Steeped in tradition

WE drink water to quench our thirst, according to Lu Yu, author of the Chinese classic Chajing, wine to banish melancholy and tea to clear the mind.

WE drink water to quench our thirst, according to Lu Yu, author of the Chinese classic Chajing, wine to banish melancholy and tea to clear the mind.

 This was written in AD780, during the Tang Dynasty; the Chinese were evolving the philosophy of cha dao, the way of tea, when those in the West were just finding their feet after surviving several terrible centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Apart from the vicissitudes of history, this wise saying, included in the National Gallery of Victoria's exhibition Tea and Zen, reminds us how intimately beverages are associated with human culture and even with the quality of a people's thought.

There was neither tea nor coffee in the ancient world or even in Renaissance Europe. Both appeared around the middle of the 17th century, and coffee in particular began to have profound effects both on social life, with the beginning of the coffee house, and more generally on culture and even literary style.

The nervous energy stimulated by coffee is palpable in the writing of Voltaire, who is said to have consumed 40 cups a day, and in the exuberance of Balzac's style; caffeine-inspired excitability undoubtedly contributed to the intellectual hysteria of the French Revolution.

But even in its Arabian homeland, coffee is only 500 or 600 years old. Tea, in contrast, has been prepared and drunk for thousands of years, and although it is also a stimulant, its effect is much gentler, promoting lucidity rather than excitement.

The cultures that are particularly attuned to the state of mind induced by tea -- apart from the special case of Britain -- are those of China and Japan, the dual focus of Tea and Zen, and the spiritual tradition with which tea is particularly associated is Buddhism in its Ch'an or (in Japanese) Zen form.

Buddhism is a complex system of beliefs, originating in the teaching of the historical Buddha about 2 1/2 millennia ago. It arose as a reform movement within Hinduism, as Christianity arose within Judaism: its object was to offer a way out of the nightmare of endless reincarnation and repeated cycles of suffering.

This world of pain, Buddha came to understand, was an illusion produced by desire and attachment; if one could abolish desire, one would abolish suffering -- to this extent his teaching recalls the Stoic doctrine of ataraxy -- or perhaps, taking the argument a step further, cancel the world itself.

The prospect of escaping from suffering had a wide appeal, as did the later Christian idea of an afterlife where the just would be recompensed for the evils they had endured in this existence. But the original teaching was too abstract, and Buddhism soon turned into something easier to understand, a religion, succumbing to a proliferation of deities and spirits, heavens and afterlifes.

At the same time, Buddhism adapted in various degrees to the previously existing cultures and beliefs it encountered in its diffusion. Thus the Japanese ended up with a compromise: they are traditionally married in the rites of Shinto, the ancient animistic religion associated with life and fertility, but buried in the Buddhist rite, which promises salvation.

In China, Buddhism was less successful. It encountered a civilisation already based on a complementary pair of belief systems, Confucianism and Taoism, neither of which was a conventional religion either.

Confucianism is essentially an ethical doctrine based on the teaching of Confucius. But it is balanced by the completely different and unrelated philosophy of Taoism, taught by Laozi. If Confucius teaches the laws of social life, Laozi speaks of our relation with the greater world of nature and the cosmos. Nature is a living presence, animated by the breath of life, the chi, and the self dissolves in its communion with being. This is the thought that underpins Chinese landscape painting, and such imaginary views of mountains and streams served partly to console the Confucian mandarin obliged by his duties to spend much time in the city.

Buddhism encountered resistance from the Confucians but formed its own synthesis with Taoism. In its origin, Buddhism was a quest for extinction; but Taoism was concerned with communion with something greater, a cosmic order outside the self.

The assimilation of a positive aim allowed Ch'an Buddhism to dispense with the religious paraphernalia, becoming less a religion and more a spiritual practice, and in this way arriving at something closer to the spirit of Buddha's original teaching.

Ch'an was called Zen in Japan, where it became a fundamental part of the culture. It was specifically adopted as part of the philosophy of the samurai, because it allowed one to live and act in the world while maintaining inner detachment.

The central idea of Zen is to maintain unswerving presence, not distracted by desire or fear. Hence the application of Zen to archery, well-known since the post-war book by Eugen Herrigel, but discussed earlier by the great Japanese scholar Daisetz Suzuki.

