Rev. Ryofu Pussel
E-mail: ryofu@pussel-photo.com
URL: http://www.pussel-photo.com

Chado: The J apanese Way of Tea
The title of my paper is “Chado: The Japanese Way of Tea”, and I would like
to outline the world of the Way of Tea, analyse its history, connection to
Japanese culture, and also touch Japanese philosophical aspects.
I will then show that through the practice of the Japanese Tea Ceremony,
chado, genuine harmony and peace can be achieved; in other words, and this
is very much in line with the role that the Japan Studies Association of
Canada plays: to foster awareness of Japan and to promote peaceful and
multilateral international relations.
I just used the term “Tea Ceremony” because this is how chado is mostly
known in the West, but this implies that it is something like a show or an
entertainment, and this would not hit the point. Therefore, I feel, the Way of
Tea is the appropriate translation for chado; cha meaning of course tea, and
do meaning way、so: “Way of Tea”. Sometimes instead of chado, the term
chanoyu is used, which literally means “hot water for tea”.
An internet book search will reveal that there are not so many books
1

published about the Way of Tea which actually instruct any tea procedures
past the beginner’s level. This is because chado does not rely on
written-down words, but on oral instruction directly from teacher to student,
or as my late teacher would always say, “Tea cannot be learned from a book,
only from the heart.” This way of instruction is found in the Japanese
teaching philosophy: ishin-denshin (transmitting from my heart/mind to
your heart/mind) — meaning that the ultimate reality or ultimate wisdom or
ultimate insight, or however you label it, cannot be learned through books or
scriptures, but can only be induced by a teacher to a student directly, and
then experienced by the student directly with his own heart and mind and
body.
Arguing in this direction, Sen Rikyu’s grandson, the Grand Tea Master,
Sotan wrote in the 16th century:
Chanoyu to wa
K okoro ni tsutae

Chanoyu
is conveyed through the mind,

Me ni tsutae
Mimi ni tsutaete

through eye
and ear—

H itofude mo nashi

without a single stroke of the brush.

Recalling my own tea learning: the training and instructions on the Way of
Tea are very long, requiring much discipline, much physical labour (samu),
only to realize the “becoming one” with the Way of Tea. For example,
practitioners must clean the gardens and wipe each and every leaf clean
before a tea gathering, so that the kimono of the guest might not become
dirty when accidentally slightly striking against a leaf while walking
through the garden path to the assembly rooms. But, in my experience, this
strict training also cultivates humility, gratitude and develops a calm
character based on the principles of harmony, respect, and kindness.
Let me give you an example of “becoming one with tea” from my own
personal experience:
When I went to a tea gathering some days ago, I was to prepare tea for many
guests. This procedure is simple and one of the first that students of the Way
of Tea learn, so it is not so difficult. There were a lot of guests present, and I
had to improvise many things. So, I realized that the development of a
2

student of the Way of Tea really proceeds through three stages: S hu, first a
student learns the procedures by heart, ha, he is no longer hindered by these,
and ri , he breaks free and develops his own forms and patterns. Rikyu’s
poem was found true: “Practice involves beginning to learn from one (the
very first procedure) and coming to know ten (mastering the highest level
procedures), then returning from ten to the original one”. This had just
happened to me that day.
When I then heard at this exact moment some birds crying in the evening
sky, I experienced a bliss that could be labeled as “becoming one with tea”.
“Wild geese of the skies… their cries are forlorn. Passing into the drifting
rains, the chill of autumn.”: I felt completely one with the “Way of Tea”, the
procedure, the utensils and equipment, myself and the guests, I became very
still, collected, happy and peaceful. I was very collected and felt very much
“here-and-now”, while I was preparing and improvising the tea, and I was
completely concentrated on my “free” doing tea, my “releasing” myself,
beyond any prescribed rules. In other words, I felt completely “one” and was
no longer attached to any concept of “rules”, “equipment”, and “guests”: I
thus became non-aware of them anymore; being completely and peacefully
settled in my no longer discriminating activities here-and-now – and even
transcending these; in other words, I was released, while being absolutely
aware and fully acting – at least during this period of tea preparation.

3

S tudying Tea
I just said that there are not so many books about the Way of Tea, and really
even nowadays, - at least with my teacher - it is still forbidden for the
student to write down any notes during the lessons past the beginner’s level.
Imagine her reaction when I asked her to video-tape our lessons…! I was told
that until around fifty years ago, students were not allowed to talk during
the lessons and were even forbidden to ask questions to the teacher: students
were to watch the teacher closely and to remember all his movements, so
that one day they will create their own pattern and form and bring out their
own “spirit” of the Way of Tea; Gengensai, the eleventh Urasenke Grand
Master, wrote in his Rules of P ractice in 1856 the following orders:
There will be strict adherence to decorum, and unnecessary talking
will not be allowed . . . Questions are forbidden during the
preparation of tea . . . Old and young alike should undertake
practice with no sense of shame.

