The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura - Yonde Sono Hon.

That a nation should construct one of its most resonant national ceremonies round a cup of tea will surely strike a chord of sympathy with at least some readers of this review. To many foreigners, nothing is so quintessentially Japanese as the tea ceremony--more properly, the way of tea--with its austerity, its extravagantly minimalist stylization, and its concentration of extreme subtleties of meaning into the simplest of actions. The Book of Tea is something of a curiosity: written in English by a Japanese scholar (and issued here in bilingual form), it was first published in 1906, in the wake of the naval victory over Russia with which Japan asserted its rapidly acquired status as a world-class military power. It was a peak moment of Westernization within Japan. Clearly, behind the publication was an agenda, or at least a mission to explain. Around its account of the ceremony, The Book of Tea folds an explication of the philosophy, first Taoist, later Zen Buddhist, that informs its oblique celebration of simplicity and directness--what Okakura calls, in a telling phrase, moral geometry. And the ceremony itself? Its greatest practitioners have always been philosophers, but also artists, connoisseurs, collectors, gardeners, calligraphers, gourmets, flower arrangers. The greatest of them, Sen Rikyu, left a teasingly, maddeningly simple set of rules: Make a delicious bowl of tea; lay the charcoal so that it heats the water; arrange the flowers as they are in the field; in summer suggest coolness; in winter, warmth; do everything ahead of time; prepare for rain; and give those with whom you find yourself every consideration. A disciple remarked that this seemed elementary. Rikyu replied, Then if you can host a tea gathering without deviating from any of the rules I have just stated, I will become your disciple. A Zen reply. Fascinating. --Robin Davidson, Amazon.co.uk

Yonde Sono Hon.
Back in the sixties (which happened in the seventies) this book was a cult classic. Everyone in Berkeley had a brick & board book case with Steal This Book, and Kahlil Gibran, and Mao, and Ferlingetti, and the Tuttle edition of this book.

Tuttle bound it in hand made washi, and slid it into a special little box-cover. It had the look and the feel of a special precious gift. The book itself was art.

It is still a special precious gift. It is the gift of insight into Japan, and esthetics, and Tea, and Art, and Xenophobia, and most of all into yourself. This cheap little book has the power to shine a light into a blind spot within your mind. It will change your prospective, and it will teach you that prospective is everything.

In this most egocentric, self-referential, radio talk-show, don't-think-tank, time in our history,it would be well for us to read this book again. Give it to someone you love. Read it for someone you don't yet love.

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