The Book of Tea. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Book of Tea

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. 1st World Library-Literary Society is a non-profit educational organization. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism - Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste.

Okakura Kakuz, also known as Okakura Tenshin, was a Japanese academic and art critic who, during the Meiji Restoration reform era, defended conventional forms, practices, and beliefs. He lived from February 14, 1863, to September 2, 1913. He is most known outside of Japan for his 1906 book The Book of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life. It was written in English after the Russo-Japanese War, denounced Western stereotypes of Asians in general and the Japanese specifically, and voiced the worry that Japan would only acquire respect to the extent that it copied the barbaric practices of Western militarism. On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, he released The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan, a book on Asian aesthetic and cultural history. It is famous for its opening paragraph, which asserts that Asia differs from the West because of its spiritual unity. When Kakuzo persisted in visiting his mountain estate in Akakura in August 1913, his sister, wife, and daughter eventually transported him there by train. Kakuzo was able to communicate with others and feel a little better for almost a week before suffering a heart attack on August 25.