The Book of Tea: The Book of Oz (Penguin Little Black Classics) - Softcover

Okakura, Kakuzo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241251354 ISBN 13: 9780241251355

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2016

Synopsis

'Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle.'

In this charming book from 1906, Okakura explores Zen, Taoism, Tea Masters and the significance of the Japanese tea ceremony.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

About this title

Review:

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 stylisation 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 Westernisation 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

Review:

"Originally written to be read aloud by the author at Isabella Stewart Gardner's famous salon in 1906, the book focuses on the culture that has engendered the mind of tea and on the Masters who embody this spirit." --Gourmet Retailer

-In some ways, times haven't changed much in the 99 years since Kakuzo Okakura, the Japanese aesthete, gifted the local elite of Boston with his now-legendary explication of the beauties of the tea ceremony, The Book of Tea.- --Elle Decor

-Originally written to be read aloud by the author at Isabella Stewart Gardner's famous salon in 1906, the book focuses on the culture that has engendered the mind of tea and on the Masters who embody this spirit.- --Gourmet Retailer

"In some ways, times haven't changed much in the 99 years since Kakuzo Okakura, the Japanese aesthete, gifted the local elite of Boston with his now-legendary explication of the beauties of the tea ceremony, The Book of Tea." --Elle Decor

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0241251354
• ISBN 13: 9780241251355
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128