Why Would Making Tea Take Four Hours? Attention as the Point

A full formal gathering runs for around four hours and includes a meal, a break, and the serving of thick and thin tea. Guests arrive early, wait in a shelter, pass along a path designed to separate the garden from the street, and purify hands and mouth at a stone basin before entering through a deliberately low door that requires everyone to stoop. Inside they view a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement chosen for the occasion. The host lays the charcoal, serves food, and then prepares tea by whisking powdered leaf with hot water in a bowl, with every movement of ladle, whisk, cloth and bowl following a set sequence.

Four qualities are conventionally named as the basis of the practice:

• •Harmony, among the participants and between them and the season and setting
• •Respect, expressed through how objects and people are handled
• •Purity, both literal cleaning and the clearing of ordinary concerns
• •Tranquillity, understood as following from the other three
• •The idea that each gathering happens once and will never recur
• •Aesthetic appreciation of the worn, the irregular and the plain

Powdered tea reached Japan from China with Zen monks in the twelfth century, initially as an aid to staying awake during meditation. Its use spread among the military elite, who developed elaborate contests and displays with expensive imported Chinese utensils. The decisive shift came in the sixteenth century with Sen no Rikyu, who reduced the scale of everything, favouring small rooms, humble locally made utensils and irregular hand-formed bowls over polished imported ones, and who codified the procedures that remain in use. He served the two most powerful warlords of the period and was ordered by the second to take his own life in 1591, for reasons that are still argued about. His descendants head the main schools.

The material served is unlike ordinary brewed tea in ways that determine the whole procedure. Leaves for it are shaded for several weeks before harvest, which raises the content of certain compounds and produces a sweeter, less bitter result with an intense green colour. They are steamed, dried and then ground on stone mills into an extremely fine powder, a process slow enough that a mill produces only tens of grams an hour. The powder is whisked into hot water rather than steeped and strained, so the whole leaf is consumed rather than an infusion of it. Thick tea uses several times the powder of thin tea and is closer to a paste, shared from one bowl, while thin tea is served individually.

The practice is inseparable from a body of craft, and the standing of those objects explains much about Japanese aesthetics generally. Bowls formed by hand rather than thrown on a wheel, with irregular shapes and thick uneven glazes, were elevated above technically perfect wares, which was a deliberate reversal and is the origin of an appreciation of imperfection that extends well beyond tea. Utensils carry names and documented histories of ownership and are valued accordingly. Bamboo scoops carved by a famous practitioner are treated as major works. Iron kettles, lacquer containers, and the scroll and flowers chosen for a particular day all form part of a composition, and a host assembles them to say something about the occasion.

A formal gathering runs about four hours through a garden path, a purification basin, a low door, a meal and the whisking of powdered tea, with every movement following a set sequence. Harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity are the stated principles, alongside the idea that each gathering occurs once. Sen no Rikyu reduced the scale in the sixteenth century, elevating irregular local wares over imported perfection.