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The Tea Ceremony
In Japan, serving tea is an art and a spiritual discipline. As an art, the tea ceremony is an occasion to appreciate the clean lines of the tea room's design, the feel of the bowl in the hand, the company of friends, and a simple moment of purity. As a discipline, it has roots in the twelfth
century and intimate connections to architecture, landscape gardening, ceramics, painting, flower arrangement, and, of course, Zen Buddhism.
Written by contemporary tea masters, The Tea Ceremony takes a clear and comprehensive look at the sources and inspiration of this ancient discipline. The authors trace the practice from its earliest origins to the present day, considering in detail the individuals who helped it evolve. They discuss
all the elements of the ceremony-including art, architecture, incense, flowers, and the influence of Zen-and show how readily the study of tea can serve as a spiritual path to greater insight and calm.
Originally published in 1973, The Tea Ceremony has been revised extensively. Along with a rewritten and updated text, entirely new photographs and line drawings have been selected. Over 75 step-by-step stills of the tea ritual itself, featuring a number of close-up shots, give the reader a fuller
visual understanding of the ceremony. Numerous line drawings illuminating the more important elements of the ceremony have been inserted for the first time, and for those readers wishing to delve further into the subject, bilingual charts of tea terms have been appended.
This lavish new edition of The Tea Ceremony adds an important dimension to the literature of tea, capturing the aesthetic spirit that lies at the heart of the ritual.
o More than 330 photographs and illustrations of tea houses, gardens, prize tea utensils, and scenes from the ceremony.
o An extensive photographic sequence illustrating the tea ceremony.
o Appendices of famous tea houses, tea terms with their equivalents in English, line drawings of the numerous shapes for tea utensils, and a lengthy glossary.
century and intimate connections to architecture, landscape gardening, ceramics, painting, flower arrangement, and, of course, Zen Buddhism.
Written by contemporary tea masters, The Tea Ceremony takes a clear and comprehensive look at the sources and inspiration of this ancient discipline. The authors trace the practice from its earliest origins to the present day, considering in detail the individuals who helped it evolve. They discuss
all the elements of the ceremony-including art, architecture, incense, flowers, and the influence of Zen-and show how readily the study of tea can serve as a spiritual path to greater insight and calm.
Originally published in 1973, The Tea Ceremony has been revised extensively. Along with a rewritten and updated text, entirely new photographs and line drawings have been selected. Over 75 step-by-step stills of the tea ritual itself, featuring a number of close-up shots, give the reader a fuller
visual understanding of the ceremony. Numerous line drawings illuminating the more important elements of the ceremony have been inserted for the first time, and for those readers wishing to delve further into the subject, bilingual charts of tea terms have been appended.
This lavish new edition of The Tea Ceremony adds an important dimension to the literature of tea, capturing the aesthetic spirit that lies at the heart of the ritual.
o More than 330 photographs and illustrations of tea houses, gardens, prize tea utensils, and scenes from the ceremony.
o An extensive photographic sequence illustrating the tea ceremony.
o Appendices of famous tea houses, tea terms with their equivalents in English, line drawings of the numerous shapes for tea utensils, and a lengthy glossary.
224 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1977
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 6, 2010
One of the two penultimate books in the english language about the mystery and traditions of the Japanese ideal of tea. This is the first book I read about the tea ceremony, and I'm glad. Tanaka-san begins by walking you through both the history and evolution of the tea ceremony, which gives the reader a WAY better understanding of why the ceremony exists at all. It's this basis that allows the later portions describing the nuts and bolts of the ceremony to take on a deeper, richer meaning.
It's a favourite I turn to again and again, sometimes just to enjoy the amazing pictures in the middle of our frosty winter.
It's a favourite I turn to again and again, sometimes just to enjoy the amazing pictures in the middle of our frosty winter.
