Explaining the Tea Ceremony Chanoyu s History Aesthetics Philosophy and more

Hello, welcome to Murasaki day. Come on in. The soft hissing of the kettle, the deep aroma of incense, the solemn beauty of a single flower, the invigorating taste of matcha. These are the images that are conjured by the phrase Japanese tea ceremony. While they succeed in capturing the atmosphere of a tea room, there's an infinite depth to this centuries-old cultural practice. I've talked about Chanoyu many times on this channel already, and I plan to dive deep into its history, practice, schools, architecture and more in the future, so it's about time that I gave you my personal introduction to it. So, boil some water and whisk up a bowl of tea. Before we can dive into this beautiful world of aesthetic play, we must first address the elephant in the tea room, and that is the name, or rather names, both in Japanese and English. In Japanese, it has a few names, each with their own nuance and history. First up is Sado, or Chado. This is perhaps the most well-known name for the practice, despite being the newest, dating from the 1600s. It translates directly to the way of tea, or the path of tea. Framing tea practice as a way brings it in line with other Buddhist ways or paths, such as Kendo, the way of the sword, or Kodo, the way of incense. With this, it implies a sense of Buddhist training, practice and discipline. Secondly, we have Chanoyu, translating to hot water for tea, or the hot water of tea. This term actually predates the concept of a tea ceremony as we know it today, dating to at least the 1300s. Originally read as Sato or Chayu, it referred to the act of serving tea in general. As the artistic form of tea became a cultural phenomenon, Chanoyu began to be applied to this more aesthetic tea practice in the late 1400s. Compared to Sado, Chanoyu has a more relaxed, artistic and aesthetic connotation. Lastly, we have Suki. This one is harder to translate as it's a bit of a play on words. The characters themselves literally mean something like hapless fate or varied fate, but the root word is the same as the modern Japanese Suki, meaning to like or have affection for. The resulting meaning of these two being something like elegant pursuits or aesthetic pastimes. This term was originally applied to Waka poetry, but by the late 1400s to early 1500s, Suki was being used to separate the more artistic tea practice from the everyday quotidian serving of tea. Today, this word isn't really used anymore, but it lives on in derived terms such as Sukiyazukuri, or tearoom-style architecture, and Sukisha, an aesthete or tea practitioner. But today, the most common word for a tea practitioner is Chajin, literally meaning tea person. In English, the most common name is the Japanese tea ceremony. But other than for ease of communication to non-practitioners, many Chajin often avoid using this, as in addition to being a mouthful, it doesn't capture the vibe of Chanyu, which isn't ceremonial in the sense of formal celebrations or religious events. While these occasions certainly exist, they are the exception. The second most popular term is the Way of Tea, as a direct translation of Sado. Though much better, it's still quite long and has the same limiting connotations as the original Japanese term. Some other attempts at translation include the Japanese Tea Rite or Tea Ritual or Teaism, but again, these give off a little more of a culty religious vibe, in contrast to the more subtle quotidian zen that permeates the practice. Between English-speaking practitioners is commonly referred to using the Japanese Chanyu, or simply just tea. For both accuracy and brevity, I'll stick to Chanyu. So with that technicality out of the way, we can move on to the real question. What is Chanyu? If you asked 10 different tea masters to define it, you'd have 10 different answers. Chanyu is zen, it's performance art, it's motion meditation, an expression of hospitality, aesthetic philosophy, art appreciation, a gathering of friends, or a spiritual connection between guests and hosts, among other things. This multifaceted nature is part of Chanyu's beauty and a key factor in its longevity and popularity. Of all the countless cultural phenomena that have sprung around tea since its discovery, from Song dynasty tea competitions to the lavish chayote tasting parties of 14th century Japan, none have survived and thrived in quite the same way that Chanyu has. To put it as simply as I can, Chanyu is an encounter between host and guest centred around the service of matcha, in a manner that is steeped in both zen Buddhist and native Japanese aesthetics and philosophies. With centuries of tradition, innovation and refinement, this aesthetic practice has picked up additional meanings and ideals that today have culminated in a complex cultural soup. So