The Book of Tea

A long essay written in English by Okakura Kakuzō and published in New York in 1906 for Western readers. In seven short chapters it uses the Japanese tea ceremony to explain an Asian view of life and art. Okakura calls this Teaism: a reverence for the beautiful within the plain facts of daily existence. He traces tea's history in China from boiled cake tea to whipped powdered tea and steeped leaf tea, and argues that its spirit comes from Daoism and Zen, with their stress on emptiness, the relative and the present moment. He then describes the tea-room as a deliberately simple, unsymmetrical and impermanent space, discusses how appreciation of art depends on sympathy between work and viewer, writes on flowers, and ends with the tea-masters, closing on the death of Sen no Rikyū. Along the way he gently mocks the West for calling Japan civilised only once it showed its military power.

It is a short, graceful case for finding beauty in imperfection and simplicity, and an early example of an Asian writer explaining his own culture to the West on his own terms.