Tea Ceremony 茶の湯

Sunday today and I am relaxing at home on my day off. The weather is hot. I dread to think what it will be like over the next two months! After doing the washing and sprucing up my apartment a bit I headed out for a walk around midday. Did some Tai Chi practice and walked around the perimeter of a beautiful temple and forest near my house. As I walked past the small city garden opposite the temple I noticed a sign saying that today a tea ceremony was taking place in the tea hut there. So I went in.

I was invited in and paid my 300 yen before taking my seat (that is, on the floor) in a beautiful tea room along with about ten people. I have often walked past the tea hut and looked through the open door. It is very beautiful and I think very old with a round window and tatami floors and a fireplace in the middle. I was so lucky that I happened to walk past on a day when they were doing tea ceremony and actually got to go inside.

I ate my Japanese sweet and listened to the host explain the meaning of the calligraphy in the tokonoma (small recess in the wall). It was a zen aphorism about the way in which fish swimming upstream through a waterfall transform themselves into dragons through their great effort. There were a number of people serving the tea all dressed in beautiful kimono. They were members of a tea ceremony class. When I was an exchange student I was able to attend the tea ceremony classes my grandmother taught once a month and it was nice to have an opportunity on this trip to participate once more. It is a very strange art in many ways. The tea is prepared with great care and very slowly and each step in the ritual is carefully prescribed. We were not expected to follow any particular rules of tea ceremony as casual visitors but through watching others and my vague memories from all those years ago I managed to fumble my way through without feeling like too much of an idiot.

Afterwards the people asked me about myself and I explained that I was now living in Niiza and had lived in Japan before as an exchange student and had the opportunity to participate in tea ceremony at that time. Everyone was very kind and gracious and as usual went out of their way to flatter their foreign guest.

I took the photos on this post in an earlier walk I took to Heirinji temple some time last year. The rest of them can be viewed here:

A Walk to Heirinji Temple in Niiza