TEA MARKETING

Tea Marketing

Tea Marketing

The Nature of the Tea Ceremony

In the 15th century, Juro Murata introduced many of the concepts of spirituality into tea ceremony, including the special room only used for the chanoyu. Tea ceremonies were required to follow a certain order. Japanese Tea Ceremony Tea was first introduced to Japan along with Buddhism from China in the 6th century, but the Emperor Shomu introduced tea drinking to the country. During the Heian period (794-1185), tea was made from steamed and dried tea leaves ground into a powder called macha. Zen Buddhist concepts in the tea ceremony were introduced by Sen no Rikyu, a Japanese tea master. During the second half of the 16th century, Sen no Rikyu created the ceremony that is now practiced and taught in Japan called Chado. He further formalized the tea ceremony's rules and identified the spirit of chanoyu with four basic Buddhist principles of harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility. He also designed a separate building for the ceremony based on a typical Japanese farmer's hut.The object of other forms of aesthetic rituals, such as the art of fiction, for instance, might do the same. The object of the tea ceremony is to awaken or reinforce in the participant a sense of cultural identity and spiritual connection through its ritualized aesthetics. Indeed, such a connection between art and religion flourished during Japan's medieval period (950-1400), when "religious and aesthetic values became virtually co-terminous in what was called geido--the `Tao' (or Way) of aesthetics."

Diehards of the Indian tea origin theory hold that it was not Prince Siddhartha who brought tea to Japan anyway, but rather a Chinese traveler to India named Gan Lu. He supposedly returned to Japan with Indian tea plants that he planted in China's Sichuan province. According to tea origin theorists, tea was taken to China by Prince Siddhartha in 519 B.C. This presumption is clearly unfounded because tea had been part of the Chinese pharmacopoeia for at least one thousand years before Prince Siddhartha's birth. Here again the Gan Yu theory fails to convince because, like Siddhartha, Gan Lu was born long after tea had come into widespread use in Japan.

The Buddhist belief that tea bushes sprouted from Prince Siddhartha's torn-off eyelids must, like any miracle, be accepted on faith. Buddhism in any case laid sacred claims on tea, which became central to the Buddhist religious practice -- the tea ceremony -- in the same way that wine is central to the Catholic Mass. Just as in the country of the Vatican there is a wine called Lachryma Christi, or "Christ's Tear," in Offering Sacrificial Tea to Buddha was an obligation in Buddhist homes and monasteries and was formerly an imperial duty of Chinese emperors. Buddhist Japan there is a tea called Sow Mee Cha, or "Eyelid Tea." Devout Buddhists reverently presented offerings of tea to statues of Buddha always portrayed in the meditative posture.

Monasteries in Song times had developed a rigid hierarchy in which middle-ranking priests called ...