The Book of Tea: A Quick Read edition

Discover a new way to read classics with Quick Read.
This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter.
- Reading time of the complete text: about 2 hours
- Reading time of the summarized text: 6 minutes

The Book of Tea is a long essay written by Okakura Kakuzō in 1906, which links the role of chadō (teaism) to the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Japanese life. The book emphasizes how Teaism taught the Japanese many things, the most important of which were simplicity and humility. Okakura believed that this aesthetic should inform everything from the arts and architecture to daily life and was already informing them in Japan. The book also discusses topics such as Zen and Taoism, but also the secular aspects of tea and Japanese life. According to Tomonobu Imamichi, Heidegger's concept of Dasein in Sein und Zeit was inspired by Okakura Kakuzō's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-worldness) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy. The Book of Tea has been cited as an important influence on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Georgia O'Keeffe.