The Book of Tea, one of the great English tea classics, is a long essay about the connection between teaism, Taoism, and the aesthetics of Japanese culture. It was written by Okakura Kakuzo in English and was published in the United States in 1906.
The essay targets a Western audience and seeks to explain the importance of tea in Japanese culture, not just as a beverage, but as a form of art expressed in different aspects. After a brief introduction of the Western attitude towards tea, Okakura demystifies the admiration of the Japanese people for this green plant by presenting the different schools of tea, its connection to Zen philosophy, and how it has affected the arts. The famous tea ceremony and its rigid formalities are explained, together with the contributions of the great tea-masters.
The Book of Tea is considered by many to be one of the first books to introduce Eastern culture and philosophy to the Western world. This was possible due to Okakura's early contact with the English language and Western thought, but also due to his later involvement in the Asian art division of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which he came to head in 1910.
A slender, elegant meditation that turns a simple cup of tea into a doorway onto an entire philosophy of beauty, simplicity, and mindful living.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)