At a formal tea gathering (chaji ), the host will prepare and serve two kinds of
tea: thick tea (koicha, let’s say like espresso) and thin tea (usucha, like
regular coffee), with some sweets served before and in between them; the
procedure of which is called temae. The two kinds of tea vary in the utensils,
the tea bowls, the amount of powdered tea used, and also in the manner of
partaking them.
Students first learn thin tea before they embark on thick tea. Altogether,
there are eighty-five different types of temae known in the Urasenke school
4

of tea—each perfected in fixed rules, which bring out the most beautiful
forms possible in using the different utensils, preparing tea by using these
utensils, and partaking it. Some movements are slow, some fast, some
appear light, some appear heavy, some are abrupt, and some are delicate; the
positions of the utensils, and the sequence of actions, are absolutely defined.
The beauty of the moment is manifested in the host being completely
absorbed in this very moment in this very action; this is the perfected spirit
of Zen Buddhism. A tea preparation, temae, cannot be measured in how good
the student can remember the different steps of preparing and serving, but
in how much he himself has become the spirit of “drawing hot water from the
kettle,” “whisking green tea,” and so on; this is very graceful and brings out
the beauty of the moment. Thus, the preparation and serving of a bowl of tea
will manifest the same spirit as in all actions of the daily life. The phrase
ichigo-ichie, meaning “one time–one meeting,” or, as the Past Grand Master
Sen Genshitsu (the father of the present Grand Master) likes to translate it,
“one-time-one-chance” or “one-time-one opportunity”, is fully established in
the spirit of a tea meeting. I chigo-ichie, the coming together of the host and
the guests, is only certain here and now; yesterday is gone, and nobody
knows for sure if one will ever meet again in the future. Because of
ichigo-ichie, the host and the guests must make the most of the moment and
put their fullest attention, effort, heart, and thankfulness into the actual tea
gathering as if it were the last one in their life. The Past Grand Master Sen
Genshitsu experienced that when he prepared chado-Tea for his comrades
and himself before they were to fly off as kamikaze-pilots, never to return
home. Well, they all died, only he and one friend were spared, as they
couldn’t depart on that day because of heavy fog obstructing visibility, so
they were scheduled to fly off again – the day after the Second World War
ended for Japan – lucky them!

5

H istory of the Way of Tea
Now I would like to talk very briefly about the history of the Japanese Way of
Tea.
There are many somehow religiously shaped drinks: Christianity has wine,
Islam has coffee, and Japanese Buddhism has powdered and whisked green
tea. Regarding tea, the culture of black tea originated in India and spread to
the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, whereas the green tea originated
in China and spread from there to Japan. Using more or less similar tea
plants, the only main difference is that for black tea, the tea leaves are
fermented; whereas for green tea, the leaves are steamed.
In the 12th century, the monk Eisai, the founder of the Japanese Rinzai
School of Zen Buddhism, returned from China and brought back with him
tea seeds and, convinced of the benefits of tea drinking, strongly propagated
tea drinking in Japan. One of his books, P reservation of H ealth through
Drinking Tea (Japanese: K issa Yojoki ), explains the medical virtues of tea
and starts with this line: “Tea is an elixir for good health, a miraculous
means of prolonging one’s life”. He also administered green powdered tea to
the powerful shogun Minamoto for relief of his frequent hangovers. Eisai
Zenji had the head abbot of the Kozan-ji in Kyoto plant his tea seeds, and
this is the exact beginning of tea growing in Japan. Soon, the Buddhist
temples started to introduce rules for tea preparation, called sarei . These
were ritual celebration teas, usually offered at the first morning meeting of
the temple. This habit still exists today; and for example at our monastery, it
is offered every morning between 7:20 and 8:00, where everybody in the
monastery gathers together (which is, as a side note, an excellent method for
checking the whereabouts of all the monks) – let’s not forget that we get up
at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning!
In the 13th century, Dogen Zenji from the Japanese Soto Zen brought back
from Sung China a ceramic caddy for tea powder, called koga kata-tsuki ,
which became the model for tea caddies used for thick green tea even until
now—more than 750 years after Dogen.

