In the Muromachi period of Japan in the 6th century, there circulated an allegorical text written in Chinese characters titled “On Wine and Tea”. In this text of over two thousand characters, two people with the elegant names “Exorcist of Weariness” and “Lord of Carefreeness” sat opposite each other. One was drinking tea while the other was drinking wine. On this spring day with no human voices around, vulgar conversations were not allowed.
Thus, “Exorcist of Weariness” and “Lord of Carefreeness” engaged in a debate between tea and wine. Each side held their own views and repeatedly argued about the superiority, virtues, and functions of tea and wine, exposing each other’s weaknesses and stating their own strengths. When it was hard to tell who was better, a “leisurely person” came forward to mediate, saying that it was hard to distinguish between tea and wine as both were extraordinary things in the world. It was better to just let “wine be wine and tea be tea”. Apparently, the names “Exorcist of Weariness” and “Lord of Carefreeness” originated from the Tang Dynasty poem “Tea is the exorcist of weariness, and wine is the lord of carefreeness”. The narrative mode of the question-and-answer debate between the two sides is also one of the inherent paradigms of Chinese folk story types. Coincidentally, at the beginning of the last century, the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang were discovered, containing tens of thousands of volumes of documents and silk paintings, including an extant Tang Dynasty text “On Tea and Wine”, which was extremely similar to the Japanese “On Wine and Tea”. This text was written by Wang Fu, a Jinshi candidate from the countryside in the Tang Dynasty. With over a thousand characters in the full text, it launched a debate between tea and wine in the Tang Dynasty in the same narrative mode – this text was several hundred years earlier than the Japanese “On Wine and Tea”.In the history of cultural exchanges between China and Japan, Japan’s tea and wine culture is closely related to ancient Chinese culture. The eastward spread of tea culture is particularly typical. Based on learning and absorbing Chinese tea planting, tea making, and tea drinking cultures, Japanese tea culture has creatively derived the tea ceremony culture with unique oriental aesthetic characteristics.
The retrospection of historical truth is always a bit bumpy. The eastward spread of Chinese tea seeds and tea culture was not initially recognized. Teng Jun’s “History of Sino-Japanese Tea Culture Exchanges” briefly mentioned the early “self-generation theory” of Japanese tea culture. Since the 17th century, Japanese scholars once formed a rather subjective judgment, believing that there were native wild tea trees on the Japanese archipelago long ago. It was only after the Chinese tea drinking method was introduced in the 8th century that the Japanese began to drink local tea. Works such as Oishi Sadao’s “History of the Development of Japanese Tea” (1983) and Taniguchi Kumanosuke’s “Investigation Report on Wild Tea” (1936) all led to this view. With the development of tea science and technology, the local “self-generation theory” of Japanese tea gradually collapsed. In the 20th century, tea experts led by Matsushita Satoshi and Hashimoto Minoru put forward the “theory of introduction from China”, believing that the reproduction of wild tea trees in Japan showed human factors. Combining the round-trip situation of Japanese Buddhist monks who went to China to study since the Tang and Song dynasties in China, it is reasonably speculated that Japanese monks spread Chinese tea seeds, tea seedlings, and tea drinking customs to Japan and promoted their development.The Chinese tea-drinking customs introduced to Japan gradually spread among the common people through the imperial court, shogunate, and temples.
