The World of Caffeine (24 page)

Tea was brought to Japan from China by Buddhist monks more than a thousand years ago. As a result of the Japanese adaptation and codification of the Zen tea ceremony about six hundred years later, the preparation, service, and imbibing of tea became a mirror of a national aesthetic, moral, social, and metaphysical ideal. In the Japanese tea ceremony, taking tea was said to be an earthly finger that “pointed to the moon” of enlightenment, the awakening to which all Buddhists aspired. In modern Japan, with its Western scientific, educational, industrial, and commercial models, the frenzied ethos of the rat race has created a largely urban Japanese market for a new drink to fuel their work and play. As a consequence, while tea use and tea ceremonies abide, coffee has achieved a powerful and growing presence there. In Japan today, the coffeehouse plays the important part it played in Arab countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serving as a place in which people can meet and mingle with others outside of their families or circle of close friends. Because Japanese living quarters are so small, people flee from their confinement to enjoy the pleasant social respite of the coffeehouse, and this resort is even more important to them than to the average American or European.

Of course, old Japan and new Japan exist together, intertwined and inseparable, two aspects of a nation that is in many cultural aspects different from anything European. Yet in the Japanese love of both tea and coffee, we find a twin affection familiar to the West. Tea and coffee, emblematic of the traditional and the new, are enjoyed side by side, there as here.

In the seventh century, Japanese monks discovered tea in China and introduced it to their homeland, where it was used by Zen practitioners in their communal ceremonies and as a curative drug. In the early ninth century in Hei-an-kyo, the national capital, during a long civil war, tea enjoyed a brief early vogue as a comestible. It was not until four hundred years later, however, that, the publication of a book made tea a nearly universal fixture of Japanese society.

At the end of the twelfth century,
¹
Yeisai (1141–1215), or Senko-Soshi, the leader of a Zen sect, planted tea seeds he had brought from China in a friend’s monastary and several other favorable spots around the country. Relying on what he had learned of tea in China and his own experience with its cultivation, Yeisai wrote
Kitcha-Yojoki,
or
The Book of Tea Sanitation,
the first Japanese book on tea. Yeisai’s work, which praised the plant as a powerful pharmaceutical, a “divine remedy and a supreme gift of heaven,”
²
marked a watershed in the history of caffeine use in Japan. Before this book appeared, tea drinking had been confined to monks and aristocrats; after its publication, the practice spread to every stratum of society.

The great influence of Yeisai’s book came about in the following way. The shogun of the time, Minamoto Sanetomo (r. 1203–19), whom gluttony had severely sickened, called on Yeisai to pray for his recovery. But Yeisai did more than that. He sent to the temple for some of his homegrown tea crop and prepared and served the healing brew to Sanetomo. When the military leader promptly regained his health, he asked to learn more about the wonderful remedy. To satisfy Sanetomo’s curiosity, Yeisai copied his book by hand and presented it to the ruler. After reading it, Sanetomo became a tea enthusiast himself, and, from his example, the use of tea as a medicinal tonic rapidly spread from his court into general use across the nation.

Although Yeisai must have observed tea ceremonies during his visit to China, it was Dai-ō the National Teacher (1236– 1303), also a Zen monk, who in 1267 introduced the tea ceremony he had encountered in China’s Zen monastaries to the Zen monastaries of Japan. Following Dai-ō’s lead, succeeding generations of Zen monks continued to practice this ceremony within their own religious communities. Finally, in the fifteenth century, the monk Shukō (1422–1502) employed his artistic talents to adapt the ceremony to Japanese tastes and in so doing originated the first form of
chanoyu,
the distinctively Japanese tea ceremony that is still practiced today. The tea ceremony itself can be illuminated for western readers by comparing it with the dialectal method of Socrates. Through the grammar of this ceremony, the superficialities and illusions of everyday life and practical pursuits were to be broken down and transcended. The ultimate goal for any practitioner of the shared mundanities of the Zen tea ceremony was
satori,
the insight into the ultimate reality.
⁴
Shukō taught
chanoyu
to Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1435–90), shogun and patron of the arts, who helped to establish it as a national tradition. As a result, during Ashikaga’s reign, the practice of the tea ceremony escaped the confines of the monasteries and was discovered by the lay population, especially by the warrior class, the samurai.
⁵

Sen-no-Rikyu (1522–91), a tea merchant by trade, was in some ways the most important, and, by reputation, the best, in a long line of tea masters in Japan. It was Rikyu who systematically expounded the principles of
chanoyu
and designed the features of the modern tea ceremony and teahouse, and who became the progenitor of the three major tea schools flourishing in Japan today. In a country where the profession of tea master has been highly regarded for centuries, Rikyu remains the master of them all. It was largely as a result of Rikyu’s efforts that, from his time forward, tea became a symbol of the national culture.

In Rikyu’s day, three groups shared leadership of the nation: the emperor and aristocrats, the warlords, and the merchants. The emperor on his imperial throne had become little more than a ceremonial prop, in this respect comparable in status to Hirohito during World War II or Queen Elizabeth today. The once-feared shogun, who carried what had degenerated into an hereditary title, had suffered the same fate. The actual leaders of the country were a new breed of military dictators who arose from the ranks of the feudal warlords and conspired with the wealthy merchants to increase and solidify their control of the nation.

