“Immerse your heart and mind fully in it alone…”

Feeling the need for a bit more Zen in my life, I’ve been re-reading the Zen Tea Record. Here’s a great passage:

The original significance of chanoyu lies not in appraising the quality of utensils, not in scrutinizing the circumstances and arrangements of the occasion for preparing tea, but solely in praxis: entering into the samadhi of handling utensils and discerning your orignal nature (honsho).

            To seek self-nature through adopting the forms of chanoyu is none other than samadhi in which tea utensils are treated with the One Mind, which is lord alone, undrifting. If you are to take up the teascoop, immerse your heart and mind fully in it alone and give no thought whatsoever to other matters. This is to treat it first and last. When you replace it, do so deeply conveying your heart and mind to it as in the beginning. Such treatment is not restricted to the teascoop; it applies to all the implements that are handled.

            When, upon putting the utensil down, you release it and withdraw your hand, without in the slightest dismissing it from your awareness, shift the mind just as it is and convey it to the next utensil to be treated. Without relaxing the spirit at any point, prepare tea as the forms (kata) prescribe. This is called “performing in the continuity of spirit.” It is wholly the functioning of chanoyu-samadhi.

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This is such great practice. Which is not to suggest that a state of mind like this is in any way easy to achieve, but achieving isn’t the point. Making the effort (and then the lack of effort!) is the whole thing.

New Year, New Tea!

We had our New Year’s tea gathering, Hatsugama, this past Sunday at the Horticultural Center in Fairmount Park. This was our first Hatsugama as a Tankokai association, and also our largest gathering ever, with 20 guests!

Here’s a photo of the group together:

 

We did our usual full meal, with a tenshin tray, miso soup with shrimp and mochi, jubako with more traditional New Year’s food, hashiarai (a light broth to wash off chopsticks) and hassun with lobster and gingko nuts. And, of course, hanabira mochi to kick off the thick tea!

 So here’s an example of how sometimes we have to improvise when the unexpected happens . . . tenshin trays (in the photo above) are made of lacquer, and so you can’t use any kind of ceramic plates on them. We were going to use little boards made of cedar to put food on, but there was a miscommunication about who was bringing them, and at the last minute we didn’t have any. So then we thought, okay, we’re in the Horticultural Center—there’s got to be leaves somewhere we can use! Off we went to search the building. As luck would have it, they were having a plant sale that day, and we found a peace lily with leaves just the right size. Definitely not a traditional Japanese plant, but I kind of like the idea of starting the year with a piece of peace!

Here are a few more photos from the event…

It was great to see everyone, and we’re already looking forward to next year!

The Year of the Snake

A happy brand-new 2013 to all of you! This year is the year of the snake in the Chinese zodiac that the Japanese also use. Throughout the year, but especially around New Year’s time, we use tea utensils with snake imagery to celebrate the coming of the season.

The Chinese zodiac is a rotating cycle of twelve animals, and people born in the year of a certain animal are thought to have certain characteristics (just like the twelve zodiac months in Western astrology). If you are going to be a multiple of 12 this year (24 years old, 36, 48, 60, 72, etc.), then you are a “snake” person!

People born in the year of the snake are said to be very intelligent and wise; they love exploring new ideas and having stimulating conversations, although they also get bored easily and can sometimes be impatient with others. They are deep thinkers who tend to act logically and methodically and are also very determined and ambitious, which can bring them good fortune in money matters. They can also be very materialistic and love to have the very best of everything, so they can easily spend to excess if they don’t watch themselves. They tend to be very self-contained and self-reliant, although they can also be very caring and compassionate friends.

Regardless of what year you were born, the year of the snake is a time for slow, steady progress in both business and personal affairs. It’s important to maintain your focus and discipline and not take risks, because this is not a time when they’re likely to pay off. Historically, snake years have also been times of turbulence, even violence in international affairs, although this year is also associated with the Chinese element of water, which tends to bring a calming influence. It may also be a good time to travel, but choose your destination carefully!

Wherever you go and whoever you spend your new year with, have a wonderful, prosperous time!

Inaugural Celebration

Well, we did it! On November 10 and 11, we had an inaugural celebration for our new kyokai (association).

The first day was a dinner with tea preceding. The event was held in a private club in downtown Philadelphia, and because they normally aren’t open on weekends we had the whole place to ourselves. We had usucha in one of the meeting rooms prepared ryurei style, which means that the host and assistant were seated at a low table (one designed especially for this purpose) and the guests were seated at tables with chairs. Here are a couple of photos of the tea setup. The first one is Drew Hanson, one of our teachers, sitting behind the table (misonodana), and the second is Azusa Matono, one of our senior students, making tea there:

In an adjoining room, the Living Room, we had cocktails and sushi. Like the rest of the club, the Living Room is decorated in colonial style, with beautiful paintings, mahogany tables, a piano, and other period furniture. For this event we had a touch of Japanese in that a koto player, Motoko Yost, very generously donated her time to play for us.

The dinner was held upstairs in the dining room, where Kayoko Hirota Sensei, of the Urasenke Tankokai North America Head Office in New York, presented our president, Dr. Frank Chance, with a certificate showing our new status and also a gift of money from the Sen family – that is, the grand master of the Urasenke School, Oiemoto Sen Soshitsu (Zabosai) and the former grand master, Daisosho Sen Genshitsu (Hounsai), and the rest of their family.

We had a full house for the dinner, a mix of new friends and old, including some former students we hadn’t seen in years, two teachers from the very beginning of our tea group’s establishment at La Salle (Yumiko Pakenham and Janet Ikeda), and a group of students from the newly established tea institute at Penn State University.

On Sunday, we had more formal tea gatherings at Shofuso. Because the space is fairly small (being a Japanese house!) and we had around fifty people to accommodate, we broke the gathering up into three separate groups: Two smaller rooms with koicha (thick tea) and the largest space with usucha (thin tea). The guests would start with either usucha or koicha and then switch. Taeko Shervin Sensei was doing koicha in the actual tea room of the house (also the smallest space); Drew Hanson was doing koicha in a ten-mat room off of the veranda, and I was doing usucha in the fifteen-mat room, also just off of the veranda.

Here’s a picture of the usucha space:

We were incredibly lucky in terms of weather. In November the weather in this area can change very quickly, and of course we had Hurricane Sandy coming through just two weeks before. It was very cold the previous weekend, but the weekend of the tea it was not only sunny but in the 60s! The only downside is that the pond off of the veranda, the centerpiece of the garden, had been drained for maintenance, but the garden was still beautiful.

I won’t attempt to describe the utensils we used, because with three separate rooms going there was so much! But for the sweets, in the koicha sittings we had kooringiku mochi – red bean paste covered with yuzu-flavored rice dough (mochi), covered with a flaked type of mochi that looks like large flakes of snow. For usucha, we had a type of sweet that’s made of sugar and agar-agar with a jelly like consistency (kangoori) in two shapes: red maple leaves and yellow gingko leaves (which also had white bean paste in them). The third sweet was made from a green soybean flour (suhamako) and shaped like chrysanthemum leaves.

 We were very lucky to have so many people coming out and giving us their good wishes, and hopefully they all had a good time! 

(And a big thank you to Miyo Moriuchi, who took all of the photos above except for the first one, which was by Keijiroh Yamaguchi.)

We Exist!

There’s big news for our tea group that as of today is officially official: We have been approved as a kyokai, that is, a chapter of our parent school, Urasenke.

What does this mean in laypeople’s terms? First of all, it’s recognition for our group. Rather than our tea students and teachers being members of Urasenke New York, we’re an independent organization, which means little things like being invited to official Urasenke events in the U.S. and abroad, and big things like being able to send our students to study in the main school in Kyoto. It means some responsibilities, like maintaining a high profile in the Philadelphia area and continuing to reach out and do demonstrations, gatherings, and be involved in the community. It also means some benefits, like getting referrals from Kyoto and also support for our classes.

We’ve been working on this for a while now, and after some false starts and a lot of preparation, our application was approved this summer, with our official start date being today, September 1, 2012.

It’s especially apropos because it was twenty-five years ago—to the month, actually—that Brother Joseph Keenan officially established the tea group at La Salle University that would become our kyokai. He passed on a few years back, but I’d like to think that he’s watching over us, and that he’ll be there in spirit when we celebrate our inauguration as Chado Urasenke Tankokai Philadelphia. (I know, it’s a mouthful, right? But that’s the naming convention established by Urasenke, and if you know anything about Japanese culture, you know that the keyword is “conformity.” Just call us Urasenke Philadelphia. It feels good to be saying that after all these years!)

