Chapter 3 · 2 / 8
Tea Is the Elixir of Long Life
Eisai brings tea seed back from China in the Kamakura period and writes Kissa Yōjōki. Reading the regimen of health built on the five-phase theory, in which bitterness works on the heart.
The lessons are narrated in Japanese.
How to turn on English subtitles
- Start the video and click the CC button to switch captions on.
- Open Settings (the gear icon) → Subtitles/CC → Auto-translate.
- Choose English.
These are machine-translated from the Japanese captions, so expect some roughness — particularly around tea terminology. The text on this page is a proper translation, so read the two together.
The scene changes to Japan, in the Kamakura period.
The Zen monk Eisai brought back to Japan what he had learned of Zen, of tea and of tea culture at Mount Tiantong in China. He is said to have brought seed of the tea plant with him at the same time, planting it on Mount Sefuri in what is now northern Kyushu and beginning cultivation there.
Tea had reached Japan before Eisai, but he was the first to succeed in cultivating and spreading it in earnest, and for this he is called the father of Japanese tea.
In time, out of his own knowledge and experience, Eisai wrote Kissa Yōjōki. It was presented to Minamoto no Sanetomo, the shogun of the day, and was highly regarded. That became the occasion for tea to spread, above all through the warrior class.
As for its content: it is comprehensive and systematic in the manner of Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea, but it is a practical book with its weight on regimen, on the maintenance of health. It covers cultivation, brewing, uses and effects.
One of the more significant items in Kissa Yōjōki is the claim that the bitterness of tea works on the heart.
“Heart” here is a term of Chinese medicine. Beyond the heart and circulatory system of modern medicine, it carries the sense of mind as well — the seat of mental activity and of consciousness.
In the five-phase theory underlying Chinese medicine, bitterness among the five flavours is tied to the heart among the five organs.
To quote Eisai: “Bitterness benefits the organ of the heart. The heart is king among the five organs.” Put in modern terms: bitterness supplements the organ of the heart and raises its function; the heart is the ruler of the five organs.
The tea of that time seems to have differed somewhat from ordinary tea today, both in how the leaf was processed and in how it was brewed.
As to processing, picking and steaming the leaf appears to have been much the same. From there, however, the leaf was pounded, formed into a disc, then roasted over a distant open flame and dried. This form, called compressed tea, carries the strong influence of Tang and Song Chinese culture.
As to brewing, the usual method was to shave the compressed cake into powder with a medicine grinder and decoct it in a pot. Done this way, the constituents of the leaf would have been strongly extracted, and the bitterness and astringency would have stood out more sharply than in matcha today.
That thick bitterness and astringency must have been exactly the bowl of tea a practitioner needed.
This idea of regimen through tea is a source of what we now call mindfulness and wellbeing, and it still has a great deal to say to us.