Some aspects of the tea ritual in medieval China in the context of anthropological studies

The importance of studying rituals has been proven by past generations of scientists; therefore, it requires no further reasoning. We are lucky to rely upon the rich and well established research methodology and a huge collection of field research data. Nevertheless, rituals are still a source of numerous problems for those who intend to interpret the ritual and its symbolism. One of these problems is verification of the interpretation results. This problem becomes especially essential in case of the Chinese tea ritual. There are so many canonical and individual ways of explaining the meaning and purpose of the whole ritual and its different parts in particular that it may seem that there is actually no meaning at all. However, putting the tea ritual into the temporal and ideological context helps to observe the ritual from the outside as a holistic act. In this article, the author talks about the tea ritual as it appears in the Tea Classics of Lu Yu, a poet of the Tan dynasty, who composed his text in the second part of the eighth century. The book consists of ten chapters describing the origins of tea and tea drinking customs; tools that are used to produce and prepare tea; methods of picking leaves, their processing, brewing and drinking. The Tea Classics had a major influence upon the development of Chinese tea culture and remains of high value amongst tea lovers and researchers. Methods and techniques of tea preparation were changing along with the development of tea and related industries. Another important feature of Chinese tea culture is that during its history no unified tea ritual was developed. The tea ritual took different shapes and was filled with different meaning depending on the social strata and philosophical views of those who performed it. Though Lu Yu mentions different methods of tea preparation popular amongst regular people, he emphasizes his disapproval of these methods. At the same time, he mentions that the method he describes is appropriate among aristocrats. As well as other ancient books on tea, the Tea Classics does not provide any interpretation of the meaning of different aspects of the tea ritual, neither does he use the word ritual itself. Instead, Lu Yu gives some recommendations for those who already know how to make tea and perform the tea ritual. The attempt of analyzing some particular elements of the Tan dynasty tea ritual that was made in this article is to show researchers the depth of symbolism of the tea ritual to draw attention to this topic. One can see that methods of preparation and serving tea to guests are strongly ideologically engaged and culturally and temporally determined.

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