CHA-NO-YU

Japanese: "tea ceremony", a cult and a genuine instrument of culture with a lasting effect on the arts. Its allusive, restrained aesthetic is one of simplicity and elimination of the insignificant.

Tea drinking, which originated in China, was first practiced in Japan during the Kamakura period (1192-1333) by Zen monks to keep awake during meditation in their study halls.

It later became an active part of Zen ritual honoring the first patriarch, Bodhidharma.

During the 15th century, it came to be a gathering of friends in an isolated atmosphere to drink tea and discuss the aesthetic merits of paintings, calligraphy, and flower arrangements displayed in an alcove called the toko-no-ma or quite often to discuss the merits of the tea utensils themselves.

The tearoom, or cha-shitsu, is so constructed that one has to enter on one´s knees, thus symbolically beginning the ritual with humility. The mood is continued in the meticulous ceremony that follows, for which the various tea untensils have been carefully selected by the tea master.

The most famous exponent of the tea ceremony was Sen Rikyu, an aesthete at the 16th-century court of the military dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who codified the ceremony into a style known as wabi (meaning roughly "simplicity", "quietude", and "absence of ornament"), which still enjoys popularity in Japan.

The preference of the wabi tea masters for simple, seemingly rustic objects for use in the tea ceremony led to the production of tea utensils in this style.