Consuming Culture: The Japanese Way of Tea in Performance PDF

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Michelle Liu Carriger 141 not express a history or culture; they in fact create ideologically-charged versions of history and culture precisely through the appearance of CONSUMING CULTURE: immanence and "tradition." This occurs through bodily performance that most certainly looks very simi...

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Michelle Liu Carriger

CONSUMING CULTURE: THE JAPANESE WAY OF TEA MICHELLE LIU CARRIGER

Chanoyu is conveyed through the mind, through eye and earwithout a single stroke of the brush. -Sotan

When one goes to tea, one must first "shake offworldly dust" and prepare to "leave the mundane world."J Then one enters the tea room, a special place removed from, or rather deep within, the everyday, where the simple, ordinary gestures of sharing food and drink are codified and abstracted to the level of art and ritual. In this place, social hierarchies are momentarily leveled, personal identities are obscured, and all participants submit themselves to an elaborate structure of bodily and mental discipline that culminates in the exchange of a small sweet and a few sips of bright green powdered tea, whipped into a froth by the host and drunk by the guests in turn. Tea is a practice that balances paradoxically between the instantaneity of an unrepeatable, flawed performance and long-preserved memories of Japaneseness; artistic accomplishment; and spirituality, particularly Zen Buddhism. Guests and hosts alike simultaneously embody and express these memories by disciplining their bodies to perform the carefully taught and preserved behaviours that culminate in the creation of the bowl of tea, a momentary pleasure imbued with meaning, and then literally consumed. Tea's status as an embodied, repertoire-based performance practice allows it to carry multiple, sometimes contradictory messages. These unstable meanings are transferred from body to body through performance, raising questions about how bodies themselves affect the messages, and revealing that the philosophy of Tea is thoroughly imbricated with its physical practices. I argue that bodily Tea practices do

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not express a history or culture; they in fact create ideologically-charged versions of history and culture precisely through the appearance of immanence and "tradition." This occurs through bodily performance that most certainly looks very similar to the way it did 500 years ago, but whose connoted meanings are constantly in flux. The three organIzmg principles of "performance," "embodiment" and "cultural memory" help us to conceptualize the ways in which Tea practice poises paradoxically between two temporalities - the instantaneity and disappearance of the Tea event that correspond to Peggy Phelan's theories of performance and the chain of memory maintained through the repertoire and practices of surrogation, as performance studies scholars like Diana Taylor and Joseph Roach have written. I argue that these two temporalities in concert enable the practice of Tea to remain a vehicle for apparently unchanging cultural memories while also adapting to new audiences and messages. After general background and description of what Tea practice and events entail, this essay is split into three major parts, addressing in turn the role of embodiment in transmission of Tea practice and values, the types of cultural memories that are transmitted in performance, and finally the performance of Tea, in which I will further discuss the two temporalities that govern the Tea gathering, dual temporal modes which enable fluid expressions of cultural memory through embodiment.

The Way of Tea In Japan, it is said that the Buddhist monk Daruma cut off his eyelids

while meditating in a cave in order to keep from falling asleep. He threw them outside the cave, and where they fell the tea plant (camellia sinensis) sprung up, yielding the leaves that ground or steeped in water enable monks to stay awake while meditating. Maccha, the type of tea used in Chanoyu, was probably brought to Japan by Eisai, the man who also is credited with introducing Rinzai Zen to Japan in the late 13th century CE. 2 Maccha, unlike most teas, consists of steamed, dried, and Powdered tea leaves that are mixed with hot water and whisked into a froth, usually just a few sips per serving. 3 The enjoyment of tea, both steeped and maccha, spread from China to Japan and from Buddhist lllonks to the population at large. The aristocrat and warrior classes in particular developed and organized many events in which to enjoy tea, SUch as contests to name varieties of tea, opulent gatherings for showing off Chinese utensils, or poetry and tea parties. 4