The archer is not to think of himself and what he is doing with the bow but only of the target. The arts of swordsmanship and tea are also discussed by Suzuki in Zen and Japanese Culture (1959).

But Zen itself is famously unteachable; there are countless stories of masters refusing to instruct students who ask for answers, and of monks tearing up scriptures. Paradoxes (koan) are used to reduce the rational mind to surrender. According to Zen doctrine, you cannot even seek enlightenment, since desire and yearning are incompatible with presence. It is simply there as soon as you stop striving.

The relevance of tea to all this is that it both promotes lucidity and calm and serves as a stimulant, so that it was originally used to help Zen monks stay awake during stretches of meditation that could go on for many hours. According to legend the monk Bodhidharma sat in meditation for nine years until his arms fell off (giving rise to the popular Japanese Daruma doll).

The NGV exhibition is elegantly laid out with a small contemporary Japanese tea-house in the centre and the two sides of the square room divided between Chinese artefacts on the left and Japanese on the right. It is accompanied by a concise but scholarly brochure that allows the viewer to understand an experience of tea that has relatively little in common with that of a hurried cup made by jiggling a tea bag in mechanically boiled, chemical-filled water.

Great attention was paid to the growing and picking of tea -- often cultivated around the Zen monasteries -- and then to its preparation. The leaves were originally made into tea cakes, some of which was broken off and dissolved in the boiling water, and then mixed with a whisk like the one still used in the Japanese tea ceremony.

The water had to be pure, preferably from a pristine mountain stream. It had to be boiled to the correct degree. And then it had to be served in beautiful cups, in order to appreciate its colour and its perfume.

Most or all of these principles are common to China and Japan, but the exhibition is also an opportunity to consider some of the profound differences between these two cultures, manifest in the materials they produce for the making, serving and enjoyment of tea.

The Chinese side of the exhibition includes landscape scrolls as well as beautiful blue and white wares and bowls in the celadon hue that was admired because it recalled jade. The first impression is one of great refinement, but also a certain characteristic informality.

Several scrolls evoke the environment in which the Chinese liked to drink tea, or to imagine drinking it: high in the mountains, on the terrace of a scholar's retreat, overlooking forests and streams, so that the pleasure of tea is visibly assimilated to that of communing with nature.

The many writings cited remind one of another aspect of Chinese classical culture, namely its love of reflecting on aesthetic experience, of writing lists of rules for enjoying things such as tea or wine or mountain views, or cataloguing various other refined pleasures.

Although there are shared elements, the Japanese aesthetic is very different. What is expressed in literary terms in China seems to be turned into elaborate ceremony in Japan, a conversion that is in keeping with the more formal and introverted character of Japanese culture, but also with the idea that Zen is all about practice and can be conveyed better through participation in a ritual than in theoretical or even literary discourse.

Because of the particular conditions of Japanese history -- and specifically the rise, in the late medieval period, of a powerful and wealthy new feudal class of people eager to make a show of their cultural sophistication -- the Japanese love of refinement expresses itself in two different and in a sense diametrically opposed ways.

On the one hand there is an extreme luxury of materials and workmanship in some cups, tea-caddies and other equipment made of metal or lacquer with inlays of precious materials; and on the other hand this very extravagance provoked a predictable return to radical simplicity and the characteristic Japanese wabi aesthetic.

Instead of fine porcelain, humbler stoneware was preferred for teacups; the darker earth hues set off the green tea better, and instead of the minute exactness of pattern, a preference arose for the random effects of glazing that formed asymmetrical and patchy compositions of colour and texture.

Perhaps it is only in Japan that a change in something as apparently rarefied as the tea ceremony could become a tool of political power, but as the catalogue explains, in the 16th century the effective ruler Hideyoshi adopted the reformed ceremony as symbolic of his new social order.

A simplified ceremony, however, does not mean a less formal one. The materials may be humble, but each of the actions involved in the preparation and serving of tea is slow and considered. This is something that has to be seen to be appreciated, and the exhibition is accompanied by the video of a tea master performing the cha-no-yu.

It is an absorbing spectacle, like watching any highly refined activity carried out with skill and expertise. The gestures are minimal and yet stylised, almost choreographed, but never gratuitous. They are set as a pathway through the sequence of necessary practical operations, to allow the mind to remain, in the spirit of Zen, undisturbed and present.