Friend’s friends visited for tea today and talked about bring tea culture to this country, from A(nhui) to Z(isun), and write a modern tea book. The Tea Sutra, he said.
Sūtra is a sanskrit word means a thread or line to holds things together, most in a metaphorical way as the ‘thought threads’. When in plural form as in Vedānta Sūtras, the multiple threads weave the insight and experience into a collection of rules in the form of a manual. When in singular form as in Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra The Diamond Sutra, the thread flows through the text as a single formula.
I guess I should start to tag my blogs to make it easier to navigate – not that I have written enough, just the way my mind works, it is almost impossible to keep a single stream on anything since everything is so interesting and so such to learn from! Any sort of organizing is challenging, thoughts being the hardest to put in order, if possible at all. But there’s always a thread to hold the insight and experience together, or as ancient Hindus and Buddhists did to string the aphorisms into a whole tapestry.
Tea is one of the threads to unite the beads of Chinese history and culture together. For thousands of years, it has served medicinally and spiritually till the height of elixir of immortality, celebrated and intoned by literati and scholars since Lu Yu the Tea Sage in Tang dynasty (was he really sponsored?), cultivated and ameliorated by connoisseur from the farmers in land to the emperor in court, and transported on horse and camelback and junks to every street corner.
The thread could also be a measuring method of balance and justice, centeredness and impartiality. Through the history of tea, there have been establishment and destruction of monetary and financial system, enforcement and resistant against brutal colonialists and imperialists, speculation and sensationalization of the medicinal and material values, ups and downs of powers and dynasties.
So maybe tea is the sutra itself, and no need for a tea sutra.
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