Consuming Culture: The Japanese Way of Tea

Michelle Liu Carriger

The Way of Tea as it is now practiced in Japan was codified from these earlier practices in the 16th century, largely through the influence of a single man, Sen no Rikyu, a merchant-class chajin ("tea person") who gained prominence solely through his mastery of Tea, becoming a favoured guest and teacher of daimyo Hideyoshi and earning fame as the "father" of Tea, although not its progenitor. 5 Although he did not invent it, he revolutionized his preferred style of Tea (wabicha, a heavily Zeninfluenced practice that favours combinations of the old, repaired, and austere with the opulent) and his ensuing popularity helped ensure that it became virtually the only strand of tea ceremony that continues to be practiced. 6 The practice is known in Japanese as chanoyu, literally "hot water for tea," chado, or sado, both variations on "the way of tea." The term chadD favors the Zen and Taoist connotations of Tea as a "path" or "way" of spiritual practice. In English, chanayu is often called "tea ceremony," a term which certainly captures the highly stylized and sometimes solemn nature of the proceedings, but which is generally considered rather misleading? In this essay I use the terms "Tea" and "Chanoyu" for the practice and "tea" to refer to the beverage.

the Sotan poem that serves as this chapter's epigraph. However, in keeping with Zen principles, to confound the intellect does not mean a simple binary swing to privilege the bodily, but rather to realize the fundamental unity of mind and body: nonduality. The means to achieve this in Zen (and in Tea) is practice that is, through repeated performance.

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Zen Buddhism undergirds the entire philosophy and aesthetic of Chanoyu, to the extent that Sotan, the grandson of Rikyu and one of the most highly revered Tea philosophers after Rikyu, is credited with coining the famous aphorism: "The taste of Tea and the taste of Zen are the same."g Generally speaking, Zen is concerned with the breaking down of the mental distinctions that keep humans locked in a cycle of karmic illusion; a key part of this process is realization of the "nonduality of mind and matter.,,9 Daisetz T. Suzuki, one of the most important scholars to write on Zen in English, emphasizes the importance of thwarting the intellect by stating baldly, "Zen is a discipline and not a philosophy, it deals directly with life."lO The process of attaining this realization can take many forms, but Tea is considered an ideal vehicle for Zen-infused physical practice, because it focuses practitioners' attention on their material surroundings and encourages the equal value of (and therefore non-distinction between) the old and new, repaired and opulent, low and high. Further, although speech is used in Tea gatherings, the participants' actions are primary; this corresponds with Suzuki's observation that in Zen, language is recognized as "a treacherous instrument. .. always liable to make us take the symbol for reality.,,11 Physical embodiment emerges as a means to circumvent the intellectual tool par excellence, language, as alluded to in

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As with most of the traditional Japanese arts, Chanoyu is maintained through a patrilineal chain called the iemoto system. lemato, often translated "grand master," translates more closely to something like "family head.,,12 Through the iemoto system, Rikyu's scions inherited custodianship of the practice and continue to hold the highest places in the Tea world. Descendants ofRikyu are now iemoto of the three largest Tea schools: Urasenke, Omotesenke, and Mushanokojisenke. (The "senke" in their names means "Sen family.") The iemoto of the different schools are the fmal authorities both for the bodily movements that make up the practice and the philosophical content - the "why" to go with the "What" of tea making. Urasenke has many more students than any other school of Tea; this may be primarily due to top-down initiatives propounded by active iemoto, especially Ennosai, the 13'" iemoto (1872-1924), Tantansai, the 14th iemoto (1893-1964) and Hounsai, the 15 th iemoto (b. 1923).13 During the Meiji restoration when the traditional arts faced devastating drops in participation, Urasenke under the leadership of Ennosai was the flfst Tea school to compensate by beginning a concerted effort to bring women through its doors and grant them teaching licenses. Tantansai and Hounsai expanded this policy fifty years later, shortly after the end of World War II, with an official campaign to extend Chanoyu to practitioners around the world. This essay focuses on examples from Urasenke, because of its special commitment to women and non-Japanese practitioners, and because it is the school I have studied with the longest. 14 Although the different schools all have different iemoto and therefore different fmal authorities, they do share common roots and an archive of historical information; most of the practices I outline are generalizable across schools. Tea is both an event and a practice, the former describing a momentary and unique happening, a gathering of people which can never be repeated, the latter the means by which the event was enabled to occur. It takes sustained study with a teacher to produce people who share a codified knowledge of the bodily actions required to make and receive tea; in fact, most Tea practitioners spend the vast majority of their time doing Tea