6

In the 14th century, the head priest of the Rinzai-Daitoku-ji head temple in
Kyoto, the famous Ikkyu Zenji , loved tea and coined the phrases “The
Buddha’s law also exists in Tea” and “Tea originated out of Zen”.
An amusing anecdote that illustrates Ikkyu’s sharp-witted character goes as
follows: “Accidentally, as a young, he broke a favorite tea bowl of his master,
and when the master returned, he asked him, ‘Why do people have to die?’
The master answered that everything is impermanent and has to die, and
that death is a natural process. Ikkyu laid the pieces of the bowl before the
master and said, ‘It was time for your bowl to die’”.
In the 15th century, the Zen Buddhist monk and tea-obsessed Shuko (also
sometimes pronounced Juko) Murata said remarks like “I do not like the
moon in a cloudless sky”, referring to the sensible aesthetic beauty of the
“imperfect” moon shining through rents in the clouds rather than the
“perfect” moon shining brightly in the cloudless sky. This preference for the
“imperfect” and “incomplete” led him to develop the first
four-and-a-half-tatami-mat room explicitly for tea (the standard size of a
tearoom even nowadays—around 2.7 by 2.7 meters—to include one host and
all the guests!). When asked why he had developed such a small tearoom, he
answered that in a tearoom, “any discrimination between oneself and the
others vanishes, the virtue of gentleness prevails, and a new mutual
understanding can be found”. He coined terms like modesty, harmony,
respect, and cleanliness—similar to wa (harmony), kei (respect), sei (purity),
and jaku (tranquility). Through his concept of hiesabi , “chill and aged,” he
created a quiet form of tea that is rich in calmness and insight, and this was
named the soan-style of tea.

7

The exceptionally tea skilled and uncompromising Sen Rikyu (1521–1591)
was the most active, most powerful, most controversial, and most
extraordinary tea person ever, who developed, completed, perfected, and
codified the rules of the Way of Tea and its etiquette of preparing and
receiving a bowl of tea, as still practiced today. It is fair to say that only
because of Sen Rikyu we have the practice of chado as it is today. He is
regarded as the First Grand Master of the Japanese Way of Tea line of Grand
Tea Masters, who are now in the 16th generation.
Sen Rikyu was born into a wealthy merchant family dealing in fish. When he
practiced Zen in his twenties, he received the Buddhist name Soeki. He was
thus known as Sen Soeki. The first syllable of his first name, So, is still found
in all tea names descending from his tradition, such as Soshitsu of the
present grand master and Sofu of, well, myself.
It would go beyond the scope of this paper to present a complete analysis of
Rikyu’s life and death by seppuku, ordered by the ruler of Japan, Hideyoshi.
It should only be mentioned here that he brought the wabi sabi tea to its
uncompromising height and established the Way of Tea as a path.

Finally, it should be noted that chado was exclusively for men until recently.
The Sino-Japanese War in the 19th century saw the unfortunate death of
many men, and the thirteenth grand master of Urasenke, Ennosai, taught
the remaining women and widows all the way up to tea instructor licensing
and introduced the Way of Tea in the curricula of secondary girls’ schools
throughout Japan. This was a completion of the initial steps taken by the
8

wife of his father, the twelfth grand master, Yumyosai, who saw a decline in
Japanese culture and tradition. Chado in schools was further developed by
the fourteenth grand master, Tantansai; and the fifteenth grand master,
Hounsai, the father of the present Grand Master, who established chado at
credit-level courses in universities and colleges and was the first to actively
expand the Way of Tea abroad.

The P hilosophy of the Way of Tea
Now I would like to talk about the philosophy of the Way of Tea. It is based
on these principles: wa, kei , sei , jaku, wabi sabi , and suki . I’ll explain these
one-by-one.
Wa (harmony) is a feeling of oneness with nature and people—a harmonious
spirit between host and guest, guest and guest, but also between the seasons,
weather, and utensils chosen for this particular event: for example, light
equipment that evokes a feeling of coolness in summer or heavy, earthen
ware that gives the feeling of warmth in winter. Like everything that is
bound to change, weather is unpredictable, and one should always be
prepared for rain even on a sunny day. Man is not separable from nature,
and nature not separable from man.
K ei (respect) arises out of a feeling for gratitude, goodwill, friendship, and
9

includes respect for the worthiness of other people, acceptance of their
individuality, respect for both cheap as well as expensive utensils, and
indeed for everything in our daily life. In the Way of Tea, kei is manifested in
the hospitality and mutual concern of the host and the guests, and the quiet
and careful handling of the utensils and equipment. What we, in the West,
would call democracy is also reflected in kei, since participants respect and
value their worthiness as individuals: for example, Rikyu’s crawling
entrance (nijiriguchi ) made everybody equal—the king, the nobleman, the
samurai, the merchant, the farmer—through the same degree of bowing and
crawling when entering the tearoom.

S ei (purity) includes cleanliness and orderliness, both physically and
spiritually. It plays a very important role, and the guests of a tea gathering
first wash their hands and rinse their mouth before entering the tea hut,
which symbolizes the cleaning of their heart and mind as well as of their
body; the host, when purifying the tea utensils with a silk cloth, also cleans
his spirit at the same time. After the tea meeting, having sat in reflective
silence for a while, the host will put all utensils back to their original places
and clean the tearoom because a clean heart manifests naturally a clean and
orderly room.
J aku (tranquility) refers to the Japanese term nehan (Sanskrit: nirvana).
This is a state of mind – at least this is how I, well, “see” it - of oneness with
tea, stillness, happiness, and transcendence (of mind-body, object-subject,
host-utensil, guest-host, etc.). Constantly practicing wa, kei , and sei realizes
10

jaku.

