Spirit of Tea

Does tea have a spirit?
Does it have an essence?
Can individual types of tea have personalities unique to them?

This seemingly insane question is actually a very relevant one and we should be asking this of ourselves and our tea.
Tea is a dried leaf from a tree and it doesn't become tea until humanity interacts with it in the process of converting fresh leaf to finished material, and finished material to steeped liquid for consumption.
Tea is not a leaf that grows on a tree, it is the process of tea from bush to production floor, to package, to cup, to person.
This spirit of tea involves something more than the life of a tree (although that is very important to the making of good quality tea) it is a long process which interacts with the spirits of people, and with their intentions to ultimately produce a beverage which either illuminates and uplifts the spirit or is just another tepid drink.

There are so many aspects of the tea world in which human consideration and intention are important, and hopefully we can illustrate a few of the most important ones in this article:

1 Tree, farmer, worker, machine:
Tea trees themselves have life energy. This is obvious by simply watching the upward turned leaves enjoying the bright sun on a clear day.   Tea trees are plants and just as with all other plant life, they grow and thrive under good conditions.   Tea is also usually a domesticated plant and only in rare cases does it grow wild, outside the providence of humans.   Domesticated tea plants rely on humans to survive, and farmers are the life line that tea trees need to stay alive and healthy.   A good tea plantation is one where farmers pay special attention to the trees, where they monitor which trees are healthy and unhealthy, and where the body of the tree is understood to directly affect the quality of the produced tea.   A poor farming situation is one in which trees are seen as turn over commodity and are cultivated carelessly until they die, and then replaced by new trees.  Of course tea leaves are a commodity crop and it is totally unjustifiable to suggest that farmers put in hard work to not make a profit from their tea.  What I am suggesting is that while tea leaves are a commodity, tea bushes are an investment.   The very most dedicated and intelligent farmers understand that a healthy tea tree produces more and better tea than a tree which is frequently stripped bare by machine, frequently sprayed with chemicals and expected to die within a decade of first being planted.   The farmer who knows his tree is an investment which can be gradually cultivated and turned into an annual producer of great tea leaves is also a farmer who can ask for higher prices at market.  A well tended garden benefits both the farmer and the life of the trees. 
A good workshop is one in which care is taken to make leaves with the perfect mix of aesthetic, perfume, taste, and texture.   Skilled workers make good tea.  

2: from farm to shop and shop to customer:
tea which is packaged and sent off to shops must not be exposed to the elements or allowed to age prematurely due to oxygenation or moisture saturation.  A shop owner should respect their tea enough to store it in places where it won't pick up outside odours or come into too much contact with potential adulterants.
The best shop owners love tea culture and want to share it with customers as purely and respectfully as possible.   The feeling of a tea shop, its decor, the natural smells there, and many other things influence our aesthetic vision of the tea we have bought, and even things such as the visual memory of the tea shop can influence our opinions about the quality of the tea, so unless you are doing blind tasting, there will always be some memory of where you bought it and who you bought it from.  This is also part of the human and tea spirit equation.

3: from tea table to you:
Finally, how you prepare tea has a huge effect on its taste.  Do you take the time to carefully and gingerly pour the water from vessel to vessel, to measure the tea, and to do the things required to make it smell and taste as good as it possibly can?    Aside from the overall quality of the leaves, brewing is the next most important aspect of whether the tea will illuminate and interest your mind or not.    Knowing how much our spirit interacts with the spirit of the tea allows us to come close to understanding the synergistic relationship between tea and person.  

A well brewed cup of tea from a good farm and an honest supplier tells us so many subtle stories not only about the tree it came from, but also about all of the people involved in its cultivation, production, distribution, and preparation.   The spirit of tea and the spirit of humans is inextricably connected and without it, there would be no tea.





Robert James Coons is the creator of this blog and a tea merchant, and writer on Daoism and other interesting topics.   He lives in Guelph Ontario and runs the website www.chayotea.com where great teas from Taiwan and China can be obtained.