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Consuming Culture: The Japanese Way of Tea

Michelle Liu Carriger

today during lessons. The codes of behaviour (called temae) learned by students of Tea share basic similarities across the different schools and amongst the varieties of procedures for thin and thick tea and the different seasons, rooms and utensils (there are about 800 such procedures in Urasenke and 500 or so in Omotesenke).15

one walks and kneels - is dictated by the rules of temae, and therefore regularized enough so that anyone practitioner can take over from anyone else at any moment. This rigorous bodily discipline can be explained in Zen terms as a means to eliminate pre-occupation with the self. As the Noh theorist and performer Zeami asserted that the greatest actor will perform "without any distinctive qualities," so too does the Tea practitioner rehearse the choreographies of movement that allow all the members of the gathering to produce a harmonious whole. 18

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The gathering called the chaji is generally considered the standard from which all other types of Tea events are derived. The chaji is generally about four hours long, and includes a host, perhaps a helper called a hanto, and a few guests. Four guests are often considered the ideal because with the host, the people in room comprise five persons, an auspicious number. 16 Guests arrive promptly at the time indicated by the invitation, entering through the garden which has been carefully prepared, along the path that has been splashed with water to give a feeling of freshness. They are greeted by the host and then enjoy a light meal and sake. The host serves the guests, but does not eat with them. After the meal and a sweet, the guests retire to a waiting room while the host prepares the tea room for koicha, thick tea. Koicha is the most solemn part of the gathering; the guests share the tea from a single bowl passed hand to hand. 17 Then the host adds charcoal to the hearth and the mood lightens with the beginning of the thin tea (usucha) procedure. Usucha is the portion of the chaji that is most often excerpted in tourist demonstrations and the large gatherings called chakai. In any gathering save those tailored expressly as demonstrations for non-practitioners, guests have many duties to fulfill and must have been instructed as meticulously as hosts, so that together guests and host can bring a gathering to satisfactory completion. There are endless variations on the basic template of chaji, depending on the season, the guests, utensils, and space, guaranteeing that each Tea meeting will be a unique event, enabled by participants schooled in a centuries-long tradition of embodied practice and philosophy.

Embodiment When one begins studying Tea, one can continue learning for life, advancing through higher and higher levels of a network administered and maintained by the direct descendents of Sen no Rikyu. At the same time as inhabiting this elaborate hierarchical structure, in a meeting of practitioners everyone should be interchangeable; all behaviour - from verbal exchange to the drinking of the tea to the placement of the feet as

A tea gathering is a highly controlled event that relies on each participant's adherence to an all-encompassing set of regulations in order to be completed. The complexes of bodily behaviours of which Tea procedures consist are called temae. Virtually every aspect of both host and guest behaviour in the tea room is accounted for by temae, including the way to lay the charcoal under the kettle; the way to enter, exit, and move around a room for both hosts and guests; how to give and receive sweets and tea; how to clean and use utensils; and how to measure and prepare the tea. While a large amount of supplementary archival information exists, these written records are always only ancillary to body-to-body transmission and moreover the information contained in these documents is itself most often orally shared in the form of stories and anecdotes. Chanoyu thus consists of an embodied, physical practice that always culminates in the exchange of food and drink, a bodily act of consumption that cannot be mediated. It should be no surprise, in light of the importance of each performance, that temae is very consciously and explicitly maintained via a network of teachers, each of whom maintains a bodily knowledge of temae obtained from his or her own teacher(s). Virtually all teachers continue studying Chanoyu for life from higher-ranking teachers in a chain of hierarchy that ends with the current iemoto. While these networks of shared knowledge spread diachronically back in time as the elder teach the younger in meticulous imitations, new knowledge about temae is also periodically issued from the iemoto, the only person who can and does occasionally mandate changes in procedure. There is no substitute for body-to-body contact in teaching temae. While there are plenty of archival materials that supplement Chanoyu study, both in its philosophy and temae, photographs are unable to convey all the nuances of the movements required for each moment. While videos also exist, it requires a second, knowledgeable eye to identify where the learner deviates from prescribed behaviours and stop her. As in the teaching of dance, teachers tend to take

