty years diluted his meals with only
the infusion of the fascinating plant; who with tea amused the evening,
with tea solaced the midnight, and with tea welcomed the morning."
Charles Lamb, a professed devotee, sounded the true note of Teaism when
he wrote that the greatest pleasure he knew was to do a good action by
stealth, and to have it found out by accident. For Teaism is the art of
concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare
not reveal. It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet
thoroughly, and is thus humour itself,--the smile of philosophy. All
genuine humourists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers,
Thackeray, for instance, and of course, Shakespeare. The poets of the
Decadence (when was not the world in decadence?), in their protests
against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the way to
Teaism. Perhaps nowadays it is our demure contemplation of the Imperfect
that the West and the East can meet in mutual consolation.
The Taoists relate that at the great beginning of the No-Beginning,
Spirit and Matter met in mortal combat. At last the Yellow Emperor, the
Sun of Heaven, triumphed over Shuhyung, the demon of darkness and earth.
The Titan, in his death agony, struck his head against the solar vault
and shivered the blue dome of jade into fragments. The stars lost their
nests, the moon wandered aimlessly among the wild chasms of the night.
In despair the Yellow Emperor sought far and wide for the repairer of
the Heavens. He had not to search in vain. Out of the Eastern sea rose a
queen, the divine Niuka, horn-crowned and dragon-tailed, resplendent
in her armor of fire. She welded the five-coloured rainbow in her magic
cauldron and rebuilt the Chinese sky. But it is told that Niuka forgot
to fill two tiny crevices in the blue firmament. Thus began the dualism
of love--two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they
join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his
sky of hope and peace.
The heaven of modern humanity is indeed shattered in the Cyclopean
struggle for wealth and power. The world is groping in the shadow of
egotism and vulgarity. Knowledge is bought through a bad conscience,
benevolence practiced for the sake of utility. The East and the West,
like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to
regain the jewel of life. We need a Niuka again to repair the grand
devastation; we await the great Avatar. Meanwhile, let us have a sip of
tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are
bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle.
Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of
things.