August 4, 2025
*What is sado / chanoyu?*
You’ve probably heard to some degree about sado, the Japanese Tea Ceremony, an ancient, performative art form that was developed in Japan and has become a symbol of its traditional culture and the popular imagination of it to the same degree as, say, samurai and cherry blossoms. Unless you’ve lived in Japan, though, you probably haven’t seen it performed -let alone participated in it, and might have an issue trying to grasp how serving and drinking a cup of tea can be art in the same way that painting, sculpture or (closer to sado) nō theatre is one. You might consult the wikipedia page, but it isn’t terribly useful in this. So before going on into the review of a book that is a presentation of said art form, we might as well start with a decent explanation of it:
Sadō (茶道, “the Way of Tea”) or chanoyu (茶の湯, “hot water for tea”) is the Japanese art of preparing and serving matcha (powdered green tea) in a ritualized, codified manner. Rooted in Zen Buddhism and refined by masters like Sen no Rikyū, it combines aesthetics, etiquette, architecture, and philosophy into a meditative practice. It is not merely about drinking tea, but about cultivating harmony (wa), respect (kei), purity (sei), and tranquility (jaku) in both host and guest. Over time, sadō evolved into one of Japan’s most sophisticated and symbolically dense traditional arts, on par with nō theatre, calligraphy, or ikebana (flower arranging)
The first book I can recommend for getting acquainted with the topic is Okakura Kakuzō’s 1906 The Book of Tea. This is a short philosophical essay that presents the Japanese tea ceremony as a profound expression of aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality. Okakura frames "Teaism" as a worldview rooted in simplicity, humility, and harmony with nature—drawing heavily on Zen Buddhism and Taoism. He contrasts Eastern subtlety and appreciation of impermanence with Western materialism and rationalism, suggesting that the quiet ritual of preparing and drinking tea embodies an entire philosophy of life.
Rather than focusing on the practical steps of tea preparation, the book explores themes like the beauty of imperfection (wabi-sabi), the design of the tea room, the role of flowers in art, and the spiritual elevation found in everyday rituals. It is both a cultural bridge for Western readers and a romantic defense of Japanese tradition during a time of modernization and Westernization. Okakura’s prose is ornate, ironic, and idealized, presenting tea not just as a beverage but as a vehicle for refined living.
I’d say Okakura is the best introduction. It isn’t a book for learning tea ceremony steps or schools, but it gives a right enough overall picture. So if your curiosity is piqued, a good follow-up is Chado: The Japanese Way of Tea, by Sen Sōshitsu XV. This is also a short book, but it comes with lots of color photos and more technical details, including the instruments used in the tea ceremony and its different stages and gestures (these shown in black and white photos). The book blends historical context and practical guidance, the origins and evolution of chado, seasonal aesthetics, step-by‑step protocols and etiquette for beginners. When you finish it, you will have a pretty clear mental picture of what chado really looks like, and the rudiments of how it is performed.
Finally, a good third followup is Jennifer L. Anderson’s An Introduction to Japanese Tea Ritual. The book analyses different aspects of the art, and of her schooling in it, following the Urasenke family tradition, which is the most accessible to non-Japanese. Information is included about the history and origins of ritual tea-consumption, its development in Japan, the different elements employed in tea ritual and an explanation of their role and 'grammar' (how each element transmits information, like the choices of items employed for each tea gathering, the toriawase). The author has studied Anthropology, so she also gives her reflections on the Tea-Ritual as a form of religious experience, in connection with Zen Buddhism, with transformative and more conventional elements coexisting inside it. The book also explains the structure of Tea-Learning and its organizations (especially Urasenke) and gives a model of a sojo-chaji (formal tea gathering at midday). There's some other tidbits and morsels of information scattered around.
Right now, you will be asking: why is the reviewer telling me about all these other books, instead of the one by Tanaka Sen’o? But there’s reason in my madness. The three I’ve mentioned are stepping stones and benchmarks against which to compare today’s volume.
