A great Culture often impresses itself through material means that affect people's everyday lives, through which they can learn more about the Culture, if they wish. Food, music, spiritual practice...these things have immediate observable effects and persuasions, which don't depend on an ego-specific receptivity to a cultural idea or experience, so they spread far and wide very quickly, and oftentimes universally. It is through these universal material experiences that outsiders find their way into a cultures pulsing center. Let me explain what I mean by all this.
Over the years I've discovered that I have a love for green tea. First, it was just the taste, which was favorable. But slowly I started to discover its even and stable distribution of energy (with its moderated caffeine levels) and its warming and calming effects. It reverberated throughout the body; it felt good.
Over time one learns about the health benefits, the different types of tea, how to brew the delicate leaves, and etc.
To deepen this relationship, I picked up a cast iron teapot, and later a heat pad and platter, which come with it because of its thermal properties. I've never been much for ceremony, and I don't know much about the evolution of various ceremonious practices, but I suspect that there is a common thread between ceremonies and ornate objects with character, which interact with the bare senses, communities, patterns of thought, and social practices in complex ways.
In one way, these objects fix constellations of practices and activity; they bind them to a particular space, with particular people.
These things are essential for a weary earth. Sometimes it is all that one can do: one boils the water and ceremoniously prepares the tea with anticipation, and then finally one sits with a great sigh to enjoy the drink. Traces of this fact can be seen in the early formation of cultural self-consciousness around tea, manifesting as "Teaism," an aesthetic religion in 15th century Japan. In the very beginning of The Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo demonstrates that this Teaism was "founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence."
Sordid indeed. This is an opinion that indicates the weariness of an aging culture, after the old ideals disintegrate under warfare and upheaval, and a preoccupation of material realities achieves primacy.
What to do then? The little things do help, and they slowly get bigger too, in a way.
Soon enough, it becomes much more than mere tea, or the mere enjoyment of beautiful ceremony objects. One develops a spiritual relationship with one's material helpers. One carries these helpers everywhere, and unfurls them wherever one sets down. It is a way to establish place both materially and psychologically. And it gathers others around it, and brings them together around it. Through the sensual, healthy, psychological, and social delights of the tea and its vessels, another presence altogether is achieved, which is something that goes beyond the sum of its parts.
But something was missing. Where was all this green tea coming from? Where had the teapot come from? Where were these customs coming from, which ready-made, I was able to adopt as my own?
These questions gain intensity as the earth continues to blaze, and various cultures and groups are set against each other. As part of a dominant imperial culture, I can readily take advantage of a large range of comforts, delicacies, techniques, and aesthetics, while the originating cultures behind those things suffer cultural humiliation or worse. As Okakura Kakuzo himself remarks, "the glory of the West is the humiliation of Asia." Alas, the process of rapid modernization and industrialization that Japan itself underwent was seen in no uncertain terms as part of the "White Disaster" in many parts of Asia. Strong words that are not without good reason.
The concept of cultural appropriation, which enjoys wide usage in social justice circles, reflects the sensitivity to this reality. If I was to simply pluck up this teapot, this tea, and go on my merry way enjoying it without a thought to how these things were possible, I would in a way be appropriating them, stealing them.
To know the origins of one's joys and pleasures is also to know the shadow those things cast, which is often unfortunately the case in a world that is so deeply interconnected and at the same so violently unequal. Further, to know all of these things together is to move closer to harmony in thought, discourse, and practice, however insignificant one's efforts may seem in the face of titanic cruelty.
As for the helpers! Green tea, has been consumed for a long time, dating far back into ancient Chinese history. Far enough to fade into cultural myth in fact, with exact dates unconfirmed as far as I know. The leaves have gradually gone from being intended as medicinal to making up a part of a revered and cultivated beverage. But it is the implements for preparing and consuming the tea that have transformed more dramatically.
Earlier on, tea was made with water boiled in a cauldron and then a kettle. The teapot was invented in China during the Yuan Dynasty, an era in which a fracturing Mongolian Empire, which itself had spread through the ruins of older Chinese dynasties, had broken off to reconstitute a Chinese empire in the east, which then eventually grew and took up once again the other broken off Mongolian khanates to the west.
All of this reveals a common pattern. Great inventions arise through evolving purposes, customs, and technologies, amidst coalescing and growing societies, themselves which are often formed through various processes of disintegration, and that all of the processes interpenetrate various cultures as they are born, evolve, grow, and die across the earth.
Of course this history must be taken with contemporary world affairs. My teapot has its visual interest, but it is mass produced and bears a design that has been repeated far past cliche. What horrifying industrial processes, what endless circuits of retail distribution, all of which grind workers into the ground and lay waste to mass sprawls of land and ecosystem, were responsible for my particular piece? The same can be asked of the green tea itself, and of the pad that keeps it from burning the surface it sits on, and the heat that boils the water.
Out of respect, one must learn about one's material helpers, and about the long chains of history which have delivered them to one's arms. More importantly, there should be a recognition of the labor and sacrifice that makes these objects and customs possible, labor and sacrifice which have been offered by other cultures throughout history, cultures which have undergone the many births and deaths that we believe we are immune to, and for that matter, separate from.
Needless to say, it is not enough to merely contemplate these things. One's own labor and activity should go towards ameliorating the ongoing destruction that underwrites cultural production. All of it is bound up in one's helpers. It all plays a part.
