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Contents of The Meaning of Tea Practice

A man with short, dark hair and glasses sits at a picnic table in a park. He wears a blue, Japanese-style shirt. He is whisking tea. There is a wooden box for tea utensils to his left on the table. To the left of the box is a pewter bowl for waste water. A thermos bottle sits opposite the tea utensils the man is using.

Tea Master Gary Cadwallader makes tea in the park

Lecture Notes

Norman Girardot has suggested that religion is based on "periodically recovering in this lifetime, a condition of original wholeness, health or holiness." Sen Soshitsu, the fifteenth generation Grandmaster of the Urasenke tea lineage suggested that "Tea is the practice or realization of religious faith, no matter what you believe in." The ideal for devotees of tea ritual is to make their practice more than a worldly means to an end. It is to realize, as Sen Soshitsu says, "Peacefulness in a bowl of tea."