According to the Japanese document “Okugi Sho”, “In the first year of Tenpyo in Japan, Chinese tea was introduced.” At that time, it was the 17th year of Kaiyuan in the Tang Dynasty (729 AD), and it was almost 50 years before Lu Yu’s “The Classic of Tea” was written. The earliest record of tea-drinking in Japan appears in the “Kukai’s Memorial of Offering” in the 5th year of Kōnin (814 AD). This text, which records the daily life of Monk Kukai (774 – 835), briefly states: “During my leisure time from meditation and practice, I sometimes study Indian literature. While sitting over tea, I casually read Chinese books.” If this personal experience record is a credible account of the actual situation, then in the early 9th century, Japanese monks already had the habit of drinking tea during their leisure time. Another early record appears in the “Nikko Shinto Secret Records”. The text records the deeds of Monk Saicho of Japan introducing tea seeds from China. According to legend, in 805 AD, Monk Saicho (767 – 822) went to Tiantai in China to study Buddhist teachings. When he returned to Japan, he brought back tea seeds from Tiantai Mountain and sowed them in the Nikko Shrine at the foot of Mount Hiei in Kyoto, ending the history of no tea on the Japanese archipelago. Although the authenticity of this document is still controversial, there still stands a “Stele of Nikko Tea Garden” in the Nikko Shrine garden, and the inscription on the stele reads “This is the earliest tea garden in Japan”. If the above two records are not sufficient as conclusive evidence, then the Japanese historical book “Nihon Koki”, as an exact record of tea-drinking in Japan, is a relatively credible direct document. In the 10th year of Yuanhe in the reign of Emperor Xianzong of the Tang Dynasty (815 AD), which was the 6th year of Kōnin in Japan, Emperor Saga of Japan went on a pilgrimage to the Fushaku-ji Temple. The chief priest (i.e., the Buddhist official) Monk Eicho (743 – 816), who greeted him, personally made tea for him. “… Passed by Fushaku-ji Temple again, stopped the carriage and composed poems. Many imperial princes and ministers composed poems in response. Monk Eicho personally brewed tea and offered it to the emperor, and presented the imperial quilt. Then the emperor took a boat on the lake.” This Monk Eicho, who offered tea, came to the Tang Dynasty on a diplomatic mission in 775 AD and lived in Chang’an for 30 years. He returned to Japan in 805 AD. His act of brewing tea in front of the emperor greatly shocked Emperor Saga, who ordered people to plant tea in the Kansai region for annual tribute. Here, the “brewed tea” offered by Monk Eicho to the emperor is a brewing method recorded in Lu Yu’s “The Classic of Tea”, which was very popular in the mid-Tang Dynasty. Mainly, cake tea was used. After roasting and cooling, it was ground into powder. When boiling water, salt was added after the first boil. After the second boil, the tea powder was put in and stirred in a circular motion. After the third boil, a ladle of water was poured in for a slight cooling, and then the tea could be divided and drunk. This brewing method advocated by Lu Yu became a common elegant activity among Tang Dynasty scholars and court nobles. The way of grinding tea into powder and boiling the powder to drink also often appears in ancient paintings.One of the ‘Top Ten Chinese Ancient Paintings’, the ‘Tang Palace Ladies’ depicts a late Tang Dynasty court scene of tea drinking. In the center of the long table sits a tea kettle, filled with tea soup, from which a lady is scooping tea with a long-handled tea ladle to serve to others. The other ladies are seated around, holding tea bowls for drinking. These records align with the conclusions of the renowned Japanese sinologist and tea scholar, Mr.
Shio Saeki. In his article ‘Chinese Tea Culture in Japan’, he clearly states that Chinese tea culture had reached Japan by the first half of the 9th century at the latest, with the envoy monks to the Tang Dynasty playing a crucial bridging role. Kukai and Saicho were both part of the entourage of the Japanese 17th envoy to the Tang Dynasty, Fujiwara no Kue. During their time in Tang, they extensively studied Buddhist teachings and engaged in poetry and song, demonstrating a profound understanding of Chinese culture, which significantly contributed to the spread of Buddhism and Chinese studies in Japan. Initially, tea drinking in Japan was confined to the aristocracy and experienced a period of decline. However, by the end of the 12th century, the Zen master Eisai (1141-1215) brought tea seeds and plants back from China, cultivated tea plants, and gradually revived the custom of tea drinking, which spread to Buddhist temples and the warrior class. Eisai is a milestone figure in the history of Japanese tea ceremony development and is revered as the ‘Father of Japanese Tea’. Among the Chinese monks who came to Japan, he stands out as the most distinguished. Eisai visited the Song Dynasty twice, dedicating himself to the study of Zen Buddhism. His simple lifestyle of long-term Zen practice and Buddhist study nurtured his profound understanding of Chinese Song Dynasty tea culture. The ‘Drinking Tea for Health’, a Han script manuscript that he finalized before his death, is a book that highly praises the virtues of tea and is the earliest known Japanese work on tea, referred to as ‘Japan’s Tea Classic’. This reveals the influence of Lu Yu’s ‘The Classic of Tea’ in Japan. From the perspective of Zen practice and longevity, the book strongly advocates for tea drinking. It begins with the words: ‘Tea is a divine medicine for health preservation, a wonderful technique for extending life. It grows in the mountains and valleys, a place of divine spirits. Those who pick it live longer. Both in Tianzhu and Tang lands, it is valued, and our country Japan also loves it. It is an extraordinary divine medicine, a must to pick.’ By referring to tea as a ‘divine medicine’ and ‘wonderful technique’, Eisai’s fondness and admiration for tea are evident. During Eisai’s visit to China, it was the peak of Chinese tea culture development in the Southern Song Dynasty. ‘Drinking Tea for Health’ records the tea-drinking methods circulating in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas at that time: ‘Serve it with extremely hot water, using a square-inch spoon for two or three spoonfuls, the amount is at will, but less water is better, and it is also at will, with a preference for thickness. ‘ This is clearly different from the tea drinking of the Tang Dynasty era of Lu Yu. What is scooped by the ‘square-inch spoon’ mentioned by Eisai? This leads us to the new tea method of the Southern Song Dynasty that he introduced to Japan. The previous tea-drinking method required the tea leaves to be picked, steamed, mashed into cakes, dried, and stored. When drinking, the tea cakes were softened, crushed, and brewed, which was indeed time-consuming and labor-intensive.In the Southern Song Dynasty, the tea – drinking method introduced to Japan by Eisai was much simpler: freshly picked and processed, stored as loose leaves, ground into powder when consumed, and directly whisked for drinking. The whole process preserved the freshness of the tea. When drinking powdered tea, it entered the body directly, enabling people to absorb the tea essence more fully. As Eisai mentioned in “Kissa Yojoki”, about two or three small spoonfuls from a square – inch spoon were exactly the powdered tea that had been milled.
This method of whisking tea was well – received by the Japanese. Even today, Japanese tea enthusiasts still follow the method of whisking powdered tea from the Song Dynasty after some improvements. The whole process of preparing tea is called “dian cha”. That is, scoop the powdered tea into a tea bowl, pour boiling water into the bowl, and stir vigorously up and down, back and forth with a chasen until thick and fine foam forms on the surface of the tea soup, then it can be sipped. Interestingly, we can notice that the matcha consumed by contemporary Japanese tea lovers mostly has bright green tea foam. In contrast, tea lovers in the Song Dynasty of China advocated that “tea should be white in color and goes well with black tea cups” and “the color of tea should be valued as white” (from Cai Xiang’s “Cha Lu”). This vividly reflects the absorption and transformation of Chinese tea culture by Japanese tea culture. For a long time, Japanese tea lovers have tried to preserve the natural color of the tea leaves themselves and regard it as the purest and most beautiful life and spirit.In the early 13th century, the Hojo family, who held real power in the Kamakura shogunate, highly admired the Jing Shan Xing Sheng Wan Shou Chan Temple in Hangzhou, China. They dispatched a large number of Buddhist monks to Jing Shan to seek the principles of Zen. The Jing Shan Temple in the Song Dynasty was regarded as the head of the “Five Mountains and Ten Great Monasteries” and held a very high status. According to the “History and Annals of Jing Shan”, “Faqin, the founding master of the ancient Jing Shan Temple, rang the bell for tea. Initially, it was for offerings to the Buddha, and later for entertaining guests. There were special rituals and tea sets for entertaining guests with tea, which was called the ‘tea feast’. ” The tea ceremony regulations in the meditation hall of Jing Shan were strict in both rules and procedures. The tea ceremony in the Zen temples of the Southern Song Dynasty was completely recorded in the “Chi Xiu Bai Zhang Qing Gui” of the Yuan Dynasty. This is the highest summary of the tea ceremony in the meditation halls during the Song and Yuan dynasties in China and also an important historical evidence for the tea ceremony in Jing Shan. The transplantation of the tea ceremony in the meditation halls of the Song Dynasty, represented by the Jing Shan tea feast, to Japan was directly related to Enni Ben’en (1202 – 1280), the “National Master Shoichi”. In 1235 (the second year of Duanping in the Southern Song Dynasty), 34 – year – old Enni Ben’en went to Jing Shan Temple to make a pilgrimage and seek Dharma. During this period, he mastered the tea – planting, tea – making, and tea – ceremony matters of Jing Shan. When he returned to Japan, he brought back the tea seeds from Jing Shan and planted them in his hometown village in Shizuoka. Along with the tea seeds from Jing Shan, a copy of the “Qing Gui of the Zen Courtyard” was also brought back. During the process of spreading the Dharma, Enni Ben’en imitated the Qing Gui of the Zen courtyards in the Song Dynasty and formulated the “Qing Gui of Toho – ji” according to the actual situation in Japan. It was clearly stipulated in the text that all the tea – drinking rules learned from Jing Shan Temple must be followed without any deviation, and naturally, this included the tea – feast ceremony in the Zen temple.To this day, the Tōfuku-ji temple in Japan continues to hold the ‘Hōjō-saizen’ on the anniversary of Enni Ben’en’s death, preserving the legacy of the tea ceremony from Jingshan Temple. During the Tang and Song dynasties, another direct factor in the development of Japanese tea culture was the spread of Chinese tea books, whose influence remains strong to this day. For instance, Lu Yu’s ‘The Classic of Tea’ laid out a concrete and feasible foundation for the comprehensive cultural art form of Japanese tea ceremony.
