The Taste of Tea

With one sip of tea and you swallow the whole universe…

For centuries drinking tea has been an essential component of spiritual practice. In drinking tea you have to slow down, open up your senses and allow yourself to belong to something bigger. For tea invites you to a place language can’t go. And the finest, most sublime tea, be it sencha, Darjeeling or Oolong tastes almost like nothing. Unlike coffee which tends to come down like a tomahawk, the flavor of tea tastes like freshly mown grass or the smell of melon on the vine. Tea awakes in us the subtle and the delicate. It takes us to the fine edge between emptiness and form.

For this reason it is great to drink tea and meditate. First, you soak your leaves in hot water, the temperature perfectly calibrated to release the ethereal flavor from the leaves. Steeping tea leaves and steeping the mind/heart in meditation are really not different. Both evoke a flavor of quiet joy, both are uplifting.  When steeping, you just have to wait until the leaves wake up, unfurl and saturate. It’s the same in meditation, soaking the cells of the body until they vibrate with clarity. When you take your first sips, you allow the vapor of the tea to spread. The effects are illuminating. You feel as clear as a mountain stream and yet as relaxed as the cat sleeping in the sun.

When drinking tea we go moment by moment. It brings the racing mind to a standstill and opens us up to the creeping flow of time. We learn to be with what is. We take company in birdsong, the wind, an engine, a passing thought or memory. As the Taoist hermit master Lu T’ung said, “I am in no way interested in immortality, but only in the taste of tea.” With that said, drinking tea is elemental. It evokes fire, water, air and space. But mostly it brings us down to earth. It invites us to be right where we are and celebrate silently the exquisite beauty of this world.

Photo: N.Sergey / Unsplash