The Himalayas give not just water, then, but life.
From these mountains, locals believe, the breath of God blows cool air down over the Darjeeling hills and brings mist and fog and moisture that nurtures the neat rows of tabled, jade-green tea bushes that follow the steep contours of the valleys around this Victorian hill town.
The tea bushes seem a natural, integrated part of the surrounding hills, but they are not indigenous. Tea was only planted on these slopes just over a century and a half ago, a few years after the town began to take shape, at the tail end of a lengthy and improbable journey.
Tea came to Darjeeling as something of an afterthought, something almost accidental. The area was never really considered as a place for planting seeds or saplings. Even the venerable and much-respected Joseph Hooker opined that Darjeeling was too high with too little sun and too much moisture to grow tea.7
How wrong he was.
CHAPTER 2
Journey from the East
According to an ancient legend, tea was discovered by Bodhidharma (c. A.D. 460–534), the wandering, devout Buddhist monk born near the modern southern Indian city of Chennai (Madras) who founded the Zen (or Ch’an) school of Buddhism. In the fifth year of a seven-year sleepless contemplation of Buddha, he began to feel drowsy. To keep from falling asleep, he cut off his eyelids and threw them to the ground. (Or, as Sanjay Kapur tells the story, “Bodhidharma was so angry when he fell asleep he cut off his eyelids!”) In the spot where they landed, tea bushes grew.
Another, gentler version of the legend says that during the fifth year of a seven-year, sleepless promotion of Buddhism around China, Bodhidharma began to feel drowsy. From a nearby tree, he plucked a few leaves and chewed them, and his tiredness disappeared. The bush was wild tea.
Or, one day, while he was boiling a kettle of water to purify it for drinking, a gust of wind blew a leaf into the pot. When Bodhidharma drank the liquid, he began to feel alert and lively.
Tea’s actual history predates Bodhidharma. It goes back at least twenty-five hundred years to the mountains around Yunnan, in southwestern China,1 where it was initially blended with herbs, seeds, and forest leaves.2 During the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 B.C.), tea leaves began to be boiled and drunk without the addition of other herbs—that is, drunk as tea rather than a medicinal brew.3 As China gradually unified into a single state, and techniques for processing and brewing the leaves were refined, tea drinking became imbued with artistic, religious, and cultural notes. In the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618–907), the apogee of ancient Chinese prosperity and refinement, the drink garnered ritual, etiquette, and specific utensils.
During this period of unparalleled splendor, merchants commissioned the gifted Lu Yü (733–804) to write the first book dedicated solely to tea, Ch’a Ching (The Classic of Tea). Biographical sketches generally tell a Moses-like story of an abandoned infant found beside a river in a basket by the abbot of the Dragon Cloud Monastery.4 Raised by monks who grew and processed tea, Lu Yü eventually rebelled against monastic life, left before being ordained, and joined a theatrical troupe, becoming a popular circus clown and playwright.5 He then worked as a government official before settling into life as a scholar, poet, and tea expert.
Around 780, he penned his brief but comprehensive masterpiece on tea. It contains such precise details on tea’s origins, cultivation, processing, and preparation that a thousand years later the British drew upon it when they started producing tea themselves. Yet it is not written in the language of a technical manual, but with a poet’s imagery and inventive use of metaphor, as this celebrated passage on something as elementary as boiling water for tea reveals:
When the water is boiling, it must look like fishes’ eyes and give off but the hint of a sound. When at the edges it chatters like a bubbling spring and looks like pearls innumerable strung together, it has reached the second stage. When it leaps like breakers majestic and resounds like a swelling wave, it is at its peak. Any more and the water will be boiled out and should not be used.6
Throughout, he infused the practical with the spiritual and emphasized the ritualized details of tea making. Tea drinking should be treated with reverence and be accompanied by beauty but also restraint: “Moderation is the very essence of tea. Tea does not lend itself to extravagance.”7
In the final decades of his life, Lu Yü, renowned and celebrated, withdrew from society and lived in solitude as a hermit. Upon his death, he metamorphosed into the god of tea. According to a tenth-century encyclopedia, tea merchants worshipped statues of Lu Yü in order to be blessed with good sales.8
But when their tea didn’t sell well, the merchants would pour boiling water over the statue.9
• • •
Tea spread from China outward across eastern Asia, retaining its spiritual ties. This was particularly true in Japan, where a monk named Myoan Eisai (1141–1215) is often considered the father of Japanese tea.
Eisai took two trips to China and introduced the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism to his country. On his second trip, in 1191, he carried back tea seeds, which were planted successfully, including at a temple compound in the forested Uji Hills between Kyoto and Nara. While tea had been planted as far back as the eighth century in Japan, it did not become widespread until after Eisai’s reintroduction.
Its popularity stemmed in part from the healthy, medicinal properties that Eisai lauded in his book Kissa Yojoki, which means something like “drinking tea for health.” “Tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one’s life more full and complete,” Eisai boldly asserted in the first line of the book.
That included spiritual health, too. Tea, Alan Watts noted in The Way of Zen, “so clarifies and invigorates the mind that it has been said, ‘The taste of Zen [ch’an] and the taste of tea [ch’a] are the same.’”10 Zen monks used tea as a mediation stimulant,11 and the drink became paramount in aiding long periods of deep concentration. “If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee,” Watts wrote, “Buddhism is most certainly tea.”12
“Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage,” opens Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea (1906). “In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism—Teaism.”13 The influential art critic and scholar wrote his book in English in order to celebrate the oriental uniqueness of Japan. He used tea as a symbol and, in doing so, introduced the Japanese tea ceremony to the West. The cult of teaism celebrates, Okakura wrote, “the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence” and “inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order.”14
From the formalities of Zen came the highly ritualized tea ceremony know as cha-no-yu (literally “tea hot water”). Okakura’s in-depth descriptions of the three elements of the tea room—tea, pot, and place—are heightened by moments of poetic flight that Lu Yü would have appreciated. The author liberally quotes his Chinese predecessor on boiling water and even takes a brave, lyrical stab at describing it himself: “The singing kettle, as it boils over the brazier, sounds like some cicada pouring forth his woes to departing summer.”15 And elsewhere: