Session 14: Tang China ②: Cha jing tea manual (A)

Topics

❖ Mid-Tang China (8th c.) — Tea manuals: Cha jing basics and the philosophy behind the work

• Tea Classic (Cha jing, ca. 760-761) by Lu Yu
• Yin-yang concepts, including the five elements

Thoughts—read before class, revisit for tests

The Cha jing (and I will call it this, not by its English title) is the first of the tea manuals and is the "go to" classical for all major treatises on tea that came later. It places tea for the first time within the discursive tradition of scholarly essay and intellectual history and by that its status more or less officially changes. There will be many other tea manuals but all will acknowledge this one as the first and founding text, even when offering different views. It remains the most frequently mentioned text. We read it with some care. In one way it is quite simple in content, but if read for its implications it grows in expressive power. Try to understand the implications of the statements made. Lu Yu titled his text Cha jing, and the "jing" asserts the canonical nature of his essay.

Required—to be completed for today's session

✓ Read Tea Classic (Cha Jing) Lu Yu 760 [bSpace, PDF].

Multimedia notes

❖ textextext
◊ textextext

Links

⇢ Cha jing in Chinese (Project Gutenberg): here

⇢First three chapters of Cha jing in English at Qing Tea (also incorporated into the pdf reader on bSpace): here

Other

Links to each session page

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