Regarding tea utensils, Lu Yu meticulously listed the materials, sizes, and uses of twenty-four different types of tea utensils in the ‘Four Utensils’ section. We can observe that the use of these utensils corresponds almost entirely to the practices in contemporary Japanese sencha tea ceremony. The sencha tea ceremony consists of five major steps: preparing utensils, selecting water, making fire, waiting for the water to boil, and practicing tea. During the Edo period, Sakai Tadahide’s ‘Sencha Zuan Shi’ and Toen’s ‘Seifū: Sencha Yorán’ introduced the tea utensils (wind stove, tea pot, tea bowl) and the history of sencha, which were introduced from the Tang dynasty. Careful examination of the illustrations in the manuscripts reveals that all sencha utensils are based on Tang dynasty standards, with Japanese tea practitioners meticulously depicting the shapes and regulations of Tang dynasty tea utensils, accompanied by brief textual explanations. Today, there are numerous schools of sencha in Japan, such as the Ogasawara-ryū and Shōgetsu-ryū, but when practicing the tea ceremony, they still widely use utensils like the tea basket and wind stove, which have been passed down from the Tang dynasty in China. The ‘Tang ware’, represented by Tang dynasty tea utensils (referring to items introduced from the Tang dynasty), was once the ‘Made in China’ craze in Japan, with unparalleled popularity, especially under the promotion of the third shogun of the Muromachi shogunate, Ashikaga Yoshimochi (1358-1408), where all daily necessities were considered high-class if they were ‘Tang ware’, and were highly favored by the court nobility and the upper echelons of the warrior class. The extremely popular ‘dui cha’ activity in the Muromachi era once became a gathering for expanding social interactions and showing off ‘Tang ware’. ‘Dui cha’, also known as ‘ming zhan’, was an activity prevalent in the Song dynasty for evaluating the quality of tea and the skill of tea brewing, from the court to the common people, all were passionate about it. When the ‘dui cha’ fashion was introduced to Japan, it mainly occurred among the warrior class, showing a clear difference from the dui cha scenes of the Song dynasty literati and scholars. At the end of the Ming dynasty, the eminent monk Yin Yuan Zenji (1592-1673) arrived in Japan on Zheng Chenggong’s ship, bringing the Ming dynasty’s scholarly tea style to the Huangboshan Wanfu Temple in Kyoto, Japan (founded by Yin Yuan). From this, Gyougai, also known as the Tea Seller (1675-1763), established the Japanese sencha tea ceremony using leaf tea in Japan, known as the ‘Pioneer of the Revival of Sencha Tea Ceremony’, diverging from the matcha tea ceremony revered by Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591), forming a dual peak in Japanese tea ceremony. To this day, what people commonly refer to as ‘Japanese tea’ is still divided into two major categories in terms of tea-making technology and tea-drinking methods: ‘matcha’ and ‘sencha’, with ‘matcha’ further divided into ‘usucha’ and ‘koicha’.Japanese tea ceremony schools are diverse, with the Urasenke, Mushakō-jō, and Minkō-jō being the most renowned. The act of drinking tea has long been integrated into the daily life of the Japanese people. Serving tea to guests is an indispensable part of Japanese etiquette, and the essence of human relationships can be seen in a cup of tea. The importance of tea drinking in Japanese cultural life can also be inferred from the Japanese term ‘daily tea and meals’.
