Tea Resembles Buddhist Meditation
2 min readThe connection between tea and the Zen Buddhism, after all, should attribute to the curative function of tea. We know that monks would doze when sitting in meditation, and drinking tea could refresh themselves. In the strong trend of tea-adoring in the society, especially in the Tang dynasty, monks’ tea drinking also had profound cultural meanings. There were Buddhist allegorical implications in drinking tea, and tea-drinking and Buddhist meditation went along with each other. In other words, tea-drinking and Buddhist meditation were alike in making people behave properly to cultivate oneself.
The connection between tea and the thoughts of Zen Buddhism had both the inner and outer reasons: tea was the traditional drink long used in temples; and it wasthe most popular drink in the daily life in temples, and the monks had a kind of warm feeling towards tea, and such feeling was connected with life; the refreshing function of tea made it the best assistant for the monks to sit in meditation. Tea’s aspiration of life and its lofty characteristics implied or disclosed Buddhist meditation, and expressed the wonderland of it. Therefore, there was the theory of “tea resembling Buddhist meditation.”
Tea resembling Buddhist meditation presented the high degree of harmony of the thoughts of tea ceremony and Zen Buddhism. As for the development of tea in Buddhism, from its special function to serving tea to the guests and forming a wholeset of sober and solemn tea ceremony, at last to being the indispensable part in the Zen activities, the most underlying reason lay in the uniformity of ideas and thoughts,i.e. the nature of tea went in harmony with Buddhist meditation and realization, and the two mutually helped each other.
