Fuden-an: Leaves from a Tea-journal

　　We are now at the very height of midsummer. Although I had so far been accustomed to assume that I happened to be comparatively indifferent to extreme heat, this year I too have repeatedly found myself struck quite dumb with dismay. Hitherto, I had found myself relatively untroubled by sweating, even when preparing Tea before invited guests; this year, however, this proves no longer the case, and so one item in my daily agenda is taking extra precautions not to become messily sweaty, whenever I am offering or receiving Tea hospitality.

　　The other day, however, I left Tokyo, to take part in our Tottori Branch's celebrations of the sixtieth year since the founding of that Branch. While the original bond between Tottori and our School dates back to the relations maintained between the house of Ikeda and our Founder, Lord Ensh?, there subsequently ensured a long period during which contact between the Grand Master's family and that of the Ikeda remained temporarily severed. But, in the eighteenth year of the Sh?wa Era , those persons in Tottori whose family-lines had nevertheless maintained the spirit and forms of the praxis of Ensh? Tea suddenly invited my grandfather, the then Grand Master Goshin-an S?mei, and my grandmother, S?gin, to visit them, and thereby reestablished cordial relations between Tottori and our own house. Well, the eighteenth year of the Sh?wa Era being a time at which Japan was on the brink of vast war, it is no longer apparent to us just why - and particularly at such a time of restriction and injunctions to extreme frugality - my grandparents should have decided to travel all the way to Tottori; but such an act at least strongly suggests that they were aware of a deep bond - one that might have been temporarily suspended, yet had after all proven never actually to have been broken.

　　For my own part, it had been all of three years since I had previously visited Tottori. I spent three days there, each of which I devoted to intimate contact with Branch members; but this has turned out to be an opportunity that strongly suggests to me that this Branch will from now on soar up to even greater heights of Tea endeavor.

　　But now to a different matter.
　　At the time at which I first published this installment of my Tea-journal, in our School organ, Ensh?, the event that I am now about to comment upon was already over. This event was the 'Tokyo Ozone Great Tea Meet for 2004' ; and in this event I took part, and to it also offered to its success my meager services. Last year, the 'Tenrai' that I had myself selected, and offered as one element of my own contribution to this event had been very favorably received. This 'Tenrai' was a table (for the tea ceremony), first used during our Fukuoka Branch's hosting of our Annual National Convention. Its surface is entirely coated in silver; and it therefore proved rather costly to have fashioned; but, then again, the somewhat mystical effect of pure silver is what must have generated its somewhat-acclaimed appeal.

　　This year, given that all this Tokyo Ozone Tea Meet was to be held during midsummer, with regard to the utensils that I myself would use and so offer I decided to try making my consistent theme both 'conversion' and 'selection' . As summer is of course hot, I thought that merely offering an assemblage of utensils that might appear over-prestigious would only make my guests feel the less able to relax, and most undesirably put them 'on their best behavior' - where I felt that the heat alone must already prove to be all too tiring; and so wanted them to feel cooled, released, relaxed, and refreshed, by their experience of the Tea that I might be allowed to offer to them.

　　To this end, I prepared cut-paper-patterns of relevant utensil-shapes, and commissioned Nakao Tetsuaki to fashion from these a set of utensils that would suggest both coolness and the infinite, heatless universe that enfolds our tiny globe, and then asked him further to fire them using a silver-dominated glaze that has never before been seen, in all the world of Tea. On one hand, the resulting utensils are entirely innovative; at the same time, when they are seen from a distance, one might easily mistake them for ones blown entirely from more usual glass.

　　At the same time, in with these silvered artifacts I mixed others thath were not originally of Tea provenance, but which I had chosen, for conversion to Tea utensils; and, in doing this, selected almost entirely objects by which I had been struck while traveling abroad. France, the Netherlands, Sweden, India, the U.S., Italy, Myanmar, Singapore, Vietnam, China, South Korea, and also elsewhere - in every country that I have visited have I noticed and acquired numerous objects apt for use in Tea. And conversion inevitably means that objects so re-employed must, in turn, reflect the powers of selection that their converter has managed to exercise. With this in mind, as on the occasion to which I now allude I had decided to use only utensils of my own personal selection, I could not but feel that it was my own self that was, indirectly, under the acute inspection of my guests. And so I hoped that each guest would vouchsafe to me her or his own critical reactions.

　　The results of both conversion and selection can be some of the greatest delights that, at its best, Tea hospitality may afford. And I might perhaps claim that the contribution of the Ensh? group may be proving to constitute the very cutting edge, with regard to such contributions to refreshing the praxis of Tea. I myself wish to understand the cultivated cast of mind that must underlie both successful conversion and effective selection, to deepen my own apprehension of from what spiritual approach authentically inventive Tea may still be offered, while adding to this a small yet important element of playfulness, and thereby to make of the praxis of Tea something yet more ample, in spiritual approach.