| I’m not Buddhist or Taoist not a Confucianist either I’m a brownfaced whitehaired hard up old man. people think I just prowl the streets peddling tea, I’ve got the whole universe in this tea caddy of mine. | In the fourth month of 1724 the priest Gekkai Genshō, then in his late forties, left the Zen temple in the castle town of Hasuike on the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu, where he had served for thirty-eight years, and set out for the capital at Kyoto, some five hundred miles distant. After a decade or so which he apparently spent wandering around the Kyoto/ Osaka region, he took up residence in a small dwelling on the banks of the Kamo River in Kyoto, earning a living at the age of sixty by selling a new type of tea known as sencha, made by infusing leaves in a teapot. He soon became a familiar figure around the capital, known simply by the sobriquet he had adopted, Baisaō, "the Old Tea Seller." His shop was frequented by ordinary citizens as well as by many of those at the center of the city's artistic, literary, and intellectual life. In addition to selling tea at his place of residence, Baisaō was soon taking his shop outdoors. Shouldering his tea equipment, balanced in large portable bamboo-wicker baskets on the ends of a carrying pole, he could set up for business wherever he wished, choosing sites among the many celebrated scenic locales in Kyoto and the surrounding hills. |
| Going far away to China to seek the sacred shoots Old Eisai brought them back sowed them in our land. Uji tea has a taste infused with Nature’s own essence a pity folks only prattle about its color and scent. | |
| Brewing tea in a cluster of pines customers one after another imbibing for a single sen one cupful of the spring; Friends, please don’t smile at my humble existence, being poor doesn’t hurt you, you do that on your own. |
Monday, February 4, 2013
Norman Waddell
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Baisao: The Old Tea Seller
ReplyDeleteby Norman Waddell
At a time when the word “tea” for most Japanese still meant powdered matcha, Baisao was serving a new variety that came to be known in Japan as sencha, a word that translates literally as “simmered tea.” The term was used to refer to loose-leaf teas in general, and could indicate the tea itself, the method of preparing it—simmering or steeping—and, later, the elegant pastime of drinking it (the “Way of Sencha”).
Old Tea Seller: Baisao
ReplyDeleteLife and Zen Poetry in 18th Century Kyoto
Authors: Baisao and translated by Norman Waddell
In the fourth month of 1724 the priest Gekkai Genshō, then in his late forties, left the Zen temple in the castle town of Hasuike on the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu, where he had served for thirty-eight years, and set out for the capital at Kyoto, some five hundred miles distant. After a decade or so which he apparently spent wandering around the Kyoto/ Osaka region, he took up residence in a small dwelling on the banks of the Kamo River in Kyoto, earning a living at the age of sixty by selling a new type of tea known as sencha, made by infusing leaves in a teapot.
He soon became a familiar figure around the capital, known simply by the sobriquet he had adopted, Baisao, “the Old Tea Seller.” His shop was frequented by ordinary citizens as well as by many of those at the center of the city’s artistic, literary, and intellectual life. Baisao forged lasting friendships with his remarkable clientele of leading poets, writers, painters, calligraphers, and scholars of the Edo period, a set of congenial spirits who made early eighteenth-century Kyoto one of the finest and most interesting cities anywhere in the world.
In addition to selling tea at his place of residence, Baisaö was soon taking his shop outdoors. Shouldering his tea equipment, balanced in large portable bamboo-wicker baskets on the ends of a carrying pole, he could set up for business wherever he wished, choosing sites among the many celebrated scenic locales in Kyoto and the surrounding hills.
Baisao did not charge a fixed price for his tea, relying instead on donations left by customers. Although these alms usually were enough to buy the small amount of rice he needed to sustain himself and were occasionally supplemented by gifts of staples such as miso and shoyu, his poems describe times of great extremity when, foodless and penniless, he was reduced to begging.
For the first ten years of his residence in Kyoto, Baisao remained a priest, going against Buddhist regulations pointedly forbidding clerics to earn their own living. ‘When at the age of sixty-seven circumstances arose that obliged him to leave the priesthood, forfeit his Buddhist names, and revert to lay status, he adopted the secular name Kö Yugai, which he and his friends often shortened to Layman Yugai.
In his eighties, Baisao was crippled by severe back pains that made it impossible to continue carrying his tea equipment atound the city. He burned his favorite carrying basket and other tea utensils-to keep them, he said, from “falling into vulgar hands”- I and began to eke out a living from writing calligraphy and from selling tea at his shop, which now, after many moves, was located in the village of Shogo-in in Kyoto’s eastern suburbs.
In the seventh month of 1763, Baisao passed away peacefully at the age of eighty-eight. Shortly before, his friends had put in his hands a copy of the Baisao Gego (“Verses and Prose by the Old Tea Seller”), a collection of Chinese writings he had composed in the course of his tea-selling life, which they had prepared and printed.
The earliest account of Baisao’s life is the one compiled by his young friend Daiten Kenjo, a Shokoku-ji priest, as an introduction for the Baisao Gego. This became the basic source for most of the brief sketches of Baisao that appeared prior to the twentieth century. In piecing together the present work I have followed quite closely the chronology established by the modern Baisao scholar Tanimura Tameumi. Thanks to new material in letters and inscriptions found in private collections and sales catalogs that I have been able to discover in the decades since Tanimura’s work was published, I believe that I have been able to emend or clarify his research in some places.
ReplyDeleteThe present volume consists of two parts, the first a life of Baisao, and the second, translations of Baisao’s poetry and prose, which include all of the works in the Baisao Gego collection of poetry and prose published before his death, as well as most of the eleven additional verses that appear in Baisao, the standard edition of his writings edited by Fukuyama Chogan and published in 1934. Of Baisao’s prose writings, the most important are the Baizan shucha furyaku (“A Brief History of the Tea Seeds Planted at Plum Mountain”), a very concise history of Japanese tea; and the Taikyaku Genshi (“A Statement of My Views in Reply to a Customer’s Questions”), in which Baisao explains at some length his reasons for taking up his tea-selling life.
Baisao’s religious career can be divided into three periods: the period of religious training, which continued until roughly his thirty-second year; the second period, ending in his fifty-seventh year, during which he served as temple supervisor, and later as de facto abbot at Ryushin-ji in Hasuike; and the third period, which covers the years he spent in Kyoto as the Old Tea Seller. The following biographical sketch focuses on the third period: in addition to being the most interesting part of his life, it is the only one for which any source materials exist.
http://www.wisdom-books.com/ProductExtract.asp?PID=21261