Tea Ceremony Utensils

A review and its effects on my ceramics

by Douglas M. Hooten

(This paper was written for my first course, in raku ceramics, in the summer of 1996 and added to in September 1998)

"It is not the form or even the philosophy of raku that is important–the form will disappear in time, it is sure to be broken–it is the experience that lives and moves life foreword" (Piepenburg 35). Going into this course I had no knowledge of the Japanese tea ceremony, or low fired ceramics. In the short time that I’ve been in this course I have tried to put my self into a state of wabi. The tranquillity and lack of ostentation fit in very well with my personal aesthetic. In my research, I found that exact form is not dictated, or even encouraged, but that visual and tactile feel both contribute to the wabi of the piece.

Of all the Japanese tea utensils the tea bowl has the most variety of shapes, from round and regular to shoe shaped and irregular in profile. The foot which the Japanese consider to be a very important part of the bowl varies, from twenty to eighty percent of the bowls’ overall diameter and in height from one to thirty percent of its height. Most tea bowls in the illustrations that I have seen, have a foot diameter from twenty five to forty percent of the overall bowl diameter. The height of the foot is generally one to three times the wall thickness of the bowl which allows hands to fit under the sides, but again this is not always true. The most dramatic exception to the normal foot is the red raku tea bowl named "Otogoze" whose foot is barely discernible from the body of the bowl.

Today’s tea utensils didn’t just happen, but they did evolve over a relatively short period of time. The first tea ceremonies in Japan, starting in the late Kamakura period (1185-1336), were introduced by Zen monks returning from China with the Sung-dynasty form of powdered tea. These ceremonies were in the form of Buddhist meditations. A young Buddhist priest, Shuko, brought the tea ceremony out of the religious setting and into Japanese life. He modified the previously religious ceremony into one that set rules for the art of drinking and serving tea. His disciple Jo-o continued to develop and refine Shuko’s theories and the way of tea. Jo-o introduced the concept of wabi. Sen-no Rikyu, a student and disciple of Jo-o, "reformed the rules of the tea ceremony completing its Japanization to suit ordinary people and surroundings of Japan" (Piepenburg 27). These three men, in a little over a hundred years, refined, designed and set the standard for the tea ceremony and the utensils used in the tea ceremony.

A part of the tea ceremony grew out of gatherings hosted by samurai and aristocrats, whose purpose was the viewing of beautiful imported artifacts (in the case of samurai, spoils of war). At these gatherings food, saki, and sometimes tea were served. Outbreaks of violence were not unusual with numbers of intoxicated, fully armed samurai in close quarters. To avoid the violence, but still showing a work of art, alcohol was no longer served and swords were left outside. These gatherings and the place of these gatherings evolved into the tea ceremony and the tea house. The culmination of this evolution was brought about by Sen-no Rikyu, a Buddhist monk and arguably the most influential person in Japan by the time of he was ordered by the shogun to take his own life in 1591.

The earliest tea ceremonies used Chinese and Korean ceramics. In the late fifteenth century the interest in the tea ceremony had grown to such an extent that more tea bowls were needed than imports could supply. This was the impetus for the Seto kilns to produce large quantities of bowls finished in Yellow Seto (amber) and Temmoku glazes (black). The first uniquely Japanese tea ware originated from the kilns of the Mino region. Another reason for locally producing tea bowls was the growing alienation with the Chinese culture. Rather than the perfectly round and symetrical shape of the Chinese bowls, the Japanese bowls most prized by the early tea masters were not perfectly round, smooth of form and surface texture, or having a flat rim, but rather strived to be comfortable and interesting to the hands. The irregularity of surface, glaze and rim gives the Japanese tea bowl a different look and feel as it is rotated before the tea ceremony participant. The combination of the foot, shape, glaze and rim often suggest a meditative landscape.

Where the Seto bowls copied the Chinese imports for their shapes, Shino and Oribe bowls each showed a unique individuality to its design and finish. Shino bowls are characterized by a thick creamy off white glaze often decorated with markings of an iron underglaze. Oribe bowls, designed by the master Furuta Oribe (1544-1615), are often very unusual in their out of round shape and their bold, lively finishes of painted slip and green glazes. The Mino kilns also created utensils in a Yellow Seto glaze. The Mino Yellow Seto glaze is very different from the original Yellow Seto in that the Mino version has a much more granular look and feel.

The Raku kiln was established by Chojiro (1516-1592) at the direction of the tea master Sen-no Rikyu for the purpose of producing tea bowls to use in his tea ceremonies. Rikyu provided direct guidance to Chojiro in the form of paper cross section templates. Chojiro’s tea bowls are probably the most famous and valued in the world, but they are they are just as much a product of Sen-no Rikyu’s.

Some of the bowls preferred by the early tea masters were not originally produced as tea bowls, but as mukozuki (rice bowls). Generally these are the tea bowls which have a foot diameter larger than sixty percent of the overall diameter. Some of these bowls were hastily made either by peasants for their own use or to be sold to peasants at quite low prices.

The other utensil which is most appreciated by tea masters and connoisseurs to the tea ceremony are the tea caddies. The tea caddies are in general wheel thrown, regular and smooth. Many of the early tea masters continued to use imported Chinese caddies while stressing a uniquely Japanese aesthetic for their tea bowls. Even when the tea masters used Japanese tea caddies (which still follow the Chinese geometries) they displayed them on Chinese hand-carved lacquer trays.

Bibliography

Fujioka, Ryoichi. Tea Ceremony Utensils (Arts of Japan 3). New York: John Weatherhill Inc., 1973

Piepenburg, Robert. Raku Pottery. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Pebble Press, 1994.

Riegger, Hal. Raku, Art & Technique. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1970.

Swann, Peter. Art of China, Korea, and Japan. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1967