The Book of Tea

The Book of Tea is a cultural essay written in English by Okakura Kakuzō, a Japanese thinker and art activist of the Meiji era, first published in the United States in 1906. While living in Europe and America, the author felt keenly how much the West misunderstood the East, so he took "tea" as his entry point to introduce Western readers systematically to the Japanese tea ceremony and the philosophy and aesthetics behind it. The book has seven chapters. It begins with "The Cup of Humanity," traces the evolution of Chinese tea through the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties, summarizing it as the classical, romantic, and natural schools of tea, then discusses the relationship between the tea ceremony and Daoism and Zen, expounding "Zen and tea as one"; it goes on to describe the construction and spirit of the tea room, the attitude of art appreciation, the meaning of flower arrangement (flowers), and closes with the deeds of the great tea masters through the ages. The book proposes that the tea ceremony is a gentle attempt at the "imperfect" and a worship of the "incomplete," and that the tea room is a place of rest for the spirit. Written in a clear, elegant, and evocative style, the book elevates the tea ceremony into an "art of life" and is regarded as one of the representative works through which Japan exported its cultural ideas to the world; it has been selected for American middle-school textbooks and translated into French, German, Spanish, Swedish, and many other languages.