*So how does The Tea Ceremony compare?*
I’d say that to all intents and purposes, it is an equivalent to Sen Sōshitsu’s book, to such a degree that their Venn diagram intersection is pretty much a circle. Both are really good introductions for people who have at least a minimal acquaintance with the basic aesthetics of the art; both are colorful, and illustrate items and procedures in a very detailed way. Both have a similar number of pages. If memory serves, I feel like Tanaka’s packs marginally more information, but they really are interchangeable for the second slot in the three levels I’ve mapped above. The main difference is, perhaps, one of background: Sen Sōshitsu was the head of the Urasenke school of chado, so his book reflects the canonical views of his school; Tanaka Sen’o was the founder of the Dai Nihon Chado Gakkai, an organization that sponsored the study and practice of the Tea Ceremony but was really uneasy about the iemoto system of apprenticeship (of which Sen Sōshitsu and his school are very representative) in which a traditional art becomes the hereditary patrimony of a family with a hierarchical structure and under the supreme authority of the iemoto, who has inherited the secret traditions of the school.
*Back to the book*
The Tea Ceremony is divided into three parts. The first goes through the history of tea consumption and the ceremony that arose from it in Japan, with an overview of the most important tea masters and their styles. The second is devoted to the aesthetics of this cultural practice, its wabi principles, connections to Zen Buddhism and the buildings and gardens in which it takes place. The third and last part dwells on the temae, i.e., the set of objects and practices that are employed in the different stages and variations of the tea-drinking ritual and performative art. Because of the great variation, we only get a relatively detailed view of making thin tea (usucha), thick tea (koicha) and etiquette for guests.
The book ends with a conclusion insisting on the value of the Tea Ceremony today as an antidote against an overtly materialistic and rushed society, and with some appendices with tea terms, a chronology, diagrams of different styles of tea instruments and information about some famous tea huts.
*Conclusion*
The book is pretty excellent, and a good introduction to the topic (even more so if you use it, as stated, as a second read on sado). Subjectively, I was tempted to give it a lower rating (3 and a half or 4 stars) because it didn’t actually tell me anything I didn’t know already, but this is no intrinsic fault of the book - I’ve just read a lot about the tea ceremony before, and even been to a few classes. This summer I found myself in the Shimonoseki public library and Tanaka’s was one of the few English books therein, so I decided to give it a shot. If you do the same, I doubt you will be disappointed.
You’ve probably heard to some degree about sado, the Japanese Tea Ceremony, an ancient, performative art form that was developed in Japan and has become a symbol of its traditional culture and the popular imagination of it to the same degree as, say, samurai and cherry blossoms. Unless you’ve lived in Japan, though, you probably haven’t seen it performed -let alone participated in it, and might have an issue trying to grasp how serving and drinking a cup of tea can be art in the same way that painting, sculpture or (closer to sado) nō theatre is one. You might consult the wikipedia page, but it isn’t terribly useful in this. So before going on into the review of a book that is a presentation of said art form, we might as well start with a decent explanation of it:
Sadō (茶道, “the Way of Tea”) or chanoyu (茶の湯, “hot water for tea”) is the Japanese art of preparing and serving matcha (powdered green tea) in a ritualized, codified manner. Rooted in Zen Buddhism and refined by masters like Sen no Rikyū, it combines aesthetics, etiquette, architecture, and philosophy into a meditative practice. It is not merely about drinking tea, but about cultivating harmony (wa), respect (kei), purity (sei), and tranquility (jaku) in both host and guest. Over time, sadō evolved into one of Japan’s most sophisticated and symbolically dense traditional arts, on par with nō theatre, calligraphy, or ikebana (flower arranging)
The first book I can recommend for getting acquainted with the topic is Okakura Kakuzō’s 1906 The Book of Tea. This is a short philosophical essay that presents the Japanese tea ceremony as a profound expression of aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality. Okakura frames "Teaism" as a worldview rooted in simplicity, humility, and harmony with nature—drawing heavily on Zen Buddhism and Taoism. He contrasts Eastern subtlety and appreciation of impermanence with Western materialism and rationalism, suggesting that the quiet ritual of preparing and drinking tea embodies an entire philosophy of life.