what actually happens at a tea gathering? Tea gatherings come in two basic flavours, the chaji and the chakai, often translated as formal and informal tea gatherings respectively. But their differences run a little bit deeper, so let's take a closer look. First, at the older of these two, the chaji. The basic format of a chaji has been around since at least the early 1500s and is probably as old if not older than Chanyu itself. So here's a brief summary with a more detailed explanation planned for a separate video. The host invites a small number of guests, usually one to five, to stroll through the roji or garden, appreciating its beauty before washing their hands and mouths and entering the tea room. There the guests will view what the host has put out for them on display, before the host themselves comes in to greet them and prepares the charcoal for boiling water. The charcoal preparation is known as the sumidemai. Once the fire is lit, the host will typically serve a light meal called kaiseki. This provides some nourishment and allows the host and guests to pass the time while waiting for the charcoal to catch and the water to boil. This light meal is followed by a simple sweet, or okashi. The guests then return to the garden during a brief intermission while the host changes out the decorations and prepares to serve tea. The guests are invited back in and the host serves them koicha, or thick tea. If you don't know what koicha is, I made a video all about it. In short, it's a thick, concentrated form of matcha that's roughly four times as strong as the regular usucha or thin tea that you might be more used to. The specific movements of actually preparing tea, which is what most people think about when they think of a tea ceremony, is called the temae. There are innumerable variations of temae for different seasons, events, guests and utensils, and they also vary across the hundred or so different schools of chanryu that exist throughout Japan. But the basic idea remains the same. First, the host will purify the utensils using a silk cloth called a fukusa. As the utensils are already cleaned beforehand, this step is mostly symbolic, and in the act of purifying the utensils, the host can also purify themselves and their mind. For the chawan, or tea bowl, it is purified by being filled with hot water, then emptied and dried. This warms up the bowl and also allows the host to purify the chasen, or tea whisk, in the hot water. Once the bowl is dry, the host scoops in the tea. For koicha, each guest drinks from the same bowl, passing it around, so one serving for each guest is added to the bowl, typically around three to four scoops per guest. The host then ladles hot water into the bowl and prepares the tea. The tea is then presented to the head guest, who takes it back to their seat. When drinking koicha, the head guest will take a few sips before passing the bowl to the next guest, who does the same. While the other guests are drinking, the head guest can ask the host about the tea that they chose. After all the tea is finished, the host can clean the utensils and present some of them to the guests for haiken, or appreciative viewing and inspection, before leaving the room. During haiken, the guests are free to examine and admire the utensils before the host returns to answer any questions they have about them. Once all questions are satisfied, the host will carry the utensils out of the room and conclude the temai. In the context of the chaji, after the koicha temai, the host will refresh the charcoal before performing another temai, this time preparing thin tea or usucha. As usucha is less intense than koicha, this service of tea tends to be more relaxed, with conversation flowing more freely and each guest getting served one by one rather than sharing a bowl. After all the tea is served, questions answered, utensils cleaned and taken out, the chaji is concluded. This is just the basic format of a chaji and there are many variations. Additionally, the host might abbreviate some parts or add other parts such as incense sampling, flower arrangement or poetry composition. While intimate chaji form the heart of chanyu, they are increasingly rare, as are the number of people who have the time, experience and money to pull one off. The only way to attend a chaji is to be invited to one or to host one yourself. Instead, most people encounter chanyu either through chakai or demonstrations. Unlike chaji, which are always private events, chakai are often public, ticketed affairs with many guests, sometimes over a hundred. Here the proceedings are kept to a minimum, typically just the service of sweets and usucha. As one host can't make enough tea for all of the guests, it's common for bowls of usucha to be made behind the scenes and brought out to the watching guests. Now that you have a