The Wisdom of Tea: Life Lessons From the Japanese Tea Ceremony by Noriko Morishita

Author:Noriko Morishita [Morishita, Noriko]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760874247
Google: jazMDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2020-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

The Aesthetics of Sound

“Come on, hold it a bit higher when you pour.”

Sensei would admonish us about the same failing whether the water was hot or cold: we were supposed to leave a gap about the depth of the ladle’s cup between the hishaku and the kettle or bowl below.

Visual beauty was not the only reason for this, Sensei told us. “If you pour from that height, the water sounds better, doesn’t it?” she explained.

It was true that the one-cup gap gave the sound a crystalline quality.

“You see? That’s the aesthetics of sound,” said Sensei.

In the garden outside the tea room was a washbasin made from a hollowed-out rock. On days when we had a Tea lesson, it would be filled with clean water that we used to purify our hands and mouths. Sensei would leave the faucet very slightly open, so that a fine rivulet of water continued to dribble out.

When we had only just started to learn Tea, I thought that she had just forgotten to shut it off. But when, at the height of summer, I heard her say, “It’s hot today, so I’m letting a bit more water run into the washbasin,” I realized that it was a kind of natural soundtrack.

The trickle from the faucet etched a perpetual flow of ripples onto the surface of the small pool in the rock.

Whenever I was immersed in my o-temae, that murmuring flow was always there in the background. The sound of the water had percolated through my body and mind without my knowing.

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