| |
Comment on this article Inside the Blue Book
A Taste for Tea
by Jennifer L. Holley
April 2003 HSAR 421b: Art and Aesthetics of the Japanese Tea Ceremony
Faculty: Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Professor, Art History “I’m very honored to be drinking this tea” and “Excuse me for going first” are two sentences rarely heard in Yale dining halls. However, Mimi Yiengpruksawan’s students in “Art and Aesthetics of the Japanese Tea Ceremony” will be using such honorific language at a ceremony with a licensed tea master this month. The event will be a highlight of the popular art history spring seminar, for which Yiengpruksawan began receiving e-mail inquiries in September. The 21 students who made the cut look at the objects, environments, and philosophy of the tea ceremony. “The ceremony emerged in the context of Buddhist monastic life, yet it has an aesthetic dimension,” she says. Students have the opportunity to think about connoisseurship and how different cultures learn to value objects. “The seemingly plainest items, such as bowls, whisks, and scoops for tea, are valued highly for their beauty,” says Yiengpruksawan. “Although the tea ceremony is about making do with simple, small things, people spend fortunes on tea objects.”
| |
The quiet practice of tea taught Yiengpruksawan self-discipline and patience.
|
The ceremony started in the 15th century in the culture of wealthy merchants, warlords, and monks. Today, it follows traditions that were in place at the end of the 16th century. The service, which is intensely choreographed, didn’t come easily to Yiengpruksawan. She remembers nearly five years of three-hours-long Saturday morning training sessions, which she attended as a graduate student in Japan in an attempt to understand the culture. She had usually been out partying the night before, and the 9 a.m. meeting time and the gentle hiss of the water boiling proved to be a lethal combination. “I’d fall asleep!” she says. However, she also notes that when she received a scolding for her behavior and returned to the quiet practice of tea, she learned self-discipline and patience. “You have to be really focused,” says Yiengpruksawan. “At the same time, you are visually cherishing the tea and the environment.” Now one who appreciates the tradition, she calls it “a learned aesthetic, like for certain Japanese food.”  |
|
