Revisiting my 2021 post,"Why Japanese Tea Ceremony is Badass"

On my adventures training in Chado, The Way of Tea

I originally published this post in late 2021. I imagine that it ruffled a few feathers in the Tea world if only because, soon afterward, a young Japanese woman working in a Tea school approached me to say that she had read it, and that it had a “very interesting” title. However, she couldn’t remember the exact wording (I assume she meant the word “badass”) and the drama with which she tried to pull it from her memory convinced me she was only feigning forgetfulness. Japanese people can be exceedingly polite this way.

Back when I sent it out, there were only a few hundred people subscribed to my newsletter. So, I thought that this might be a good time to share it again. I also write much more about my experience training in Chado in my memoir coming out next year, Three Years on the Great Mountain, and will be sure to share a few excerpts in the coming months. I hope you enjoy the article.

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Early on in my Zen training at Chozen-ji, my teacher Sayama Daian Roshi pushed me to learn Chado, the Way of Tea (also known as Japanese Tea Ceremony), but I resisted. I had come to Chozen-ji with the idea of pursuing "Warrior Zen". To me, that did not include politely serving tea, bound up in a kimono that made it hard to walk and breathe. Why, I wondered, couldn’t I just keep swinging swords in Kendo (Japanese fencing) and moving rocks?

Almost four years later, I've learned that there is much more to Tea than I first expected and I've dived into it as one of the most valuable methods of Zen training for me. Now, I help teach the Tea class at Chozen-ji, which includes a small but committed group of students of surprisingly diverse backgrounds. They are not who people usually think of when they think of Chado: half are male, they're almost all under 40, and their ethnic backgrounds include Thai, Chinese, Mexican, and Japanese. And I'm Korean.

It can surprise people that Chado can be pursued as a way of training in Zen, but this actually matches Chado's historical roots. It was monks who brought powdered green tea back from China after being sent there to learn about Buddhism. And the father of Chado, Sen No Rikyu, was a Zen monk, as well.

The Way of Tea is much more than tea service. It's actually a very high-level synthesis of many different aspects of Japanese culture: aesthetics (through architecture, flower arrangement, calligraphy, textiles, and lacquer arts), cooking, and physical and mental discipline. The last bit makes Chado like both a martial art and a fine art, a hybrid. In some ways, it has been just as physically challenging for me as Kendo. And it has yielded just as much in the way of self-development and letting go of my attachments as any of the other Zen training I've done. No wonder that one of the things Sen No Rikyu is known for is for having committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, when he was ordered to by his feudal lord. The first time I learned about this was from my Kendo teacher, who emphasized the strength that it would take to commit such an act by saying, "And he was able to do it!"

In training in Chado, I've found that it's necessary to confront some common, biased assumptions about what Japanese Tea Ceremony is. People often identify the people who train in it with the harmful stereotype of the docile, submissive Asian woman. Just to be clear, this trope—just as much as its counterpart of the effeminate Asian man—is racist. It emasculates our people and culture. It strips us of agency and power, defined in bluntly white and heteronormative terms. It reduces us to emotionless automatons who cannot think for ourselves, as something alien to be driven out or assimilated.

There's much more to unpack here that I will leave for a later time. But this is the point I want to drive home: there is nothing submissive or demure about Chado. At its core is actually something deeply nuanced but no less radical, countercultural, or liberating—that the purpose of Chado is not just to serve tea, but to enable the host and guest to achieve the true meaning of Zen, transcending the dualism of self and other, of life and death. 

As my teacher, Yumiko Sayama Sensei, says, Chado is not just "Tea Ceremony," but a "Way" to realize our True Selves—i.e., to become Enlightened.

It might feel shocking for me to call this series, "Why Japanese Tea Ceremony is Badass". But how else can I pithily put into words how potentially powerful and subversive Chado can be? Chado *is* badass. It requires strength and clarity. It demands a lot of me. It has effectively upended many of my attachments—to comfort and indulgence, to egotistical understandings of what it means to be strong, and to taking care of myself before others.