general understanding of what happens during a tea gathering, let's take a deeper look at the core philosophies and ideas of chanyu. These can be understood through some of the various sayings and terms that chanyu has spawned or have since become associated with it. Some of these are zen phrases that are commonly brushed onto hanging scrolls or kakejiki, while others are terms that refer to various aesthetic philosophies that have either shaped chanyu or have been shaped by it. Firstly, we have chazen ichimi, tea and zen are of the same flavour. This saying speaks to the interconnectedness of zen and chanyu, saying that they have one and the same taste or spirit. This can be taken both ways, that the core precepts of zen can be understood through the practice of chanyu and that the heart of chanyu can be understood through zen buddhism. Another famous tea saying is ichigo ichie, one lifetime, one meeting. This is perhaps tea's most famous saying, speaking to the impermanence and transience of the world, that each moment, each meeting, each encounter is unique and it can't be and will not be replicated. Even if you had the same people in the same room, it would be impossible to recapture the essence of the previous tea gathering. As such, one should live life in the present moment and treasure each and every encounter, they shall never come again. Another famous tea saying are the four values or principles of chanyu, these being wake, sei and jakku. Harmony, respect, purity and tranquility respectively. These four virtues are seen by many as the core principles of chanyu. Harmony or wa is the positive coexistence and interactions between beings, such as the hosts and guests in the tea room, but it's also the coexistence and oneness with nature as expressed through the seasonality of tea, its utensils and the ingredients that the host will choose for the kaiseki meals. Respect or kei is the treatment of others as equals, extending not only to people but also to the objects and tea utensils themselves. Respect rises out of gratitude, for the host's hospitality or for the gifts of nature. Purity is both physical and spiritual. A pure heart is needed for harmony and respect. The washing of the guest's hands and mouths before entering the tea room is both practical and symbolic. Washing away the dirt and the worries of the everyday world before entering the separate space of the tea world. Similarly, the purification of the utensils at the beginning of the temaya is also the purification of the host's mind. Tranquility or jakku is the ultimate goal of these principles and can only be achieved once all of them are mastered. It is the ideal state of mind and is the atmosphere that we wish to cultivate in the tea room. One phrase you might know even if you have no experience with chanyu is wabi-sabi. Commonly written as a hyphenated term, these two are actually separate and independent concepts that are often conflated and combined, and are used as a shorthand for Japanese aesthetics as a whole. Like every aspect of chanyu, these terms are deep and complex with manifold definitions and nuances, but here's a rough summary. Wabi is the aesthetic of restraint, the beauty of the austere, the simple, humble, mundane and imperfect. It's not the elegance of blossoming cherry trees, but rather the struggle of fresh grass breaking through the earth. Wabi also has connotations of poverty, modesty, longing and rustic simplicity. Sabi can sometimes be understood as the aesthetic of time's effects on the world. The weathering of old moss-covered stone, the green patina on once-shiny copper, the deep tea stains in an old bowl. It's an aesthetic of impermanence, transience and evanescence. Of these, wabi is the most closely tied to tea, with wabisuki and wabi-cha used to refer to the rustic style of tea associated with zenrikyu, which forms the core of modern tea practice. On that note, let's take a quick look at the history of Chenryu. The development and evolution of tea culture in Japan is incredibly long, complex and hotly debated, with much of it still under study and revision. As such, it deserves its own video and probably a series, but for now, here's my brief summary. Tea was first brought to Japan from Tang Dynasty China in the 8th or 9th century, but it wasn't until the 12th century that whisked tea, the precursor to modern matcha, was brought over from Song Dynasty China by travelling monks, who used it as a medicine and a way to stay awake and focus for prolonged meditation. Tea drinking was mostly restricted to monks, nobles and Chinese immigrants until the publication of the first Japanese treatise on tea in 1191, the Kissa-yo-joki, by one of these travelling monks by the name of Yosai. This introduced tea drinking to the growing warrior or samurai class, where it became popular. In the following