Book of Tea

Zen and the art of tea-the classic book about the Japanese tea ceremony that is as much a guide to life. Ritualized, romantic, and historically rich, the tea ceremony is the creation of something beautiful out of the everyday. Originally written in English more than a hundred years ago to be read aloud at Isabella Stewart Gardner's famous salon, The Book of Tea presents the meeting of East and West in a teacup. It explores Asian culture through the history and aestheticism-or "teaism"-of the tea ceremony and also suggests a deep connection between beauty and war, and between flowers and social mores. In its formality, attention to detail, and celebration of beauty and harmony, the tea ceremony encapsulates the Japanese view of life-in fact, the art of life.
For a generation adjusting painfully to the demands of a modern industrial and commercial society, Asia came to represent an alternative vision of the good life: aesthetically austere, socially aristocratic, and imbued with spirituality. The Book of Tea was originally written in English and sought to address the inchoate yearnings of disaffected Westerners. In a flash of inspiration, Okakura saw that the formal tea party as practiced in New England was a distant cousin of the Japanese tea ceremony, and that East and West had thus "met in the tea-cup."