Promulgation of the Contemporary Tea Ceremony, vol. 1

Contemporary guide to tea ceremony, Enshū school. In the mid-1600s, an aristocrat named Kobori Enshū (1579–1647), who was also a skilled poet, artist, flower arranger, and tea master, developed his own style of the tea ceremony based on the aesthetic ideal of kirei-sabi, which combined the notions of refined beauty (kirei) and patina, the wear associated with age (sabi). Enshū’s kirei-sabi style, which partially supplanted wabi (imperfect or rustic) as the dominant aesthetic, had a great impact on the design of gardens and teahouses, decoration of teahouse interiors, and the production of tea wares in the mid-1600s. Two generations later, Endō Genkan, an adherent of the Enshū School of tea, wrote a number of important books on the Japanese tea ceremony including the volumes displayed here, which sought to disseminate Enshū’s kirei-sabi tea aesthetic.