Teaism
 About Okakura KakuzōAuthor In this Japanese name, the family name is "Okakura". Okakura Kakuzō in 1898 Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉 覚三, February 14, 1862 – September 2, 1913) (also known as 岡倉 天心 Okakura Tenshin) was a Japanese scholar who contributed to the development of arts in Japan. Outside of Japan, he is chiefly remembered today as the author of The Book of Tea.

 

Teaism is the sacred worship of beauty in the everyday; finding magic in the mundane. Celebrating the greatness of little things. The Japanese matcha tea ceremonies were a carefully orchestrated drama whose plot was woven around tea and the zen-like aesthetics of the ritual, making teatime a sublime and sacred devotion to the art of life.

 

The Book of Tea (茶の本 Cha no Hon?) by Okakura Kakuzō[1] (1906), is a long essay linking the role of tea (teaism) to the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Japanese life. Addressed to a western audience, it was originally written in English and is one of the great English tea classics. Okakura had been taught at a young age to speak English and was proficient at communicating his thoughts to the Western mind. In his book, he discusses such topics as Zen and Taoism, but also the secular aspects of tea and Japanese life. The book emphasizes how Teaism taught the Japanese many things; most importantly, simplicity. Kakuzō argues that this tea-induced simplicity affected art and architecture, and he was a long-time student of the visual arts. He ends the book with a chapter on Tea Masters, and spends some time talking about Sen no Rikyū and his contribution to the Japanese Tea Ceremony. According to Tomonobu Imamichi, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein in Sein und Zeit was inspired — although Heidegger remained silent on this — by Okakura Kakuzō’s concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-worldness) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi’s philosophy, which Imamichi’s teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before