Zen Tea Practice as Mundane Performance

Abstract

Chan tea practice is a Chinese Buddhist practice (Zen in Japanese and English) that stresses the value of simple utensils, humble spaces and anti-performative values such as avoidance of self-consciousness, display or theatrical effects. Since 2019 I have been practicing under the guidance of a Chinese monk, VK, within a group of sangha members from a local Buddhist priory. In this essay, I first describe the practice as I have learned it and in the context of the larger Chinese history of Chan and Cha (Buddhism and tea). The emphasis on the humble and everyday nature of the practice contrasts with better known tea ceremonies that are often deliberately theatrical. The effort to retain the most simple and unpretentious aspects of drinking tea while refining the activity and movements to their most economical and useful produces its own beauty. Aesthetics are not, however, the concern of the practitioner but rather they seek to experience the silence, focus and insight that drinking tea in this manner can offer. This practice can be done alone or with others. It cultivates harmony, respect, purity and tranquility as well as other virtues associated with meditative practices. The theoretical question that interests me is whether or not one can consider this Chan practice a performance or whether the emphasis on no self, no ‘show’(ing), no-thing means it cannot really qualify as performance. From the point of view of performance scholars, ‘repetition with a difference’ is exactly what the tea practice ‘does’, but on the other hand, the showing of a doing implies a form of self-consciousness that is arguably absent in the tea-master as it would also be troubling to call the other participants ‘audience’. I attempt to trouble the founding definitions of performance studies with the nuanced particulars of this spiritual practice.