Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast.

Today's podcast has been edited and adapted from The Book of Tea by Okokuro Kakuzzo, published in 1906.

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.

In China in the 8th century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the

polite amusements. The 15th century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of

aestheticism called teism. Teeism 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 co-jointly with ethics and religion our whole point of

view about humanity 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. The long isolation of Japan from the rest of the world, so conducive to

introspection, was highly favorable to the development of teaism. The country's habits,

costume, cuisine, porcelain, lacquer, painting, its very literature, all have been subject to teaism's influence.

No student of Japanese culture could ever ignore its presence.

It has permeated the elegance of noble bordeauxs and entered the abode of the humble.

In common Japanese parlance, we speak of the man with no tea in him when he is

unsusceptible to the tragicomic interests of personal drama. In similar fashion, we

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