The Book of Tea
Author: Okakura Kakuzo
113 pages
From Book Cover:
Originally written to be read aloud by the author at Isabella Stewart Gardner's famous salon in 1906, The Book of Tea brings alive the heart of the Japanese Tea-Masters, and guides us with wit and a very sure hand into an understanding of the Eastern aesthetic. The book focuses not on the Tea Ceremony itself, but rather on the culture which engendered the Mind of Tea and on the Masters who embodied this spirit. Okakura's considerable charisma and erudition shine, dazzling even after a century, as he introduces his audiences to the aesthetic and spirit of the East.
Writing at a time when Japan was rejecting its own artistic traditions in a frenzy of Europeanization, Okakura was instrumental in the perservation not just of masterpieces of Japanese art, but of the way of living that gave birth to them. Writing of art appreciation in The Book of Tea, he says, "it is to be deplored that so few of us really take pains to study the moods of the masters and thus often miss the rich repast of beauty spread before our very eyes." In The Book of Tea, Okakura teaches us to listen to the language of flowers and the laguage of art, inviting us to drink deeply from "The Cup of Humanity."