Rather than focusing on the practical steps of tea preparation, the book explores themes like the beauty of imperfection (wabi-sabi), the design of the tea room, the role of flowers in art, and the spiritual elevation found in everyday rituals. It is both a cultural bridge for Western readers and a romantic defense of Japanese tradition during a time of modernization and Westernization. Okakura’s prose is ornate, ironic, and idealized, presenting tea not just as a beverage but as a vehicle for refined living.
I’d say Okakura is the best introduction. It isn’t a book for learning tea ceremony steps or schools, but it gives a right enough overall picture. So if your curiosity is piqued, a good follow-up is Chado: The Japanese Way of Tea, by Sen Sōshitsu XV. This is also a short book, but it comes with lots of color photos and more technical details, including the instruments used in the tea ceremony and its different stages and gestures (these shown in black and white photos). The book blends historical context and practical guidance, the origins and evolution of chado, seasonal aesthetics, step-by‑step protocols and etiquette for beginners. When you finish it, you will have a pretty clear mental picture of what chado really looks like, and the rudiments of how it is performed.
Finally, a good third followup is Jennifer L. Anderson’s An Introduction to Japanese Tea Ritual. The book analyses different aspects of the art, and of her schooling in it, following the Urasenke family tradition, which is the most accessible to non-Japanese. Information is included about the history and origins of ritual tea-consumption, its development in Japan, the different elements employed in tea ritual and an explanation of their role and 'grammar' (how each element transmits information, like the choices of items employed for each tea gathering, the toriawase). The author has studied Anthropology, so she also gives her reflections on the Tea-Ritual as a form of religious experience, in connection with Zen Buddhism, with transformative and more conventional elements coexisting inside it. The book also explains the structure of Tea-Learning and its organizations (especially Urasenke) and gives a model of a sojo-chaji (formal tea gathering at midday). There's some other tidbits and morsels of information scattered around.
Right now, you will be asking: why is the reviewer telling me about all these other books, instead of the one by Tanaka Sen’o? But there’s reason in my madness. The three I’ve mentioned are stepping stones and benchmarks against which to compare today’s volume.
*So how does The Tea Ceremony compare?*
I’d say that to all intents and purposes, it is an equivalent to Sen Sōshitsu’s book, to such a degree that their Venn diagram intersection is pretty much a circle. Both are really good introductions for people who have at least a minimal acquaintance with the basic aesthetics of the art; both are colorful, and illustrate items and procedures in a very detailed way. Both have a similar number of pages. If memory serves, I feel like Tanaka’s packs marginally more information, but they really are interchangeable for the second slot in the three levels I’ve mapped above. The main difference is, perhaps, one of background: Sen Sōshitsu was the head of the Urasenke school of chado, so his book reflects the canonical views of his school; Tanaka Sen’o was the founder of the Dai Nihon Chado Gakkai, an organization that sponsored the study and practice of the Tea Ceremony but was really uneasy about the iemoto system of apprenticeship (of which Sen Sōshitsu and his school are very representative) in which a traditional art becomes the hereditary patrimony of a family with a hierarchical structure and under the supreme authority of the iemoto, who has inherited the secret traditions of the school.
*Back to the book*
The Tea Ceremony is divided into three parts. The first goes through the history of tea consumption and the ceremony that arose from it in Japan, with an overview of the most important tea masters and their styles. The second is devoted to the aesthetics of this cultural practice, its wabi principles, connections to Zen Buddhism and the buildings and gardens in which it takes place. The third and last part dwells on the temae, i.e., the set of objects and practices that are employed in the different stages and variations of the tea-drinking ritual and performative art. Because of the great variation, we only get a relatively detailed view of making thin tea (usucha), thick tea (koicha) and etiquette for guests.
The book ends with a conclusion insisting on the value of the Tea Ceremony today as an antidote against an overtly materialistic and rushed society, and with some appendices with tea terms, a chronology, diagrams of different styles of tea instruments and information about some famous tea huts.
