he Sung tea reached
us in 1191 with the return of Yeisai-zenji, who went there to study
the southern Zen school. The new seeds which he carried home were
successfully planted in three places, one of which, the Uji district
near Kioto, bears still the name of producing the best tea in the
world. The southern Zen spread with marvelous rapidity, and with it
the tea-ritual and the tea-ideal of the Sung. By the fifteenth century,
under the patronage of the Shogun, Ashikaga-Voshinasa, the tea
ceremony is fully constituted and made into an independent and secular
performance. Since then Teaism is fully established in Japan. The use
of the steeped tea of the later China is comparatively recent among us,
being only known since the middle of the seventeenth century. It has
replaced the powdered tea in ordinary consumption, though the latter
still continues to hold its place as the tea of teas.

It is in the Japanese tea ceremony that we see the culmination of
tea-ideals. Our successful resistance of the Mongol invasion in 1281
had enabled us to carry on the Sung movement so disastrously cut off in
China itself through the nomadic inroad. Tea with us became more than
an idealisation of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of
life. The beverage grew to be an excuse for the worship of purity and
refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to
produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane. The
tea-room was an oasis in the dreary waste of existence where
weary travellers could meet to drink from the common spring of
art-appreciation. The ceremony was an improvised drama whose plot was
woven about the tea, the flowers, and the paintings. Not a colour to
disturb the tone of the room, not a sound to mar the rhythm of things,
not a gesture to obtrude on the harmony, not a word to break the
unity of the surroundings, all movements to be performed simply and
naturally--such were the aims of the tea-ceremony. And strangely enough
it was often successful. A subtle philosophy lay behind it all. Teaism
was Taoism in disguise.

III. Taoism and Zennism

The connection of Zennism with tea is proverbial. We have already
remarked that the tea-ceremony was a development of the Zen ritual. The
name of Laotse, the founder of Taoism, is also intimately associated
with the history of tea. It is written in the Chinese school manual
concerning the origin of habits and customs that the ceremony of