Tea and Buddhism

Peter GW Keen (teabox.com, May 13, 2016); CC Liu, Crystal Quintero, Wisdom Quarterly

Chinese Buddhist monks pick green tea leaves in field (Buddhistchannel.tv)

Tea and Buddhism: More Than Just Contemplation

Gold Buddha (popolisson/flickr.com)

At one level, the association of Buddhism and tea seems natural and obvious. The ethos and practices of its many schools and their impact on modern modes of yoga, Zen, meditation, nutrition, and daily living conjure up images associated with tea: calm, cleansing, meditative, and ceremonial [but stimulating enough to preserve vigilant mindfulness].

Somehow, the link doesn’t quite seem the same for other beverages: Seek karma with a languorous double latte caffeine jolt, a contemplative soda sugar boost, or a double rye on the rocks?

But the impact goes much further and shaped almost every basic element of tea production and much of its social context. There are two great traditions of tea, Buddhist and British.

They are marked by what may be called The Great Sugar Divide. Basically, Buddhism drove the methods of producing great teas pre-sugar, giving us the legacy of mainly green teas and oolongs [oxidized and fermented].

It’s hard to put dates on the 4,000 or more years of tea in China, but by 800 CE, it was a mature agricultural activity in China, and had been introduced into Japan and Korea. At that stage, it was in essence Buddhist-driven.

 

Buddhist monks and British merchants: two great traditions

The British created the later tea culture of the West, but their role was very much that of trading: building the global supply chains, blending, packaging and branding that have made tea a consistent, cheap and convenient commodity, now mostly in tea bags.
 

This was built on scale and integration: the consolidation of small growers’ harvests through centralized auctions, the magnificent tea clipper ships that raced the Pacific to cut weeks off the many months of journey, the monopoly control of the East India Company, and the creation of large farms in Assam [India] and Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. More