Chado or The Way of Tea

The cradle of the Tea ceremony has been for centuries one of the most beautiful and at the same time one of the oldest cultural centres on Japanese islands - former imperial city of Kyoto. The city became the residential city of the Tea Masters of Senke dynasty founded by Sen no Rikyu approximately in the second half of the 16th century.

Sen no Rikyu was born in the middle of the 16th century in the family of a rich sakai trader and left his imprint in the Japanese history both as a reformer of the Way of Tea and at the same time as an outstanding politician who later became the personal Tea Master of the two most powerful men of the medieval Japan - Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

In this context it is necessary to say that the habit of tea serving ceremony had already been known two centuries before Sen no Rikyu. However, this former tea serving practice looked rather like an ostentatious tea party than a ritual Tea ceremony. Its main purpose was not a meditative session over a delicious cup of tea but the demonstration of wealth and power through the high-quality Chinese and Korean ceramics.

The aim of Rikyu's reform was to create a Tea ceremony that would serve not only to quench one's thirst but would have its own strong aesthetic and spiritual ideal. Taking this into account the Tea ceremony was then transfered from rich rooms of aristocratic palaces into small and simple rooms of tea huts. In the following years the perfectly worked-out and luxurious ceramics from China and Korea were replaced by Japanese ones and precious metals such as gold or bronze and ivory used for their manufacture were replaced by cheap and easily available bamboo. Rikyu then shocked the whole tea world by expanding his collections of tea tools with common tools of everyday life - e.g. he replaced a varnished tray used for serving confectionery with a vessel which farmers used for shifting out rice or replaced mizusashi (a vessel for cold water) with a wooden pail originally used for drawing water from the well.

We can say that all these acts included a new aesthetic ideal that had been implanted in the Tea ceremony by Rikyu. The reformed Tea ceremony is sometimes called wabicha referring to the aesthetic cathegory wabi which reveals the beauty of simplicity and sobriety of colours and shapes, their imperfection and incompleteness. The spiritual background of this reformed Tea ceremony was then found in the teachings of Zen-buddhism which, as opposed to other Buddhist sects, focuses on mind concentrated on the present moment. In the Tea ceremony the teachings of Zen are expressed by the uniqueness and unrepeatable experience of the meeting between the guest and the host that should take place in the state of peaceful mind and in the atmosphere of modest and simple beauty. The essence of the Tea ceremony is then expressed by its four basic principles: wa - harmony, kei - respect, sei - purity, jaku - peacefulness.