Friday, March 14, 2008
Posted by Miss Neddy at 10:23 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Related

Lu Yü was brought up in a monastery, and made to study the Buddhist scriptures. This showed in his personality, which was described in the Qing dynasty work “Complete Essays on the Tang Dynasty” 全唐文 (Quán Táng Wén): 见人为善, 若以有之; 见人不善, 若以羞之. “If he saw others do good, it was as if he himself had been the recipient; if he saw others were unkind, it was as if he himself had been humiliated”. Such was the depth of compassion within him, that he empathised with great intensity.

Kindness, compassion and generosity are integral to achieving expertise in tea making. Philosophically, tea making for the Chinese is usually a social activity, sharing an enjoyable beverage with friends and family - without kindness and love, one cannot truly make a genuinely good cup of tea to serve. In practical terms, if one is miserly with one’s time, one’s patience and one’s tea leaves, it would be impossible to make a decent cup of tea. The entire process of making tea, especially gongfu tea using delicate clay pots and cups, necessitates a gentle, slow approach - the thin earthenware does not take kindly to repeated knocks and clashes.

There are many legends linking tea to acts of kindness. One particularly strange one, from the Sui Dynasty, was of an old lady who sold tea on the street; oddly, her teapot never ran out of tea no matter how many customers she had that day. In the evenings, she distributed the money she earned to the poor, the crippled and the orphaned. Fearing she was some kind of witch, the authorities arrested her and threw her in prison. It is said she hoisted her tea equipment on her shoulder and flew out the window, never to return. I cannot help but draw a parallel of her endless teapot to that of the goddess Guanyin’s bottle of “sweet dew” (甘露 gān lù), which is also never empty, as it is a symbol of her compassion. Perhaps it is appropriate that tea is inextricably linked with Buddhism, being a philosophy of compassion, and that the King of teas, Tie Guanyin, is named after the Goddess of Mercy.

So remember, when you are making tea - be kind.

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