Adapted from ‘The Book of Tea’ by Okakura Tenshin for Isabella Stewart Gardener, 1906, Boston

"Chanoyu is founded on the search for beauty in the commonplace. It inculcates purity and harmony and takes pleasure in the imperfect. The philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism, for it expresses with ethics and spirituality our whole view of man and nature. It is purity, for it encourages cleanliness of both body and soul; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, in as much as it defines our sense of proportion in the universe and in relationship to one another. It represents the true spirit of democracy by making all its practitioners aristocrats in taste."