By Will Lerner, Communications Manager for Portland Japanese Garden & Japan Institute
Previously we explored the history and meaning of “wabi sabi,” a term that has grown in popularity but is deeply nuanced. To learn more, click here. In this article we explore the relationship between tea and wabi sabi, a connection that can’t be overlooked when seeking understanding of this fascinating aspect of Japanese culture.
Matcha Arrives to Japan
“The foundation of the Way of Tea is based on the aesthetic of wabi, which sometimes has been translated as rusticity. But this aesthetic should not be confused with a love of the rustic. Wabi is a state of mind.” – Soshitsu Sen XV, Tea Life, Tea Mind (2003)
Among the most significant cultural imports from China into Japan came during the nation’s Kamakura period (1185-1333) when the monks Eisai (1141-1215) and Dogen (1200-1253) returned to the archipelago from the continent with the teachings of Zen Buddhism. While it would take decades for Zen to realize its tremendous influence on Japanese customs, the monks laid a groundwork for a sect of Buddhism that emphasized, along with meditation, simplicity over the ornate. Accompanying the Zen teachings that Eisai brought was a green tea that was unfermented and ground into an electric green powder, a form we know as matcha. While Eisai highlighted matcha’s medicinal qualities, the process of whisking the tea into hot water and serving it to guests would become an art and way of life itself: Chado, or Tea Ceremony.
The journey that matcha took from the tea fields Eisai founded on Hirado Island and beside the Sefuri Mountains to thousands of tea rooms in Japan and beyond spans centuries and merits its own special attention. Within the scope of this article, however, the most relevant of the many significant contributions Chado has made was elevating the concept of wabi sabi into of Japan’s most important aesthetic ideals.
As Murai Yasuhiko has penned in Tea in Japan (1989), Tea Ceremony evolved into what we know today from a combination of: 1) tea being served at banquets marking the end of religious ceremonies in Buddhist temples; 2) tocha, which were tasting contests in which aristocrats gathered to judge teas by their quality and to see if they could determine their origin (much like wine clubs today); 3) sarei, rules established at Zen temples that expressed how tea should be prepared, served, and consumed. Within these primordial forms of Chado, karamono were en vogue. Karamono are items from China, which were often finely crafted and exquisitely designed goods, including tea bowls, caddies, flower vases, and other items associated with Tea Ceremony today.
The preference for items less finely articulated, and a more overall humble approach was first popularized by Murata Shuko (1423-1502), the person considered the father of wabicha. While wabicha has become so ubiquitous an approach to Tea Ceremony that in modern times they are often thought of as interchangeable terms, in Shuko’s lifetime it was a novel departure from the norm. In his famous “Letter from the Heart,” Shuko expressed how he felt the “worst faults” of the Way of Tea were self-assertion and attachment and how he felt it was “reprehensible” to look down on newcomers to Tea Ceremony—this egalitarian mindset also applied to tea utensils. Shuko didn’t admonish the use of karamono, but he did prevail on others to harmonize them with imperfect, plain, and even crude items of Japanese origin: waramono. In Zenpo Zatsudan, a piece of writing by Noh actor Konparu Zenpo (1454-1520?), Shuko is quoted with a particularly wabi sabi-oriented thought: “The moon is not pleasing unless partly obscured by a cloud.”
Takeno Joo & Sen no Rikyu’s Role in Wabi Sabi
“Once when Rikyu had been speaking of the tea ceremony at Shuun-an, I asked, ‘You often remark that, although the Tea Ceremony has its roots in the formal tea employing the daisu stand, when considering the deeper attainment of its spirit, nothing surpasses the informal tea held in a small room. Why should this be so?’ Rikyu respond: “The tea ceremony of the small room is above all a matter of performing practice and attaining realization in accord with the Buddhist path. To delight in the refined splendor of a dwelling or the taste of delicacies belongs to worldly life. There is shelter enough when the roof does not leak, food enough when it staves off hunger. This is the Buddhist teaching and the fundamental meaning of the tea ceremony.” – Nanporoku (1686)
Shuko’s philosophies would become more crystallized by two other essential figures in Tea Ceremony: Takeno Joo (1502-1555) and Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591). While the understated, imperfect, and aged qualities of wabi sabi were in the Japanese zeitgeist at the time, these two men, through their cultural and political significance, took it to new heights. One important consideration to keep in mind was the time of upheaval they lived through.