Although the warlords wielded military power and the merchants amassed large fortunes, the social heirarchy, in which aristocrats and priests enjoyed the highest status, remained anachronistic. It was nearly impossible for anyone outside of their closed circles to attain the respect and honor, the desire for which, shared even by the wise, has been called by Aristotle “the last infirmity of the noble mind.” In the throes of this infirmity, the warlords and merchants tried to establish their legitimacy by patronizing art and culture. They joined in promoting Zen Buddhism and the Ming Chinese culture in opposition to the native styles cultivated by the aristocracy. Encouraged by these military rulers, monk-artists shuttled between China and Japan, established flourishing ateliers, and, for the first time, through these studios, commoners enjoyed the possibility of advancement based on talent and achievement. The tea ceremony became a central device for laying siege to the aristocratic social edifice. In this era of
gekokuje,
that is, a topsy-turvy world in which the formerly humble ruled the formerly great, the incongruous sight of an illiterate peasant samurai pausing to indulge in the refinement of the tea ritual became increasingly common.

The last Ashikaga shogun was succeeded by Oda Nubunaga (1534–82), strongest of the feudal lords who fought for ascendancy after the shogun’s death. Nubunaga had nearly succeeded in unifying the country when he died in a fire that started while he was brewing tea. After his death, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98), a peasant who had risen to the rank of Nobunaga’s first lieutenant and who is sometimes called, on account of his military and political acumen, “the Napoleon of Japan,” took over his power and completed the work of unifying the country that Nubunaga had begun. Mindful of his low birth and eager to assure the respect of the increasingly important merchant class, Hideyoshi, like Nobunaga before him, was a generous patron of
chanoyu
. In order to effect a tranquil transition of power and in recognition of Rikyu’s fame as a tea master, Hideyoshi reconfirmed Rikyu’s position as curator of the palace tea ceremony and equipage. As fate would have it, this favor was the beginning of Rikyu’s undoing.

Hideyoshi was an avid tea lover and was among the growing number of samurai, or professional soldiers, who, somewhat incongrously, liked to “seclude themselves in the tearoom and meditatively sipping a cup of tea, breathe the air of quietism and transcendentalism.”
⁶
Hideyoshi went further, however, in his vanity, nourishing the conceit that he was a great tea master himself. During each of Hideyoshi’s military engagements, his attendants would erect a portable teahouse on the battlefield. Hideyoshi would then calmly practice the tea ceremony in view of both his own troops and his enemies, inspiring confidence
in the first and fear in the second. Hideyoshi, rembering his humble origins, resented that Rikyu, although nominally his servant, was the more honored because of his family’s wealthy merchant connections and his own celebrated status as the leading tea master. Because the dictator imagined himself Rikyu’s competitor in the practice of
chanoyu,
a strange rivalry gradually developed between them.

Over the years, Hideyoshi’s envy blossomed into paranoia, a transformation nourished by Rikyu’s deep involvement in the complex social and political intrigues of the day, perilous pursuits for a man with no real power of his own. Finally, giving in to a grudge over a real or imagined conspiracy against him or, some say, out of envy over a statue erected in Rikyu’s honor, Hideyoshi determined to execute his friend, though, in the spirit of good fellowship, he granted him the honorable option of suicide, a privilege ordinarily reserved for his samurai brothers.

The story of Rikyu’s death bears an unsettling similarity to the story of the death of Socrates as told in the
Phaedo
. Each was honored for his simplicity, austerity, honesty, integrity, and wisdom, and each, having come into conflict with a despotic civil authority and condemned unjustly for subverting the state, was directed to commit suicide, and each, forgoing the opportunity of fleeing to escape his end, did so peacefully, surrounded by disciples. Just before plunging the dagger into his heart, Rikyu addressed it in brief lines imbued with the mind-bending antinomy so dear to the practitioners of Zen:

Rikyu helped to shape and define every aspect of teaism, the teahouse, the tea garden, and the tea ceremony. Among his important innovations was replacing the character
“kin”
or “reverence,” in the famous traditional hortatory mnemonic
Kin Kei
Sei Jaku,
or “reverence, respect, purity, and tranquillity,” with
“wa,”
or “harmony.” This change signaled a shift from an emphasis on service to one’s superiors to the more Confucian ideal of harmony and mutual obligation. In Rikyu’s
chanoyu
“harmony” referenced the harmony between the participants and the implements of tea preparation; “respect” referenced the respect shown by the participants to each other and the implements; “cleanliness,” a Shinto inheritance, referenced the symbolic handwashing and mouth rinsing practiced before entering the teahouse; and “tranquillity,” which is imbued throughout every aspect of the tea ceremony, referenced the deliberate and attentive exercise of each of its components. Rikyu is also credited with the introduction to the laity of passing the commensural bowl of tea, which Chinese Zen monks had centuries before shared among themselves in their ceremonies and which, before his time, was practiced in Japan only among the priesthood. Some people advance the notion that the rituals of the Roman Catholic Mass may have influenced the development of
chanoyu,
because the tea ceremony became important in lay Japanese life shortly after the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries began proselytizing. According to this view, the increased use of the commensural bowl, for example, is the result of Christian influence.

In a parallel development, tea competitions, which had been widely popular in China during the Sung dynasty (960–1289), became the rage in Japan between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In their new home, these contests were blended with a prior native tradition of
monoawase,
social competitions involving rival presentations of “poems, flowers, insects, herbs, shellfish”
⁸
and other items. To play the new tea game, guests assembled in a tea pavilion, where they were offered four kinds of tea and challenged to determine by taste and scent which were
honcha,
grown at Toganoo or Uji, and which were
hicha,
tea grown elsewhere.
⁹
These tea competitions, although not direct ancestors of the Japanese tea ceremony, presaged many of the elements of what were soon to become the defining rituals of
chanoyu
.