Borrowed Water

In tea ceremony we use a bamboo scoop (chashaku) to measure the powdered tea into the bowl before adding hot water and whisking it into a foam. The chashaku is an important part of tea ceremony. Although they may all look the same at first glance, there are small variations in shape, weight, and balance that add up to make each one unique.

If a chashaku has a particularly good character, it might be given a poetic name (mei). Usually the name is based—as you might have guessed from the translation!—on an image from Japanese poetry. My sensei told me about one classic mei that’s especially appropriate for this time of year: morai mizu.

Like most mei based on a poem, this phrase is tough to translate. This particular one is from a haiku by Chiyojo (1703-1785). The Japanese version is:

Asago ni

Tsurube toraete

Morai mizu

Here’s a translation from an anthology of Japanese poetry:

With the well bucket

Taken over by morning glories

I go begging water

But although it’s very evocative, the translation doesn’t capture the full meaning of the original. Let’s break it down.

Asago is easy; it means morning glory. Tsurube is a well bucket. Ni . . . toraete is a little bit trickier. The literal translation would be “is taken,” but in Japanese, that particular verb form gives the action a negative feeling – a sense of being inconvenienced by the action. That’s reinforced by the use of the verb toru, “to take,” which can also mean “to steal.” So you could interpret the first part of the poem as “a morning glory has taken my well bucket” or, more indignantly, as “that morning glory stole my well bucket!”

Now we come to the crucial line of the poem: morai mizu. Mizu is easy enough; it means water. Morai is a form of the verb morau, which is usually translated “to receive,” but it suggests gratitude for having been given something.

So a more literal translation might be something like:

A morning glory

Has taken my bucket

A gift of water

But to fully understand the meaning, especially in the context of tea ceremony, we need to visualize the story behind it. The poet woke one morning and went out to draw some water from her well, but discovered that a morning glory had wound its way around the bucket. Unwilling to disturb the flower, she went to her neighbor’s house and asked to borrow some water.

What a great image for summer! When you’re preparing tea during a tea ceremony, you want to give your guests a psychological feeling of coolness, and in this one phrase you’re evoking a fresh morning, water, and delicate flowers that will fade in the heat of high noon.

Although it’s not a literal translation, I like using “borrowed water” for morai mizu because it also brings up the image of going to a neighbor to “borrow a cup of sugar” – a visit, a chat, a little gift that makes someone’s day a bit brighter. Just like a good tea ceremony!

Together for Tanabata

Tanabata, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a Japanese festival. According to legend, there was a princess who used to weave beautiful cloth. Her father, the sky god, loved the cloth, and she worked hard every day to make more. However, because she worked so hard, she never got to go out and meet people. Her father was sorry to see her so sad, and he introduced her to a cowherd. The two fell instantly in love and married, but then the weaver stopped making her cloth and the cowherd let his cattle wander free. The sky god grew angry that he put them on opposite sides of a river (the Milky Way) and forbade them from seeing each other. This made his daughter so sad that he finally relented and allowed them to see each other for one day a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month. This is the date of Tanabata.

This year our group held its first Tanabata tea, and we were really pleased with the number of people who came, particularly since it was a horribly hot day, with a high around 100 degrees and very humid. Fortunately, our event was in the evening, so it had cooled off at least a little bit.

The tea was held at Shofuso, and here I need to stop and put in a photo of the garden in the evening light, taken courtesy of the fabulous Terry S.:

Before the tea started, we had everyone write their wishes on a piece of colored paper, which we then tied to a piece of bamboo that the staff of Shofuso had put near the entrance to the house. Of course, this was modest compared to the type of decorations you’d see in Japan, but by the time we were done it was full of wishes! Taeko Shervin-sensei also made some decorations to add.

Once the gathering started, we had the guests sitting so that they could look out on the pond and the waterfall. We served koicha (thick tea) and then usucha (thin tea) with sweets for both. The sweets for koicha were called midori no hoshi (green stars) and were taken from a recipe developed by Glenn Pereira of Urasenke Boston. My batch came out a little more blue than green, but this will give you the idea:

And here are some pictures of the tea itself:

 By the time we were finished it was dark outside, and everyone made their way back to the cars with lanterns (since Shofuso is a traditional-style Japanese house, there are no interior lights). It was a beautiful way to celebrate this holiday, and we were lucky to have such wonderful people to celebrate with!