At Portland Japanese Garden, we are honored to share the traditional and beautiful practice of tea ceremony with our visitors. Chadō, or the Way of Tea, is an aesthetic, a spiritual practice, a mindset, and a pursuit of a way of living. Tea offers a place of sanctuary from worldly concerns and is intrinsically linked to Japanese gardens. It emulates the ideals and values the Garden wishes to share: beauty, the restorative power of nature, attention to detail, and mindfulness for others. Portland Japanese Garden offers an ongoing series of free public demonstrations of chadō at the Cathy Rudd Cultural Center.
Portland Japanese Garden is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, nestled in the hills of Portland, Oregon’s iconic Washington Park. It is a tranquil, urban oasis and a treasured space to experience peace through connections to art, nature, and one another. Through rich and unique programming, Portland Japanese Garden seeks to engage a diverse audience, stimulate cross-cultural conversations and allow people to immerse themselves in a culture different from their own.
Video Summary
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This video explores the philosophy and practice of Cha-do, the Japanese \"Way of Tea.\" It describes the tea ceremony as a meditative refuge from the chaos of daily life, emphasizing the importance of mindfulness, tradition, and the pursuit of tranquility through the ritual of preparing and sharing a bowl of tea.
In my belief, the initial reason to do tea
is to take somebody from their daily world
and give them refuge,
give them moments of just complete freedom
to just relax into the moment.
So you leave everything outside.
And in a lot of tea rooms in Japan,
they have paves next to the entrance of the tea room
where you would symbolically hang everything
from the outside world.
Cha is tea.
Do is path or way.
So cha-do is the way of tea.
It's the host's initial goal
to make a delicious bowl of tea.
And that sounds somewhat simple.
It sounds like just put the tea in,
add the water and whisk.
However, there's history behind that.
There's legacy behind that.
And as you study tea, the path of tea,
you realize it's not only that bowl of tea.
And so to complete making that delicious bowl of tea,
you're carrying a whole tradition into the tea rooms.
To help understand what cha-do is,
you have to experience it.
We sort of live in a crazy world right now,
a very busy world.
I know people who are just the most calm people,
but periodically their lives are crazy.
Tea was originally followed
to give people moments of tranquility,
no matter how small they are.
The full tea ceremony is four hours long.
And in that time, you really get that sense
of being isolated from the rest of the world
and a time to be quiet, to be calm
and not feel guilty about it,
to be experiencing it and enjoying it.
For a guest, it's having a sweet and a bowl of tea.
For the host, it's making that bowl of tea,
serving the sweets, of course, making the tea.
The kimono are usually a little softer in appearance,
but there's many layers on underneath.
And I have my fan.
Usually a fan is the symbol of a guest, right?
Whereas the symbol of a host,
somebody coming in to make tea is a cloth,
a silken cloth that you wear.
What the ultimate goal is,
the outside world doesn't exist.
That you're in this world and you are only present.
You forget the shopping list.
You forget dinner.
You forget what you did this morning.
You just become present.
