Tea is naught but this:
First you heat the water,
Then you make the tea.
Then you drink it properly.
That is all you need to know.

Sen Rikyu (1522 - 1591), translated by Foreign Affairs Section, Urasenke Foundation

The first time I encountered the tea ceremony at first hand was in England about ten years ago. A group of us who were interested in Japan and things Japanese had gathered and those of us who had any Japanese accomplishments showed them off. Along with the shakuhachi playing, the Japanese cooking and the archery, one English lady made tea and explained how she had achieved some kind of inner peace through this.

My reaction was sceptical. How could the 30 minutes or so spent manipulating these ridiculously antiquated utensils a few times promote a harmony with the universe? Apart from this scepticism, my main memory of this tea ceremony was the seemingly endless waving around of a silk cloth, and the pain in my legs from sitting still for so long on the floor.

When I came to Japan, my attitude changed. I became acquainted with a group of Japanese girls, two of whom studied tea. They invited me along to join them at a public tea gathering in a department store, where I was given some explanation of what was going on. The explanation and the experience made me more interested, and I joined the class where one of my friends studied.

In addition to simply making tea, the tea ceremony involves many aspects of traditional Japanese culture and craftsmanship: flowers, ceramics, lacquerware, architecture, kimono. If you want a concise guide to the heart of Japanese aesthetics, it's hard to beat tea. It must be confessed, though, that some of my initial motives featured less-than-classical aesthetic values. Some of the girls studying tea were extremely attractive, especially dressed up in kimono, and it seemed like a good opportunity to improve my conversational Japanese with a group of interesting conversation partners.

My first few lessons were taken up with the basics -- how to stand, how to walk (there are rules on which foot goes first when you enter and when you leave), how to bow, and how to sit. The sitting is the worst until you get used to it. It's called seiza, and you're basically kneeling on a straw mat. This hurts like crazy as all feeling in your legs disappears slowly. Of course, the endurance of physical pain/discomfort is a large part of a lot of mysticism, such as Zen meditation, and there certainly appears to be more than a coincidence here. It's not just foreigners who suffer, by the way. Many Japanese people, especially the young, are also unable to sit seiza-style; a result of the introduction of Western-style furniture into Japanese homes, according to the older generation.

After these introductory skills, and a few ground rules on how I should behave as a guest, I was presented with the tools of the trade (at least for the starting ceremony). This may be a good point to explain that "the tea ceremony" is a misnomer -- there are many different ways of making tea, depending on the time of year, the guest, the level of formality, etc. The Japanese for "tea ceremony" is sado -- "tea way" or chanoyu -- "tea hot water". The do is the same as the do of judo, aikido, kendo, etc -- and equivalent to the Chinese tao. Already we're hitting the mystical part!

The tools of the trade consist of a bamboo whisk, a bamboo scoop and a small cotton cloth, usually carried together in the teabowl, a lacquer container for the powdered tea, a basin for waste water, a bamboo scoop to scoop water from the kettle boiling over a charcoal fire, and a small piece of bamboo stem on which to rest the bamboo scoop. These are carried into the room, in a set order and placed on the floor in precise, pre-determined positions (to within 1cm (1/2")). All of this takes place on the floor, with the host and guest kneeling.

The host tucks into his belt a silk square which is used to wipe many of the tools before they're used. Again, we're entering mystical country -- the native Japanese Shinto religion and most of the Buddhist sects in Japan emphasise cleaniness as an ideal. The whole thing can take from between fifteen minutes and forty-five minutes, for the tea-making part. A whole "tea ceremony" with food and two kinds of tea, can take a number of hours.

Every item must be picked up and manipulated just so -- after nearly eight years of study, I'm still learning how to hold the bamboo teascoop properly. After a while, this discipline imposes its own rhythm on you, in the same way as playing a musical instrument or studying a martial art. While concentrating on the right way to wipe the tea-caddy or hold the violin bow, you suddenly find that you've made a bowl of tea, or played a Bach violin sonata better than you ever thought you could. The ostensible object of this perfection is to provide no surprises and to maintain harmony -- everything is exactly right, because that's the way it has been ordained in the rule book.

Of course, there are exceptions to this perfection -- there is a story of a nervous merchant making tea for Rikyu (see below), who kept knocking over the utensils and generally being clumsy. Rikyu's response was pleasure at the merchant's enthusiasm, even his over-enthusiasm. Anyone who has played music or studied any sport or physical skill, and has played wrong notes in a concert or fallen down in a critical race will sympathise with the merchant, and admire Rikyu's humanity (my personal worst in tea came when I was making tea in a public ceremony and did everything at least adequately, except leaving the room, when I hit my head on the doorframe).

If I keep drawing analogies between music and tea, this is because this is probably the closest activity with which most non-Japanese will have experience. However, a closer analogy is probably with certain martial arts (judo, etc., as taught in Japan, with their emphasis on imitating the teacher, and not questioning the whys and wherefores until suddenly you "understand"). I have also studied iaido (the art of drawing a sword) in Japan, and while non-Japanese see a dichotomy between tea and swords, Japanese people, on the whole, feel that these arts are different aspects of the same thing.

The "same thing" of course is Zen Buddhism, either one of the world's great jokes, or the most profound religious thought. Or both. There is also, as you might expect from a country where so much is imported and mixed together, more than a dash of Taoism and Confucianism in the way of tea.

Of course, there is materialism in all of this as well. Sen Rikyu, the founder of the modern tea way, who died just over 400 years ago, emphasised the importance of simple, Japanese (as opposed to costly imported Chinese and Korean) ceramics and utensils. Unfortunately, Rikyu's ideals have been modified along the way. His son's grandsons fragmented his unified way of tea into different schools, and the "simple, homely items" in the style favoured by Rikyu now command immense prices -- one teabowl can cost over US$30,000. Students pay (sometimes heavily) to attend lessons and take part in public ceremonies, and there is a set scale of fees to take the tests which mark one's development in the art of tea. But this is not a big surprise in a country where a Buddhist temple can be a family business, passed down from father to son.

Rikyu's life, indeed, although he was a Buddhist abbot, was a mass of political intrigue. He ended up offending the ruler of Japan so much that he was ordered to perform suicide. But do the more worldly aspects of his life, and the sometimes commercial nature of tea today detract from the essential spiritual aspects of tea? I think not, and neither do the millions of Japanese who study this intriguing art.