Consuming Culture: The Japanese Way of Tea

Michelle Liu Carriger

an interactive approach to teaching, using a variety of methods including physical modeling, verbal description, admonishment, and actual body-tobody contact as one hand grabs another to shape it more perfectly, pushes a knee into place, or taps a back to remind it to straighten. Tea practice is thus a bodily discipline in a strict sense of the word, willingly undertaken by the student despite pain and discomfort from kneeling for long periods, the expense of utensils, lessons and supplies, and the necessity of submitting oneself to a rigidly hierarchical system of authority.

affect the repertoire while also highlighting how an embodied practice can simultaneously serve many purposes in a society. Although the label of superficiality was unfairly leveled only at women, without a concomitant examination of men's motives in studying Tea, the critics who complain that some practitioners are more interested in form than content recognize that embodied practice delivers multiple messages, that bodies can shape those messages, and that power can be transferred to the bodies that take on these know ledges.

Temae may be usefully considered in the terminology of the "scenario," as elucidated by Diana Taylor in her book The Archive and the Repertoire. For Taylor, the scenario is "a paradigmatic setup that relies on supposedly live participants, structured around a schematic plot, with an intended (though adaptable) end.,,19 The scenario "requires us to wrestle with the social construction of bodies in particular contexts," and they are "passed on and remain remarkably coherent paradigms of seemingly unchanging attitudes and values" but "adapt constantly to reigning conditions."zo Like the scenarios of conquest discussed by Taylor, the basic outline of the Tea event has proved remarkably durable although, as I will discuss in more detail later, the connotations of the physical practice subtly shift. Certainly, the traditional appearance of Chanoyu and its centuries-old pedigree lend authority to its changing messages. Tea, like the scenario, ''both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning.,,21

In Kato's analysis, cultural memory or the "re-presented past" and

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The Chanoyu scenario preserves (and creates) a sense of historical and cultural continuity, a sort of living history that practitioners tap into when they submit their bodies and minds to the strictures of the Tea performance. Etsuko Kato goes so far as to give the subtitle "Bodies representing the past" to her book, The Tea Ceremony and Women's Empowerment in Modern Japan. Kato examines how women came to make up the overwhelming majority of Japanese Chanoyu practitioners, a 20th century innovation that has vastly altered the face of Tea and especially foreign perceptions that revolve around the figure of the geisha. th Chanoyu became part of girls' educational curricula in the early 20 century, primarily as a means of inculcating saM that is, etiquette or bodily discipline, rather than the philosophical aspects of Tea. Kato tracks how the influx of women into the previously male domain of Chanoyu sparked denunciations of women's Tea as superficial and calculated only toward making themselves attractive to men, rather than based on an interest in the philosophical, religious, cultural import of the practice?2 This troubled transmission reveals anxieties about the ways bodies can

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women's social bodies are mutually constituted via Chanoyu. Kato uses Linda Hutcheon's theory of "re-presentation" to categorize the performances of Chanoyu practitioners who use "mythological" sources and embodied transmission to create the present-tense practice that Kato calls "bodies re-presenting the past.,,23 That is, women's embodiment or "active making of their own bodies in social space" is tied up with the perpetuation of Chanoyu as a practice that is perceived to preserve knowledge of the past, with each affecting the way the other is perceived. 24 On the one hand, embodying and re-presenting the past through Tea is a means of obtaining power within the society that values that past, but on the other hand, women have already been traditionally held responsible for preserving and maintaining "tradition," a role which may certainly include perpetuating the "living history" of Chanoyu.25 When the ethnic boundaries of the practice become blurred, then a new confusion comes to the fore what exactly are non-Japanese people "representing" from a past that is firmly marked as Japanese? Are nonJapanese Tea practitioners just a new version of "colour-blind casting" which asks us not to notice that the "wrong" people are performing? Is this a moment of cultural appropriation in which foreigners borrow, yet again, the things that catch their eye as appealing? Or are there perhaps ways in which non-Japanese people access cultural "memories" that they can "authentically" own, suc...