*Conclusion*
The book is pretty excellent, and a good introduction to the topic (even more so if you use it, as stated, as a second read on sado). Subjectively, I was tempted to give it a lower rating (3 and a half or 4 stars) because it didn’t actually tell me anything I didn’t know already, but this is no intrinsic fault of the book - I’ve just read a lot about the tea ceremony before, and even been to a few classes. This summer I found myself in the Shimonoseki public library and Tanaka’s was one of the few English books therein, so I decided to give it a shot. If you do the same, I doubt you will be disappointed.
October 15, 2025
Closing the book, I felt a quiet settle in my chest. The Tea Ceremony by Seno Tanaka doesn’t perform for applause; it invites you to breathe differently. It treats tea not as a sequence of exquisite motions, but as an ethic of attention—how a room holds light, how a bowl sits in the hand, how two people agree to meet each other with care. The beauty here isn’t decorative; it’s responsible.
Reading as a Japanese woman, I was grateful for how the book restores simplicity to its true weight. Simplicity isn’t stinginess; it is concentrated choice. What is omitted is not care but vanity. That difference matters. The pages make wa, kei, sei, jaku feel less like slogans and more like verbs—harmonizing, honoring, clearing, quieting. Each word becomes a gentle instruction to arrange time and space so that another person can be at ease. That is the heart of tea, and it is deeply familiar.
The abundant images occasionally flirt with museum stillness, yet the close views of hands bring the practice back to life. They remind me that tenderness requires steadiness, that grace is a kind of strength. So much of that strength has been carried, often invisibly, by women—by the hands that clean, prepare, notice, and adjust. The book doesn’t lecture about this; it simply lets you see it.
When I finished, my breathing was slower and my gaze more patient. The ritual felt less like an antique and more like a contemporary stance: choose less and mean more; let quiet host the conversation; meet the present moment as if it will never repeat—because it won’t. This is not a manual to master. It is a companion that teaches you to make room—for others, and for a cleaner, kinder version of yourself.
Reading as a Japanese woman, I was grateful for how the book restores simplicity to its true weight. Simplicity isn’t stinginess; it is concentrated choice. What is omitted is not care but vanity. That difference matters. The pages make wa, kei, sei, jaku feel less like slogans and more like verbs—harmonizing, honoring, clearing, quieting. Each word becomes a gentle instruction to arrange time and space so that another person can be at ease. That is the heart of tea, and it is deeply familiar.
The abundant images occasionally flirt with museum stillness, yet the close views of hands bring the practice back to life. They remind me that tenderness requires steadiness, that grace is a kind of strength. So much of that strength has been carried, often invisibly, by women—by the hands that clean, prepare, notice, and adjust. The book doesn’t lecture about this; it simply lets you see it.
When I finished, my breathing was slower and my gaze more patient. The ritual felt less like an antique and more like a contemporary stance: choose less and mean more; let quiet host the conversation; meet the present moment as if it will never repeat—because it won’t. This is not a manual to master. It is a companion that teaches you to make room—for others, and for a cleaner, kinder version of yourself.
September 5, 2019
I got this book on my shelf for some time. I appreciate from it it is very comprehensive in it gives a glimpse on history, aesthetics, and general procedures of tea gatherings. It includes details on gardens and building designs.
July 2, 2018
4 1/4 stars
April 24, 2021
Informative, well illustrated.
February 19, 2022
The most thorough look at chanoyu and its history I've read thus far, although it's not the most captivating read.
April 26, 2011
A beautiful book about the essential Japanese ceremony that combines Zen, sociability, and elegance in a near-mystic combination. At the end, there is a primer on how to conduct yourself during the ceremony, so the book is handy for your next trip to Japan as well as being an interesting way to learn Japanese history, if of a particular kind.
March 28, 2016
A very, very thorough (as in "this man bleeds tea" thorough") explanation of tea ceremony.
November 28, 2015
It was interesting information, but very dryly written.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews