September 2005, Issue 21

Editorial

The following is an excerpt from this issue:

Today I particularly enjoyed one area of our practice, the tea. The tea was served just right in taste, temperature and texture and I could see that the cup was preheated.

You cannot serve tea the same way in summertime as in wintertime. In summertime you serve tea cool; in wintertime, if you don’t preheat the cup, the tea quickly becomes cool and then cold, far too quickly. So we can see in the preparation of the tea that there is care and practice working together. It is not the type of care you get from following a manual – it is care in a real sense.

There is an expression sazen ichimi ‘Zen and tea have one taste’. This expression really shows the characteristics of Zen practice. If you think Zen practice is just meditiation, separate from whatever it is that you do then you are missing the entirety of Zen practice. If tea and Zen can be one taste, then whatever you do and Zen can also be one taste. We tentatively call this ‘integration’, which is a very vague term…(Continued on page 1.)

Read this Myoju (file on Google Drive)