The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura. The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo (1906) is a long essay linking the role of chado (teaism) to the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Japanese life. 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 ...
Read More
The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura. The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo (1906) is a long essay linking the role of chado (teaism) to the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Japanese life. 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.
Read Less
Add this copy of The Book of Tea to cart. $6.41, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2018 by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.
