JAPAN WABISABI CONSIDERING FROM RAKU STYLE ~~ Tea bowl between China, Korea and Japan (Ohi Toshio, Japan)

OHI Toshio visited Urasenke branch October 17th. Here you can find his short report about the visit. The artist sits in the middle of the front row. Me, the non-asian face... Just behind our teacher, Kanako Muramatsu.

Thank You, Mr. Ohi, for a wonderful time and nice conversation!!!


The following is a short introduction about lecture that was given in Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale 2013 (GICB 2013), on October 19th, by Ohi Toshio, 11th generation ceramist of OHI tea-ware family.

Lecture

Raku ware was invented in the 16th century in Japan for ritual tea drinking. The Japanese tea ceremony, with its roots in Zen Buddhism, is a kind of meditation with its underlying philosophies of harmony, respect, purity and tranquility. The Raku type of tea bowls is characterized by a natural and unpretentious style and earthly colors, which was developed with an intention to enhance the experience of those participating in a tea ceremony. The OHI kiln is the only Raku branch kiln that is left and keeps the tradition until today. OHI Toshio was talking about the history of the Raku Ware and OHI family in the context of the wabisabi culture of Japan. It also gives an introduction to a Raku movement for the new century.

Resume

OHI Toshio is the 11th generation of Ohi tea-ware family, and a multi-talanted artist practicing the family's traditional craft simultaneously as challenging the boundaries of contemporary ceramic art, and expanding expressions in space designing and involving himself in architecture. He received his BA from Tamagawa University, Tokyo in 1981, and MFA from Boston University, Program in Artisanry, Massachusetts in 1984. He participated in the group exhibition titled "Art crafting towards the future (2012)" at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and the "2nd International Workshop (2012)" in Giroussens devoted to Raku, France. OHI Toshio received "Good Design Award: from "The 27th Japan Traditional Craft Work Competition" in 2004, and "Kanazawa Cultural Activities Award" from Government-Kanazawa City in 2002.

There is performance on TEDx SEED:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIdKtf90rN0

More about OHI Toshio please read here:
OHI homepage!!!
Onishi gallery
Amber glow from the fires of Ohi

Follow him on twitter:
https://twitter.com/OHITOSHIO

Tea lesson (2013.09.07)

Today was a very nice tea lesson in our Seoul branch of Urasenke. We were performing Tana-usucha. Before coming to class I was reading a bit about the tea from the books I have. I felt that I was preparing internally for the class (which is always good to do to have a really good class). Flowers were arranged by our tea teacher, Kanako Muramatsu. She brought them all the way from Japan, where they have been cut in the garden of a Japanese tea master. I was very touched. Just few days ago I read in "The Book of Tea" about the flower arrangement in the Tea World, called chabana (flowers of tea). And the attitude of the tea masters discribed in the book impressed me deeply. How much love, care, consideration they put in arranging flowers!!!

When it was my turn to "perform tea" (interesting way to put it ^^), I felt deep happiness that I can do it. It was a real pleasure. I did tana-usucha few times, so procedure was already known. I felt like my body is moving by itself. I didn't need to think a lot what to do next. And that doesn't happen often. Usually I pay a lot of attention to mistakes I make, but this time I just went along, even if I did something wrong. It reminds me of my mother who used to say: "If there is something wrong going on, pretend that it has to be that way!"

Even when I whisked the tea, it became so fluffy (!) and looked really good. It was one of the things I couldn't do well. To make tea fluffy. But I got it right! I think step by step I begin to feel the balance between amount of powdered tea and quantity, temperature of water. 

