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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 teaism. Teism 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

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