Tea and Philosophy C hinese texts of the first century bc describe tea as the elixir of immortality, referring to Lao-tsze, the founder of Taoism. The first philosophical and technical treatise devoted to the subject, the Cha-sing or Classic Art of Tea, appeared during the magnificent period of the T'ang dynasty, around the eighth century ad. It was by the Taoist poet Lu-yu. Lu-yu himself was even immortalized by the beverage, for after his death he was supposed to have become Chazu, the genie of tea, and his effigy is still honoured by all tea merchants from Hong Kong to Singapore.
Tea did not become a popular drink in China until about the sixth century. At first it was chewed, as cakes of pressed leaves. Later on decoctions were made of it. Around the year 1000 a powder of dried, ground leaves was mixed with boiling water, and beaten with a thin bamboo stick until it frothed, in just the same way as the Aztecs whisked their chocolate. (The Tibetans still make tea with blocks of leaves which they crumble into water. It is boiled and reboiled, mixed with rancid yak butter, and is eaten rather than drunk, for the resulting mixture is a nourishing and invigorating paste, very useful at such altitudes.)
The way of making tea we now know, as an infusion, soon became the usual one in China, and under the Ming dynasty it developed into a positive ritual, involving an intellectual discipline and symbolizing poetry and beauty, strength and determination. A cup of tea became the mirror of the soul.
Towards the beginning of the ninth century tea-drinking spread to Japan, where it soon became the ritual and sacramental drink of a kind of cult of aesthetics which sought the beautiful in the mundanity of everyday life. The Japanese tea ritual has its code, even its laws. The 'drink of immortality' has to be brewed in accordance with a very precise ceremonial, making each gesture and each mouthful both an initiation and a poetic ecstasy. The tea ceremony, although a domestic affair, is more than just a matter of enjoying a cup of tea: it is an ethic, a philosophy, it expressed the art of living. It illustrates one of the paths of Zen -'accomplishing perfectly something possible in that dimension which it is impossible to evaluate, and which we know to be life.'