While Japan has absorbed Chinese tea culture, it has elevated tea culture to the aesthetic and philosophical level of ‘the Way’. The true founder of Japanese tea ceremony, Murata Jukō (1423-1502), learned from the Zen master Ikkyū Sōjun (1394-1481). During his Zen meditation in Kyoto’s Daitokuji Temple, Jukō combined tea drinking with Zen meditation, realizing that ‘Buddha’s law exists in tea’, and he inherited and promoted the concept of ‘Zen and tea are one’. Following him, Takeo Shōō (1502-1555) also strongly advocated for the integration of Zen into tea, believing that the tea infused with profound Zen spirit. The combination of Zen and tea ceremony has elevated Japanese tea ceremony to an art, religion, and lifestyle, infusing the core of Japanese tea culture. Sen no Rikyū, the most well-known figure, is considered the perfector of the Japanese tea ceremony system, a master who synthesized various schools of thought. Rikyū deeply understood the tea philosophy of Jukō and Shōō, believing that ‘the profound taste of tea lies in the thatched cottage’. His ‘thatched cottage tea’ strongly practiced a state of tea drinking that forgets cunning and returns the heart to tastelessness. He pursued a tea-drinking experience where the host and guest must abandon worldly concerns and return to their true selves, trying to bring people closer together, thus he continued to reduce the size of the tea room. Today, the Tai-an tea room in Myōshin-ji in Kyoto, which we see, is the thatched cottage-style tea room created by Sen no Rikyū, also the only tea room left by Rikyū in the world, and is revered as a ‘national treasure’ in Japan. However, it appears to be an unremarkable small thatched hut. When people enter the tea room, regardless of their status or social standing, they must bow and enter. During Rikyū’s lifetime, Japan was in an era of war and turmoil. People lamented the impermanence of life and the brevity of existence. The smoke of war made people feel like drifting duckweed, reminding them to cherish the occasional encounter, thus the term ‘one time, one meeting’ was born. It is only through fully immersing oneself in the present moment of ‘sitting and drinking tea’ that one can reach a tranquil and detached state. The four principles of Japanese tea ceremony, known as the Four Virtues or Four Rules, directly reflect the basic Zen tea spirit of meditation, tea drinking, and aesthetics – harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility. These are inherently connected to the four characters ‘careful, respectful, pure, and quiet’ expressed by Zen master Jukō. In simple terms, ‘harmony’ represents harmony and pleasure, not only for inner emotions and perceptions but also for the coordination and appropriateness between people, things, and nature; ‘respect’ means respect and reverence, where a gentleman is respectful without loss, polite to others, and everyone is equal; ‘purity’ refers to cleanliness and purity, maintaining a spotless heart, and discarding distractions and delusions; ‘tranquility’ refers to silence, wabi-sabi, and a state of utmost purity.As a fundamental spiritual temperament and spiritual sustenance, the inner ideology of the tea ceremony has also influenced many Japanese literati. Writers such as Yasunari Kawabata, Natsume Soseki, and Osamu Dazai have directly or indirectly described the scenes of tea drinking. When pondering the taste of life, Osamu Dazai used tea as a metaphor, saying, “Those who take the world as tea stroke their beards in the bamboo forest.
” In Yasunari Kawabata’s “The Thousand Cranes”, the Japanese tea bowl is used as a clue to depict the characters’ secret, delicate and soft emotions. The protagonist, Fumiko, brought a pottery bowl used by her mother for tea drinking during an important date. There was her mother’s lip print on the tea bowl… No matter how the external form changes, the spiritual essence of the Japanese tea ceremony has not changed. It represents people’s pursuit of beautiful things in their daily mundane affairs. On the surface, the tea ceremony is a strictly regulated aesthetic ritual, but it has profound implications. Kakuzo Okakura, a thinker during the Meiji period in Japan, described the Japanese tea ceremony in “The Book of Tea” as an adoration of “imperfection”, “a gentle attempt to achieve a possible perfection in our lives where we all know perfection is impossible. ” Japanese tea culture originated from China. After a long period of local development and improvement, it has absorbed and integrated the inner culture and external techniques of Chinese tea culture, forming a tea ceremony culture with unique Japanese aesthetic characteristics. The Chinese cultural elements retained in it have also become an important reference for Chinese tea culture researchers to understand and restore ancient tea rituals. Today, improved products of contemporary Japanese matcha, such as matcha ice cream, matcha cake, and matcha latte, are also deeply loved by young people in China. A small cup of tea reflects the common aesthetic sentiment and the integration of historical cultures between the two countries.
