Ritual and Experience: the Japanese Tea Ceremony While Jennifer

Ritual and Experience: The Japanese Tea Ceremony While Jennifer Anderson stressed the “centrality to Japanese cultural identity” of the tea ceremony or chanoyu, she contended that the Japanese chado or “way of tea” had been neglected by anthropologists, perhaps because it does not seem like a particularly “religious” ritual (1987: 475). In fact, paradoxically, grandmaster Sen Soshitsu XV has asserted that “Tea is the practice of realization of religious faith, no matter what you believe in” (495). According to Anderson, there are a number of different tea rituals, including the solemn okencha in which tea is offered to gods at Shinto shrines and the okucha or tea ritual conducted for the dead at Buddhist temples. And while these ceremonies are associated, as indicated, with Shinto or Buddhism, “Taoist symbolism and Chinese-style utensils are prominent” (480). Then there is the chaji or “a gathering of a relatively small number of people (ideally three to five guests) which is conducted over a period of about four hours” including “greetings, a meal, two charcoal preparations, and the presentation of both thick (koicha) and thin (usucha) tea” (481-2). In actuality, seven main types of chaji are practiced, differing in the order of events, the theme, the specific teas consumed, and other variables. The most secular of these ceremonies is chakai, attended by more guests and concerned with matters of “relative status, group membership, ad material display” (482). Even so, Anderson held that chanoyu is “a form of ritual which developed out of the concern for Tea as a vehicle for enlightenment” (482). Planning for a chaji can take months, involving selection of the guests and the date and theme. On the day of the event, a room (yoritsuki) is set aside for changing out of ordinary street clothes into more traditional kimonos, and then guests wait in another room (machiai), which Anderson characterized as a “transitional space” (483), a liminal space in Victor Turner’s terms. After being served a drink, the guests perambulate along a roji or “dewy path” to the koshikake machiai or waiting arbor. They then enter the inner roji, where they sit in order of their social status before proceeding to the tea room (nigiriguchi) through a small low doorway, requiring each person to “enter only in an awkward, crouched position” (485). The most fascinating aspect of Anderson’s analysis is her description of the tea room, which is arranged “as a model of the Taoist cosmos,” consisting of eight segments associated with eight virtues like strength or pleasure and with natural elements such as wind, fire, and water. Not surprisingly, guests enter through the area associated “with flexibility and penetration” (485) and take tea prepared in the area associated with strength and power. The host enters from the area of submission and takes his/her place in the area associated with pleasure. “The segment of peril or difficulty is normally left unused” (485). A simple meal is served, inspiring “Shinto feelings for oneness with nature and a profound respect for the product of land and sea” through the “careful treatment and aesthetic arrangement of the food” (486). After the guests eat, rest, and stretch, “the most solemn and spiritually intimate part” of the ceremony, koicha, takes place. The high point of the entire ritual takes place as the main guest tastes his initial sip of koicha tea. If host and guest are to experience a deep sense of shared tranquility, it will be now. Ideally, the guest feels deep gratitude for everything that has gone into creating the wonderful experience epitomized by the first sip of tea (488). Guests may ask to see particular utensils, particularly the tea scoop “since this is usually a major symbol of the host’s theme. For koicha, it is customary to use a tea scoop with a name which has religious connotations” (489). Anderson concluded that chaji was an excellent example for the anthropology of ritual, since it “makes it difficult to distinguish religious from secular ritual. The chaji confounds all the attempts at classification…. It does not require a belief in deities or mystical powers. It is privately held and its ends do not appear logically related to its means” (490). Instead, the participant literally enters a ritual space and moves along a ritual course (not unlike the pilgrim’s circuit discussed in Chapter Five), ideally experiencing and being transformed by Japanese values. A practitioner of chado usually conceives of and ritually expresses an emotional and intellectual requirement for cosmic order in a more immediate way. The concepts of harmony (wa), respect (kei), purity (sei) and tranquility (jaku) are all distillations of specific aspects of this need. They have become the central litany of tea values, the most commonly recognized and recited words in chado. Every symbol, every movement, and every thought in tea ritual eventually relates back to one of these ideas, and, through them, to a universal urge to order (491). Through these practices, cosmic and social order are renewed, and the guests and host “can obtain salvation” (495). Reference Anderson, Jennifer L. 1987. “Japanese Tea Ritual: Religion in Practice.” Man (n.s.) 22 (3), 475-98. .

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