and limit their involvement with the world to lectures and committee meetings.

But in the East, and especially in the Zen tradition, philosophers write poems, rake

gravel, go on pilgrimages, practice archery, write aphorisms on scrolls, chant and, in

the case of one of the very greatest Zen thinkers, Sen no Rikyū, involve themselves in teaching

people how to drink tea in consoling and therapeutic ways.

Sen no Rikyū was born in 1522 in the wealthy seaport of Sakai, near present day Osaka.

Show map of this place.

His father, Tanaka Yohyoue, was a warehouse owner who worked in the fish trade and wished

his son to join him in business.

But Rikyū turned away from commercial life and went in search of wisdom and self-understanding

instead. He became fascinated by Zen Buddhism, apprenticed himself to a few Masters and took

to a life of wandering the countryside, with few possessions.

Zen Buddhism was founded by traveling monks, who believed that people best could find spiritual

meaning not by thinking complex thoughts or performing great deeds but by doing (often

very simple) things with intense thoughtfulness and concentration. The wise Bodhidharma, for

example, is believed to have stared at a wall for nine years with to improve his focus.

Rikyu chose to focus on something that was a little more refreshing than staring at the

wall: drinking tea. Today we remember him for the contributions he made to the reform

and appreciation of the

chanoyu (茶の湯) = Japanese tea ceremony.

It literally means “hot water for tea.” The Japanese had been drinking tea since the

9th century, the practice having been imported from China by merchants and monks. The drink

was considered healthy as well as calming and spiritual.

But it was Rikyū’s achievement to put the tea ceremony on a more rigorous and profound

philosophical footing.

The Japan of his era had grown image-conscious and money-focused. Rikyū promoted an alternative

set of values which he termed

wabi-sabi (侘寂)

a compound word combining wabi, or satisfaction with simplicity and austerity, with sabi an

appreciation of the imperfect.

Across fields ranging from architecture to interior design, philosophy to literature,

Rikyū awakened in the Japanese a taste for the pared down and the authentic, for the

undecorated and the humble.

His particular focus was the tea ceremony, which Rikyū believed to hold a superlative

potential to promote wabi-sabi.

He made a number of changes to the rituals and aesthetics of the ceremony. He began by

revolutionising the space in which the tea ceremony was held. It had grown common for

wealthy people to build extremely elaborate teahouses in prominent public places, where

they served as venues for worldly gatherings and displays of status.

Rikyū now argued that the teahouse should be shrunk to a mere two metres square, that

it should be tucked away in secluded gardens

and that its door should be made deliberately a little too small, so that all who came into

it, even the mightiest, would have to bow and feel equal to others. The idea was to

create a barrier between the teahouse and the world outside.

The very path to the teahouse was to pass around trees and stones, to create a meander

that would help break ties with the ordinary realm.

Properly performed, a tea ceremony was meant to promote what Rikyū termed

wa (和) = harmony

which would emerge as participants rediscovered their connections to nature: in their garden

hut, smelling of unvarnished wood, moss and tea leaves, they would be able to feel the

wind and hear birds outside – and feel at one with the non-human sphere.

Then might come an emotion known as

kei (敬) = respect

the fruit of sitting in a confined space with others, and being able to converse with them

free of the pressures and artifice of the social world.

A successful ceremony was to leave its participants with a feeling of

jaku (寂) = tranquillity

sei (静) = purity

central concepts in Rikyū’s gentle, calming philosophy.

Rikyū’s prescriptions for the ceremony extended to the instruments employed.

He argued that tea ceremonies shouldn’t rely on expensive or conventionally beautiful

cups or teapots. He liked worn bamboo tea scoops that made a virtue of their age and

bamboo flower vases like this one, which he carved himself:

Because in Zen philosophy, everything is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, objects that are

themselves marked by time and haphazard marks can, Rikyū suggested, embody a distinct wisdom

and promote it in their users.

It was one of Rikyū’s achievements to take an act which in the West is one of the most

routine and unremarkable activities and imbue it with a solemnity and depth of meaning akin

to a Catholic Mass.

Every aspect of the tea ceremony, from the patient boiling of the water to the measuring

out of green tea powder, was coherently related to Zen’s philosophical tenets about the

importance of humility, the need to sympathise with and respect nature, and the sense of

the importance of the transient nature of existence.

It’s open ended where this approach to everyday life may go.

It leaves open the possibility that many actions and daily habits might, with sufficient creative

imagination, become similarly elevated, important and rewarding in our lives. The point isn’t

so much that we should take part in tea ceremonies, rather that we should make aspects of our

everyday spiritual lives more tangible by allying certain materials and sensuous rituals.

Rikyū reminds us that there is a latent sympathy between big ideas about life and the little

everyday things, such as certain drinks, cups, implements and smells.

These are not cut off from the big themes; they can make those themes more alive for

us. It is the task of philosophy not just to formulate ideas, but also to work out mechanisms

by which they may stick more firmly and viscerally in our minds.