Saturday morning was nicely cool, and windy. A true refreshment after so hot summer we had here. For this reason I gave the name to chashaku - "Autumn breeze". It felt refreshing ~~~~

To those who aspire to follow the Way of Tea

"To those who aspire to follow The Way of Tea, guard against jealousy. To place yourself at the center, to envy others, to tempt others - these are unpardonalbe. Know your duty, and as you immerse yourself  daily in The Way of Tea, you will be rewarded with happiness. The more you look up to others, the clearer your own position in relation to them will become. Whenever something untoward happiness, people try to make themselves look as good as possible. But if we remember the humble heart of the host in the tearoom, for he knows the spiritual taste of tea, then this persistent clinging to power for its own sake will be seen for what it is. Know what you know and know what you don't know, for only then will the limits of your strength become evident. To attain spiritual power, seize the chance when it offers itself; devote yourself to study and practice. In life are many who feign knowledge and lead others astray. No action can be more reprehensible. The Way is never exclusive. It is open to all to follow, but those who set out upon the path perforce need the help of those who have passed that way before." - Sen Rikyu

~ "Tea life, tea mind"; Soshitsu XV, p.80

Introduction to the Way of Tea

"The simple act of serving tea and receiving it with gratitude is the basis for a way of life called Chado, the Way of Tea. When Serving a bowl of tea in conformity with Tea etiquette, a cultural synthesis of wide scope and high ideals is brought into play with aspects of religion, morality, aesthetics, philosophy, discipline, and social relations. 

The Student of Tea learns to arrange things, to understand timing and interludes, to appreciate social graces, and to apply all of these to daily experience. These things are all brought to bear in the simple process of serving and receiving a bowl of tea, and are done with a single purpose - to realize tranquility of mind in communion with one's fellow men within our world. It is in this that the Way of Tea has meaning for today.

With a bowl of tea, peace can truly spread. The peacefulness from a bowl of tea may be shared and become the foundation of a way of life."

~ "Tea life, Tea mind", Soshitsu Sen XV, p.9 

(picture was taken after the Tea lesson, in Seoul Urasenke branch, 2013. 08.31)

Rikyu and Wabi-style kaiseki

First, what is kaiseki? In short, it is a meal that host prepares by himself/herself for the guests to enjoy before proceeding to a tea drinking. When the Tea tradition just came to Japan, kaiseki that has been served before tea gatherings consisted of many kinds of different foods. Guests were having a huge party. To illustrate it you can read a following poem traditionally attributed to Soami (d.1525), which is found in the Choka Chanoyu Monogatari [Tea stories in Long-verse style]. Soami was a cultural advisor to the Muromachi shogun.

 Now they get down to the meal.

Raw fish, chicken, and everything else.

They lift the lids with haste,

And grab with bare hands

The raw-smelling dishes,

These overindulgent, gluttonous people.

The beautifully laid out dishes

They turn upside-down and spill around.

They even crunch on the bones,

Mixing many things in their mouths,

Using their chopsticks in the wrong way.

Their chatter is mingled with songs,

They prattle about the most trivial subjects;

Their voices rise as they compete,

Each pretending to know everything.

They take no note of prearranged times.

Lifting up the large sake cups,

They force themselves to drink 

Much more than they are capable of,

Till their behavior becomes undignified.

You can see that Tea gatherings were not always the way we know it now. Rikyu did his best to transform the Way of Tea into a spiritual practice, in a wabi style.

From an article " From kaiseki to kaiseki: The development of Formal Tea Cuisine":

"One winter morning Sen Doan (1546-1607) invited his father, Sen Rikyu (1522-1591), to attend a snow-viewing tea. When Rikyu arrived he glanced into the front garden and saw Doan, wearing a straw raincoat and a sedge hat. Doan had been gathering vegetables in a nearby field and was just returning home.

When the meal trays were carried into the tearoom and Rikyu - in pleasurable anticipation of banishing the early-morning cold - removed the lid from his soup bowl, he found that the bowl contained sea bass and some greens. However, sea bass was out of season, and therefore scarce and expensive. Rikyu had been wondering about Doan's plans for the meal ever since he had glimpsed him returning from the field, and the chilly mood created by the soup was very disappointing to him. He chided his son for his lack of sensibility, emphasized that the cuisine for tea in wabi-soan (simple and unpretentious "grass hut") was first and foremost a matter of doing one's best to convey the atmosphere of wabi, and certainly not of serving rare delicacies. For Rikyu the ideal kaiseki, or "tea cuisine", was a simple cuisine using ordinary ingredients; a "down-to-earth" kind of meal."

Kaiseki  that our class has prepared once for a tea gathering; fried squid and pieces of avocado.

