Tea Books in English

[Marius Frøisland]

I'm always interested in finding good books about tea, so I though we could share some opinions of various books that we have read.

Tea and Buddhism:
I bought this book a few weeks ago. The book is written by Ryofo Pussel a Zen monk and tea person, he have teaching permissions from Urasenke. I had large expectations to the book, and unfortunately they where not. This is yet another book for beginning students. It contains the basic tea history, a walk through of a chaji and explanation about many of the utensils. It has some references to Buddhism in the part where he explained about wa, kei, sei, jaku, wabi and sabi. But this was a long way from justifying the books name. Conclusion: I was disappointed by the book due to my expectations, but it is a nice book for beginners, easy to read and understand. I bought mine at amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/141348686X/

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mvh

Marius Frøisland
  - http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariusfroisland
  - http://wiki.chado.no
  - http://blog.froisland.no/FrontPage

[Drew Hanson]

Marius,

The idea of doing brief book reviews in English is an excellent idea.
All of us, I'm sure, are on the lookout for tea-related publications
or even those that are only peripherally-related to tea. In my
experience, what's out there runs the gamut from really helpful to
downright bad.

I suggest that as members of this group come across titles, they be
listed here. And reviewed, if that's an option.

Drew

[Marius Frøisland]

The last month or so I have been reading The Japanese Way of Tea by Sen Soushitsu XV, translated by V. Dixon Morris. I would like to share my thoughts about this book with you. First of all I would like to say this is a very good book. I felt it answered many questions and uncertainties that I had about the history of tea. The first chapter about 'The Classic of Tea' was very hard to read, and I constantly thought why is this relevant? But as you read the rest of the book I found it to be very relevant and I'm glad I read it. This book was not written with new students in mind, it seems to address it self to more advanced students. It does not try to tell you why you want to do tea, it only tells you the history of tea and the way of tea. It focus about equaly on Murata Juko, Takeno Joo and Sen Rikyu. Since I have read many books with focus on Sen Rikyu I found the chapters about the many other tea masters to be very interesting and revealing.

Summary: A very nice book for some what experienced students of Chado.

I bought my copy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Way-Tea-Origins-China/dp/082481990X/

[Donald Soryu]

I put a translation I did of Kusumoto Bunyu's book "Zengo Nyumon" online. Dr. Kusumoto was a student of Shin'ichi Hisamatsu, so there are numerous references to tea in the book, and in my added comments. One of my comments includes Urasenke's Kotoba (Our Creed) in Japanese and English, for anyone interested in that. It can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/mdruymar