centuries, tocha, a tea guessing game, became the central focus of chayori-ai and chakai, tea parties and tea gatherings, which grew to be these incredibly lavish and extravagant excuses for rich samurai to show off their wealth of imported Chinese artworks and tea utensils. At the same time, more tea seeds were being brought over from China to plant more tea fields, allowing tea to spread to merchants and commoners in the form of tea stalls and tea cellars, offering cheap tea to the masses. Dispensing with fancy Chinese teaware, they instead used affordable, locally made replicas and swapped imported metal ewers for the ladles, pots and buckets that everyone already had. This added a uniquely Japanese aesthetic to tea drinking, which was up until this point seen as a very Chinese practice. This new Japanese style of making matcha, using a brazier, water container and ladles, was adopted by temples and samurai as well. In these contexts, tea was made by servants in a separate room and brought out to the guests at the samurai houses or to the monks at the temples. What happened next is very interesting, but a bit unclear, and it's the focus of much study and research, including my own. It involved a civil war, a retired shogun and some monks, but by the late 1400s, a new blend of all of tea's cultural backgrounds was being born, a mixture of Zen Buddhism and warrior tea gathering, a meld of Chinese wares and Japanese aesthetics. In this new practice, tea was made in front of the guests rather than in a separate room, allowing for direct interaction between the hosts and guests. The utensils used were a mix between the ordinary buckets and jars used by tea sellers, alongside the lavish imported Chinese art pieces long treasured by nobles and samurai. By mixing these two worlds, the beauty of each became highlighted through harmonious contrast, the otherworldly and the everyday. This was the birth of Chenryu. Some central figures of this time period were Noami, cultural advisor to some of the Ashikaga shoguns, and his grandson Soami. Pivotal in this development was the monk Murata Jukō. Jukō promoted an aesthetic of chilled and withered, intentionally choosing lower quality, imperfect Chinese wares instead of luxurious ones, and intentionally blurring the lines between Japanese and Chinese aesthetics. This shift away from karamonosuki, the taste for expensive Chinese wares, set the stage for wabi or wabisuki. Developing throughout the 1500s, wabisuki reached its zenith with the most famous tea practitioner of all time, Sen no Rikyu, who further revised and perfected it, establishing the essence of what we now perceive as Chenryu. Instead of lavish Chinese temoku, he preferred cheap domestic plain wares such as the rakuchawan that he had a hand in creating. Some examples of Rikyu's contribution to the tea world are the development and promotion of rakuchawan, the creation of the daime-style tea room, and also the promotion of small rooms in general. Rikyu's most famous tea room, Taiyan, consists of only two tatami mats, one for the host and one for the guest. Rikyu's style of tea is often associated with stripping away any unnecessary ostentation or decoration and reducing things to the bare minimum. It's actually quite hard to pinpoint what Rikyu's tea really looked like because a lot of the information we have about it was written much after his death, but I'll get into this in a separate video. Rikyu is often credited with completing Chenryu's transformation from a simple cultural practice into a way or path of Buddhist enlightenment. For a handful of reasons, Rikyu was ordered to commit seppuku or ritual suicide in 1591 by the then ruler of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. However, despite common belief, Chenryu's development and evolution did not end there. Each of Rikyu's students imparted their own aesthetic additions to the artform. Of these, Furuta Oribe was perhaps the most impactful, further developing Japan's domestic ceramic artistry and adding his own aesthetic sense of hyōge or playfulness to Chenryu. Oribe and his students perfected what is now known as bukecha or warrior class tea. However, most modern senses of Chenryu can be attributed to Rikyu's adopted grandson, Sen no Sōtan, and his children who in turn founded the San Senkei, or the three Sen families. In the 1700s, the Sen families, along with other lineages of tea practitioners, began to solidify and codify their practices, moving away from simple master-disciple relationships towards a more centralized hierarchical system. This new system, where the iemoto or head of the family dictates his family's official style of tea, laid down the foundations for the modern schools of Chenryu that exist today. While the San Senkei remain the largest of these schools, there are about a hundred different schools of tea in Japan, each of them tracing their lineage to a different founder. The differences between schools might not be obvious to the uninitiated, but they can vary in many ways, including their aesthetics and philosophies, the movements of their temae, their preferred blends of tea, their styles of whisking, their preferred utensils, and tea rooms. Today, the tea schools are often sorted into three main groups. First are those that descend from Sen no Sōtan. These include the San Senkei, Omote Senkei, Ura Senkei, and Mushakōji Senkei, and also the schools that have branched off of these, such as Edo Senkei. Secondly, we have schools that descend from Sen Dōan. Dōan was the biological son of Rikyū. These include Sōwāryū, Sekishūryū, and Fumairyū among others. Lastly, we have the schools that don't trace their lineage to any of Rikyū's descendants, but rather to Rikyū himself or to his contemporaries. These include the vast majority of the samurai or Bukichā schools, which descend from Oribe. Other samurai schools of note are Enshūryū and Ueda Sōkōryū. Some other famous schools in this category include Uraku-ryū, descended from Oda Uraku, the younger brother of Oda Nobunaga, Sansai-ryū, descended from Hosokawa Sansai, and Yabunouchi-ryū, who trace their lineage to Yabunouchi Kenshū, who shared the same teacher as Sen no Rikyū. Unlike the San Senkei, who survived the transition from the feudal Edo era of Japan to the modern era by suggesting that Chano-ryū be part of women's formal education and preparations for marriage, tea schools in this category, further removed from the Sen family lineage, did not survive so well, as the abolition of the samurai class evaporated much of the school's financial support. As such, these schools have far fewer practitioners than the San Senkei, but some say they are closer to their roots, as they avoided the necessary changes that came with popularization. Of course, I couldn't introduce Chano-ryū without talking about the space in which it is conducted, the tea room or chashitsu. While they might share some features with other traditional Japanese rooms or washitsu, chashitsu are built specifically for Chano-ryū and have a few key details. Entering a tea room usually means passing through a michiriguchi, a small door that forces everyone to lower their head and acts as a gateway between the everyday world outside and the separate world of tea within. Crawling through this narrow space has the effect of making even the smallest tea room feel expansive. On the topic of size, tea rooms are typically classified in terms of how many tatami mats there are, as these come in standardized sizes but also dictate how the room is laid out and used. The most common size is the yōjō-han, or four and a half mats. The earliest surviving yōjō-han is the dōjinsai at Ginkaku-ji, or Silver Pavilion, in Kyoto, and this belonged to retired shogun Ashikage Yoshimasa and was built in 1486. Rooms larger than four and a half mats are called large rooms, or hiroma, and unsurprisingly, rooms smaller than this are called small rooms, or koma. By manipulating the size of the room, the position of the windows, the way the mats are laid out, and the finishing touches such as the wallpaper and choices of wood, the designer of a tea room can create a particular atmosphere, such as the dark, intimate, and rustic atmosphere of Rikkyu's two-mat room, Taiyan, or the bright, airy, and elegant four and three-quarter mat room, Yosuite, attributed to Kobori Enshu. Yes, I did say three-quarter mats, but that is a topic for a dedicated video on chashitsu. However, one last thing I must mention about tea rooms is perhaps their most important feature, the toko, or tokonoma, which is the alcove that houses items for aesthetic and spiritual appreciation, such as Buddhist paintings, zen calligraphy, or flower arrangements. As it is a space of honour and respect, it is the highest ranking place in a tea room and is often the central focus. That concludes my basic introduction to chanryū, and if you've made it this far into the video, well done. I already have a few videos that go over some of the made utensils that are used in the tea room, and some specifically about chawan or chassen. Of course, we have videos that dive deep into the tea side of things, but if you want to see more cultural videos like this, please make sure to leave a like and subscribe. Chanryū is my personal passion, as you can probably tell by the length of this video. And if you have a specific area you want to see a more detailed video about, such as tea room architecture, history, or deep dives into more ceramics, let me know in the comments down below, because I'm sure that I'll also want to make a video about it. Thank you very much for watching, and if you haven't already, make sure you make another bowl of tea.