  

Introduction to Sen no Rikyu's Hundred Verses (translated by Gretchen Mittwer) part 1

Dear, Tea lovers!!!

here I want to introduce a 100 Rikyu's verses, that are basically a set of rules for the way of Tea. As I started learning the way of tea (in Seoul Urasenke School, Korea), I was eager to know more about it from what the founder himself was teaching. And his poems was what I have found. Here I want to present Rikyu's verses one by one, and write my understanding of it.  

(Note: as I am copying these verses from the book "Sen Genshitsu talks about The Enjoyment of Tea" by Sen Genshitsu, Urasenke Grand Master XV, and as I don't know Japanese, while writing down the Japanese version I might make some mistakes. Mismatches with book will be marked in red. For this reason please don't print this poem as original. If there is no red marking in the poem, it might mean that I was successful in finding the correct spelling. But my future plan is to correct all the mistakes when checking it with my Japanese friends.) 

The first verse goes as follows:

1. Sono michi ni iran to omou kokoro koso

    Waga mi nagara no shisho narikere.

  その道に入らんと思ふ心こそ

  我が身ながらの師匠なりけれ

   To have the mind to enter this path is,

   Indeed, to have an inherent teacher.

My insight: 

The way I understand this verse is: having desire to study the way of Tea means that I have an inner teacher who can guide me. Now my mind goes in two direction, gives me two main thoughts. One - only the one who wants to learn can be on this road. If one doesn't want, there is no way that one would find oneself following this way. And the second thought - no matter how good teacher we might have, in the end acquired  amount and value of knowledge will depend only on us. Because the knowledge on this way can't be evaluated by any kind of test, or proven by any kind of certificate. The level of mastery is the the ultimate change of the life quality. Our internal world is in our own hands. Our perfection is our own responsibility. In the end it is me who is walking this way...

A bit of History

From a book "Japan: The story of a nation" by Edwin O. Reischauer (served as US ambassador to Japan from 1961 to 1966), p.71-72:

"The medieval Zen monks also brought from China three other arts which in time became so characteristic of Japanese culture that they are now considered to be typically Japanese. One was flower arrangement, which started with the placing of floral offerings before representations of Buddhist deities, but eventually became a fine art which is now part of the training of well-bred Japanese girl. The second was landscape gardening, in which, in contrast to the formal, geometric gardens of the West, the Ashikaga masters tried to create in a restricted space a small replica of the mountains, forests, and waters of nature itself, sometimes in close verisimilitude but sometimes only symbolically, as in the rock garden of the Ryoanji in Kyoto, which is composed only  of the rocks and sand. (The works of these Ashikaga masters made Kyoto the word Mecca if landscape gardening.) The third was the tea ceremony, a rite in which a beautiful but simple setting; a few fine pieces of old pottery; a slow, formalized, extremely graceful ritual for preparing and serving the tea; and a spirit of complete tranquility all combined to express the love of beauty, the devotion to simplicity, and the search for spiritual calm which characterized the best of Zen.

All three of these arts, as well as monochrome landscape painting, shared a common esthetic idiom. They were close to nature and rejected artificial, man-made patterns of regularity; they showed a deep love of simplicity; and they displayed a disciplined cultivation of the essence - the handful of blossoms or branches in a flower arrangement, the simple instruments and spare movements of the tea ceremony, the restricted space and sometimes austere design of the gardens, the few but bold lines of paintings that suggested sweeping landscapes and vast cosmic powers. It was an esthetics which cultivation that the feudal Japanese had derived from Zen and the warrior ethos. It was also an esthetics peculiarly suited to the relative simplicity and  poverty of medieval Japan. It is interesting that it has proved in recent years to have worldwide appeal in our own more complex and affluent age."

Sen no Rikyu

Welcome!

This page is dedicated to the Way of Tea, a 500-year old tradition that started in China, but gradually moved to Japan and rooted there. Urasenke school is one of the three main schools of Japan that practices a tradition of tea making as it was created by the great tea master Sen no Rikyu.

Once Rikyu said:

Tea is nought but this:
First you heat the water,

Then you make the tea.

Then you drink it properly.

That is all you need to know.

Only the true practitioner of Tea knows how deeply profound thought that expresses utmost sincere heart and purity in serving the other lies within theses words.

Welcome to the world of Tea!