Wabi-sabi …I will try to explain it with a poem by the person of the way of tea,
S?gi, from the 15th century:
Amatsu kari
Yo no taka mine ni

Wild geese of the skies;
on the high peak at night

K oe wabite
S higure ni utsuru

their cries are forlorn.
Passing into the drifting rains,

Aki no samukesa

the chill of autumn.

Wabi sabi is not really appropriately translatable into English, but the term
“imperfect beauty” might come near. Better than any direct translation that
might lose some of the deep meaning of wabi sabi , Tea Master Sotaku wrote
in his work Zen-cha R oku:
Always bear in mind that wabi involves not regarding incapacities
as incapacitating, not feeling that lacking something is deprivation,
nor thinking that what is not provided is deficiency. To regard
incapacity as incapacitating, to feel that lack is deprivation, or to
believe that not being provided for is poverty is not wabi . . . Pine
pillars, bamboo joists, left as they are, curved and straight, square
and round, up and down, left and right, new and old, light and
heavy, long and short, broad and narrow, repaired where chipped,
11

patched where torn. Everything at odds, nothing matching.
One is reminded of Shuko’s remark as quoted above: “I do not like the moon
in a cloudless sky”—which means that imperfect, irregular beauty is
preferred to perfection; the moon behind some clouds is more beautiful than
the perfectly shining full moon in a bright sky.
Wabi sabi incorporates the ideals of finding spiritual freedom in a situation
of material insufficiency, not to be bound to material things, expectation, or
worldly values, but to transcend them; a broken but repaired piece is
completely acceptable at a tea meeting, and insufficient equipment can still
be used sufficiently by a calm and improvising heart. Wabi sabi is the realm
of true sincerity. In short, the ideals of being and acting simple and
unpretentious, the beauty of a lotus flower blooming above mud, purity and
perfection, and detachment are included in the meaning of wabi sabi .
S uki is also a term whose meaning is difficult to grasp—and even more
difficult to translate! In Rikyu’s times, it was used as a synonym for the Way
of Tea; suki-cha or suki -tea was the phrase of the day. S uki means, in its
literal translation in English, “to like” or “to love”; and Rikyu has used this
term to illustrate that without suki , combined with purity of heart and mind,
there is no “life,” only abstraction, in the practice of the Way of Tea. Tea
without suki is just a form, an empty vessel, some robotlike rules. I therefore
propose to translate the term suki into English as “egoless, unconditioned
loving-kindness.”
To reflect upon, and prepare for, the guests’ well-being, serve them as good
one can - in the Way of Tea, this means that the host must try to understand
the guests’ characters and needs when he is preparing for the tea gathering,
and the guest must try to understand the host’s character and spirit; by
respecting and thoughtfully serving each other, together, they will produce
true human relationships. In the realm of wabi sabi and suki , “to be of
service to one another” induces true “happiness.”
In other words, the Way of Tea sees the development of harmony and world
peace as, first of all, being established and developed within oneself through
continuous devoted practice. From there, it will spread over to fellow beings
12

and all over the world, ideally. Likewise, it does not try to change a nation,
ideology, or system per se, but starts with the individual.

Conclusion
Wabi sabi (imperfect beauty) includes acting unpretentious and possessing a
simple but calm mind that does not regard incapacity as lacking something,
but that transcends material things and worldly values; a mind that is not
irritated when something unexpected happens, or when something is
insufficient.
The Japanese term suki (egoless, unconditioned loving-kindness) is related
to the ideal of service above self, for example, feeling happy for the success of
others, engaging in voluntary and humanitarian service, implementing suki
in one’s daily life in one’s family, community, and even business—such
friendliness and egoless, unconditioned loving-kindness as developed
through the practice of suki are the basic ingredients for harmony and world
peace, unconditionally accepting race, colour, religion, etc.
S ei (purity) includes physical and spiritual cleanliness and orderliness.
Wa (harmony) is a feeling of harmonious oneness with an individual and
with people and nature. Respect for nature follows naturally out of the wa
and sei attitude, and this includes gratefulness for, appreciative use of, and
caring for, the gifts of nature such as air, water, and plants. Purity and
harmony is realized through generosity, hospitality, and compassion;
whereas “pollution” and disharmony are produced by greed and hatred;
unpure and disharmonious morality leads to deterioration of man and
13

nature, whereas purity and harmony lead to improvement of the quality of
man and nature; this could result in us living peacefully in this world
without harming it and ourselves, thus supporting the development of
harmony and world peace.

14