The decades leading to Japan’s famously peaceful and isolated Edo period (1603-1868) were tumultuous as warring factions battled for supremacy and older vestiges of power diminished. As scholar and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer (1910-1990) writes in Japan: The Story of a Nation, this was a period that experienced gekokujo, or “the lower defeats the upper.” Not only did lords fall to new feudal leaders (daimyo), but perceptions on what was truly beautiful shifted. The flawless elegance of Chinese items no longer became the singular goal of the aristocracy. The merchant class, which was derided and condemned to lowest rungs of the social ladder, also began to enjoy more power, particularly those in cities that were able to import weaponry from China. A city that began to ascend in power was the port city of Sakai on Osaka Bay.
Takeno Joo and Sen no Rikyu were members of this Sakai merchant class. Joo, who was Rikyu’s master, leaned heavily into wabi-oriented Chado, notes Kumakura Isao in Tea in Japan. In his tea rooms, he went with an even more rustic aesthetic than Shuko—dispatching white paper and lacquer for plain wood. In the same book, Theodore M. Ludwig shares that Joo defined wabi as a “strong sense of respectful self-control in integrity, living one’s life without extravagance.” Joo himself was an admirer and writer of renga (linked poetry written collaboratively by two or more people), and found inspiration in the master Jujuin Shinkei (1406-1475), who felt that renga should be “withered and cold,” one of the earliest meanings of wabi.
It was through Rikyu, the greatest Tea master in Japanese history, that wabi sabi became an indelible thread in the fabric of Japanese culture. One way this happened was through the humble utensils he propagated. Whereas Shuko wanted to harmonize karamono and waramono, Rikyu eschewed both for koraimono, or items of Korean origin, which he felt had more warmth and delicacy. Soetsu Yanagi, founder of the mingei (literally, “art of the people”) folk craft movement hypothesized in The Unknown Craftsman (1976) that because Korean craftspeople of this era were not attempting artistic beauty, they somehow achieved it. Writing about the bowls, he noted they “were not products of conscious effort by the individual. The beauty in them springs from grace. [Korean] bowls were born, not made. Their beauty is a gift, an act of grace.”
As we have mentioned, wabi sabi is not just something you see—it’s something you feel. No humility in these Korean wares would be so strong as to evoke feelings of wabi sabi were the trappings otherwise ornate and glamorous. Rikyu would perform Tea Ceremony in rooms as small as one-and-a-half tatami mats large, he stripped the accompanying meals (kaiseki) of their lavishness, and upended hierarchy by having all who entered the tearoom enter through a nijiriguchi, an entry so narrow one had to crawl through. The humility one saw and necessarily succumbed to was essential in the transmission of wabi sabi.
Why would this one tea master’s approach become so important? Aside from the intrinsic value of his thoughts and acknowledging the potential charisma and gifts for communicating he had, Rikyu was in the direct employ of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. These two powerful leaders paved the way for Tokugawa Ieyasu to unify various clans into the single nation of Japan. While Rikyu was eventually condemned to seppuku (ritualistic suicide) by Hideyoshi, his proximity to power likely made the transmission of his ideas more possible and more influential. Furthermore, Rikyu was often turned to gauge the value of various tea instruments—the high value he placed on items that were imbued with wabi sabi qualities likely further influenced the populace.
Learning Wabi Sabi Through Tea
Wabi sabi is a thread that is still woven Tea Ceremony to this day. So while learning The Way of Tea may help illuminate a way to developing understanding based on intuition. However, those who seeking a simply stated textbook definition through tea may be disappointed.
Even for experts in the field, wabi sabi’s meaning can be elusive. Take Jan Waldmann, for instance. Waldmann has been a partner and friend of Portland Japanese Garden for more than 50 years and earned a teaching degree from Urasenke Foundation in Kyoto, one of Japan’s preeminent and oldest schools on the Way of Tea. She’s still searching for the right words to articulate.
Related: Click here to learn more about Jan Waldmann.
“In Tea, you learn about wabi sabi,” Waldmann notes. “But I feel there’s no definition for it. It’s an emotion. It’s a feeling of nostalgia, of going into somebody’s home and feeling comfortable. It’s empty but buoyant. It’s a connection we can feel with someone but one that is beyond description. I have pondered on how to articulate the exact meaning of wabi sabi for a long time.”
Still, learning more about Tea Ceremony can be a way to develop one’s understanding of wabi sabi. We recommend visitors attend the Garden’s demonstrations of Tea Ceremony in our Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center, which are regularly held each month.