What is Tea Gong

Taking tea back a step from pleasure

For a very long time tea was treated as medicine. Eisai wrote in Kissa Yōjōki that tea is the elixir of long life, and he meant it plainly: tea was something you took to put the body in order, and it was inseparable from the practice of Zen.

What Tea Gong Academy is concerned with is that tea — tea as practice. Choosing the leaf, pouring the water, drinking. We take this sequence of movements apart and rebuild it as a procedure for opening the body and settling yourself.

Tea Gong as a way of seeing

Tea works on us along two paths. One is the direct effect the plant has on the body and the mind. The other is the effect that “tea culture,” as a larger idea, has had on individuals and on human society.

Running through both is something we at Tea Gong Academy call Tea Gong: an unseen current of energy that arises when tea is the starting point.

We believe the same thing is at work in the movements of the tea ceremony, in the tea rituals of mountain peoples, and in an ordinary family sitting room — as a quiet, ceremonial and quite universal process. In every age, it has been settling people and societies.

There is no such thing as just tea

Try to understand tea and you find yourself travelling further than you expected.

The taste of a single cup rests on the climate of the ground the plant grew in, and on the ways of living built up there over centuries. How the leaf is picked, rolled and dried changes what it contains. Change the compounds and you change what reaches the body and the brain. And in the very short act of drinking, flavour and aroma, the temperature of the water, the body’s response and the state of your mind that day all rise at once. It is not merely a way of wetting the throat.

Perhaps that is why people have loaded this act with more meaning than drinking alone. You can see it in the forms of the tea ceremony, in the rituals kept by villages in the hills, and in the unremarkable habit of offering a cup to a guest. What we have come to call tea culture has, in every age and every place, grown up alongside ritual.

The way of tea

Tracing the history will not tell you what temperature to pour at. Learning the names of the compounds will not tell you how a given cup will reach you. Some things only make sense once your hands have done the work, and some gestures only mean anything once you know what lies behind them.

Knowledge, experience, and the cultivation that supports them both. Take any one away and tea shows you only half of itself.

The 33 lessons of the Foundation Course are built so that you can move back and forth between them. Work through them in order, or pick out only the ones that interest you.

See the Foundation Course

Your guide — K.Koba

What brought me into the world of tea was living in Vietnam.

As I got to know the tea and the tea culture there, I came across a single cup in the northern mountains. It was nothing like the tea I thought I knew. That cup struck me, and I have been in this world ever since.

Back in Japan, I studied tea as a specialist field at a research institute.

The deeper I went, the less my interest stayed within physical health alone. Tea seemed to be working on the mind as well, and further still, on something you might call the spiritual. That was where my thinking went.

And if the health of a person’s body, mind and spirit rests on what they eat and how they live day to day, then in the tea-drinking parts of the world the thing carrying much of that weight must be tea culture itself. That was the intuition.

Following that intuition is what led me to the way of seeing described above — to Tea Gong.

The reach of tea is broad and holds many meanings at once, and I find that both compelling and full of possibility. I want to make Tea Gong something people can actively use. Tea Gong Academy is where that enquiry happens.

Books

• Shin Asia Shokubunka Jinruigaku: Incha ni Kakawaru Koto (Kindle, in Japanese) — ancient tea trees in the Vietnamese mountains, the difference between how China and Japan drink tea, everyday tea in Iran, and other journeys through the tea of Asia
• Chanoki to Hito: Bokura no Arikata o Tsutaeru Shokubutsu (Kindle, in Japanese) — reading the human condition through the tea plant itself
• Shiro no Naka no Aka: Minami Indo no Shokujikan (Kindle, in Japanese) — on the order of colour and taste running through the South Indian table

About this site

This site is run by K.Koba. You are very welcome to visit the Instagram account as well.

For enquiries, please write to support@teagong.love.