Zen & The Way of Tea

My recent trip to share Chado (The Way of Tea) in Madison, WI with Yumiko Sayama Sensei

Sep 29, 2023

This past weekend, I flew out to Madison, Wisconsin with my Chado (The Way of Tea) teacher, Yumiko Sayama. Once there, we joined my dear friend, Anita, for a public demonstration at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, then the Japanese community’s Aki Matsuri (Fall Festival), and finally a full day of intensive Tea training.

Demonstrating the Hojo Kata, a 500-year-old Japanese sword form, at Madison’s 2023 Aki Matsuri

Sayama Sensei instructing students in *fukusa sabaki*, folding the red cloth used by Chado hosts to (symbolically and practically) purify the tea utensils

Anita, Sayama Sensei, me, and participants of last weekend’s Chado training

One of the most satisfying parts of my weekend in Madison was being able to connect members of the local Japanese community with Sayama Sensei. As she described in my interview with her in 2021, Sayama Sensei herself began training in Tea out of a longing to reconnect with Japanese culture after moving to Hawaiʻi.

Although we were squarely in the Midwest USA last weekend, happy voices spoke familiarly in Japanese throughout the day, we squeezed bean and chestnut pastes into traditional Japanese sweets, and we learned to serve tea in a highly refined manner—all under the warm but authoritative command of Sayama Sensei.

It was transporting. The feeling—especially but not only for our Japanese students who have long lived in the Midwest—was of a sweet homecoming, a settling into our own hearts.

I’ve written before about how training in Chado is a kind of “living Buddhism,” so it was also gratifying last weekend to be able to dig deep into how to approach Chado as Zen training. I repeated a lot of what I’ve written in my newsletter and in my memoir (out June 18) about Chado being a kind of hybrid of the martial and fine arts. You’d be surprised by how much strength and focus it takes to serve tea when your legs are numb or on fire, and there are seemingly a million steps to execute before you even serve a bowl of tea.

Here are a couple of my older articles on Chado and Zen describing some of the wonderful women I’ve gotten to train with. I hope to return to Madison for more training—and to welcome the folks we trained with there out to Honolulu—in the future.