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

India at 65: Independence Day 2012

Wisdom Quarterly

Saffron, white, and green with Buddhist wheel

AUGUST 15th marks India's independence from British oppression. Much like the United States, the "greatest experiment in democracy" (India) liberated itself from United Kingdom colonialism in 1947. Unfortunately, it meant the loss of a great deal of land ceded in the interest of the departing empire. It has kept India fighting with its neighbors (the new Pakistan and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) ever since. Imperial UK strategists cut India up along religious lines. But ethnic strife has continued to plague the nation as well as its infamous communal violence. Tens of millions of Indian Muslims were given a homeland of sort, but 100 million Muslim remain in India. And Pakistan poses the greatest threat to its sovereignty. With the US military on former Indian land (Gandhara now Afghanistan) as it continues to prosecute the longest war of its short history, the even shorter-lived nation is determined to take sides against its own neighbors squeezing it to give up territory, Pakistan and China. Southern California is privileged to have numerous Independence Day celebrations on weekends throughout the month, particularly in LA's "Little India" (Artesia).

• AUDIO: India planning its own mission to Mars
• An alternative message for India's Independence Day
• More troops sent to India's strife-torn northeast (AP) Clashes between members of the ethnic Bodo community and Muslim settlers in Assam state have left 42 people dead and 13 others missing, state...
  
• India says Pakistan websites caused migrant panic
  (Aug. 19) The exodus followed clashes in India's Assam state in recent weeks between ethnic Bodos and Muslim settlers that killed more than 50 people and...

"Jackass" star becomes a Buddhist (video)

"Jackass" star Steve-O is a Buddhist
The newly, successfully sober but still crazy stuntman Steve-O practices Nichiren Buddhism. He mentioned his conversion without going into further detail in the introduction to a new interview in the Miami New Times. Tina Turner will be overjoyed:

The best nam myoho renge kyo ever (Larry King)

Rebel Buddha: On the Road to Freedom
Wisdom Quarterly
Maybe Steve-O has been reading this new book (Shambala, $21.95)? Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is a Seattle-based Tibetan Buddhist monk who discusses how we can eliminate fear and unhappiness by awakening the "rebel buddha" within -- the "sharp, clear intelligence that resists the status quo," according to the publisher. The Vajrayana author is the founder of Nalanda West, a Fremont center dedicated to fostering American Buddhism. DailyOM review

• Miami New Times on Buddhism

Killer quake hits Bhutan, shakes India

Wasbir Hussain (AP)
GAUHATI, India – A 6.3-magni-tude earthquake shook the remote mountain nation of Bhutan on Monday, killing at least 11 people, damaging an ancient monastery and forcing hundreds to flee, officials said. At least 15 people were also injured.

• Video: Several hurt after Indonesia quake (AP)
• Video: Earthquake shakes Bali (Australia 7 News)
• Video: New homes for Italy quake survivors (Reuters)

The afternoon earthquake was initially reported in Gauhati, the capital of India's northeastern Assam state, but it was centered in a little-populated eastern region of the tiny nation of Bhutan. Much of Bhutan [the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom], a nation sandwiched between India and [Tibet], is sparsely populated, reachable only by walking paths and without electricity or telephones.

"We're trying to piece together information to assess the damage," Ugyen Tenzing, the country's director of disaster management said from Thimphu, Bhutan's capital. More>>

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Bhutan: No insurgent activity on India border

Bhutanese dancers on 3/8/09 in the peaceful Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan

THIMPHU -- On [6/20/09] Bhutan assured India that there was no United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) presence in the Buddhist mountain kingdom. “I have no knowledge [of the presence of ULFA here]...

"This is something what we also read in Indian papers, but we do not have any presence here, it should be made very, very clear. Where, [from], and how these reports had come, we also do not know,” Foreign Minister Ugyen Tshering said after signing a memorandum of understanding with External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna.

He was replying questions by journalists on Indian intelligence reports of the presence of ULFA units in the bordering areas of Bhutan. There were intelligence reports that ULFA activity was still witnessed along the Indo-Bhutanese border, resulting in violent attacks by the insurgent group in those areas. “But I can very categorically say that the purpose of the previous activities was not to have a situation where there is any presence of ULFA cadres here,” Mr. Tshering said. (PTI) Source

United Liberation Front of Asom

ULFA is a terrorist group from Assam [1] among many other such groups in North-East India. It seeks to establish a sovereign Assam via an armed struggle in the Assam Conflict. The Government of India banned the organization in 1990 and classified it as a terrorist group, while the U.S. State Department lists it under "other groups of concern" [2]. More>>

Original Buddhism in Bangladesh

Who Are the Bengali Buddhists?
Ven. Karunananda, Abbot

California Bodhi Vihara, Long Beach, CA

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While the mystic poet Rabindranath Tagore, the modern saint Dipa Ma (Nani Bala Barua), and her guru Anagarika Munindra may get all the attention, Bangladesh actually has a long and storied history of Buddhism. From its first contact with the Buddha, according to Canonical records, delivering a discourse to its oppression by the Mughal Empire of Akbar and his descendants, Banga (as it was once known) and the Chittagong Baruas have preserved the original message of the Buddha Gautama’s dispensation.

Bangladeshi Buddhists maintain the original form of Buddhism, the "Teaching of the Elder" [enlightened arhats, the immediate disciples of the Buddha]. And California now has the distinction of housing the first Indian subcontinental monastery outside of Asia.

In the 8th century, when Buddhism yet thrived in its birthplace India -- when Southern Nepal, Assam in the north, the state of West Bengal, and Eastern Pakistan were all a part of Bharat (“India” proper) -- King Shashanko came into power and laid waste to Buddhism in India. He was the forbear of the famous "Hindu" systematizer Sri Shankara Acarya, who amalgamated divergent traditions prevalent in the subcontinent into one organized religion.

King Shashanko converted to Brahmanism, slaughtering monks and razing famous Buddhist universities. He then converted people by force, displacing Buddhism as the dominant religion of Bihar. The king even went so far as to order the destruction of the original Bodhi tree, under which Siddhartha Gautama gained enlightenment to become the Buddha. He died of leprosy within seven days as a result.

Tibetan historical accounts, namely the Rajata Ramgini, record the litany of atrocities. This sent waves of fleeing monks and lay Buddhists east to what is now Bangladesh. Monks, to preserve their lives and their ordinations, disrobed except for saffron shreds around their fingers. They trekked over the perilous mountains of Assam and the wilds of Nagaland to the Buddhist stronghold of the Arkanese kings (Arkanese kings which ruled in Burma)....

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