MEDIEVAL JAPAN Chanoyu: The Tea Ceremony |
H. Paul Varley :: The last part of the medieval age was at best a tumultuous period when there was frequent, if not constant, fighting. And yet, it was also a time of marvelous cultural development, and at the heart of cultural development, or at the center of cultural development, was the development in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of chanoyu, the tea ceremony. Now, chanoyu did not, does not even today, involve just the ceremony itself, that is the preparation and serving of tea, but rather it concerned a great variety of arts that developed along with the tea ceremony itself. These included ceramicware, lacquerware, paintings, calligraphy, interior decoration, interior room construction, the building both of tea houses and tea rooms, and the designing of gardens that were outside the tea houses. So, we've got this wide range of cultural and artistic development in chanoyu. And at the heart of chanoyu, or I should say at the spiritual heart of chanoyu during this time, was Buddhism and, especially, Zen Buddhism. |
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