This essay is motivated by a conundrum. After many years of practicing tea, teaching about tea, and engaging in scholarly writing about tea, I began to notice a disconnect between how I saw tea practice described or explained and how I had come to understand it as a practitioner and instructor. The issue comes down to this: the difficulty of capturing through words and concepts that which is fundamentally experienced and understood by the body. 

The world of intellectual inquiry is rich and satisfying and provides invaluable insight into the study of chanoyu. Yet, intellectual investigation favors a certain type of question that doesn't necessarily align with the questions that arise for practitioners in the tea room. The mind wants to know, "What does this mean?" But for practitioners in the tea room this question is not the main concern. Rather, they open themselves to a fullness of experience that, if put into words, might form the question, "What is noticed and sensed here and now, and how am I moved by that?"

I would like to suggest that the understanding of chanoyu can be immeasurably enhanced when intellectual inquiry is complemented by an equally critical mode of inquiry through the body. Chanoyu is a practice comprising many forms. There are the forms assumed by the body in terms of kata, or the basic postures, gestures, and movements of participants in the tea room. There is the physical form of the tea room and the garden pathway leading to the tea room entryway. And there are the tangible forms of objects that populate the tea room setting—scrolls, flowers, vessels, and the like. As practitioners move through a tea gathering and engage in and with the various forms, the primary instrument of encounter is the body.  

In this essay, I take up embodied practice as a mode of investigation and explore, through specific examples, how this mode allows tea practitioners to uniquely perceive, communicate, encounter, and ultimately open themselves to new understandings and connections. I refer in some cases to a course I taught on tea practice to students in Stanford University's Overseas Study Program in Kyoto in Spring of 2024, where students were encouraged to utilize embodied inquiry as a springboard for their exploration of chanoyu. 

Embodied Practice as a Mode of Attunement

Guests to a tea gathering approach the tea room through a specialized garden, known as the roji, which guides participants toward the tea room door. The doorway itself is unusual. Radically reduced in height with its threshold at knee level, it requires the guest to lower and compress the body into a folded shape in order to cross into the tea room. The tea room as well is a singular environment: small yet minimally adorned; constructed primarily of natural materials; and lit naturally by filtered sunlight, moonlight, candles, and/or—nowadays—subdued artificial fixtures.

If we are to think of the body as an instrument of encounter in a chanoyu session, then we may think of the process of approaching and entering the tea room as one of tuning that instrument. As the guest journeys through the roji, lowers themselves to enter the tea room, and emerges into the tea room itself, the body becomes freshly attuned to a sensory mode of awareness that readies it for what will unfold next. A brief look at this process will reveal how this attunement occurs.  

The roji is a specialized garden, designed not for viewing per se, but for a specific function, which is to calm the guest's mindset and psyche in preparation for the tea experience. A few features of the roji support this process. The roji's plantings are textured shades of green, eschewing decorative flowers or artificial elements. The roji's pathway starts with flat organized pavement before breaking up into stepping stones set at varying angles. The foliage of the roji becomes more dense as the path nears the teahouse door. As the guest moves through the roji, the textured green surroundings exert a calming influence; the stepping stones cause the body to slow down and acclimate to a more finely tuned spatial awareness; and the progressively dense foliage creates the subtle effect of moving more deeply into a space of retreat. 

The sudden reduction in light and sound relative to the garden, accompanied by a gradually expanding spatial awareness, fine-tunes the senses. Sight, which is momentarily compromised in the relatively dim tea room interior, is aided by other senses which quickly awaken, taking in sound, fragrance, touch, and atmospherics. Guests may become aware of the sound of the water boiling in the kettle, the faint scent of incense, mist evaporating from the moistened kettle placed just minutes before the guests' arrival, soft atmospherics of muted lighting, the texture of the tatami as the fingers touch the floor for grounding.

Once guests take their seats in the tea room, their acclimation to the simple, spare setting further allows the mind to calm and the senses to sharpen. The tea room is constructed of modest natural materials, which, like the garden, soothe rather than entertain. Earthen walls, unfinished pillars, bamboo slats, paper window panes, and woven rush floors support a setting that is open, devoid of furnishings or decoration. The subdued environment stirs the senses to become more attuned to small stimuli—water droplets on the flower in the alcove, the glowing coals beneath the kettle, the sounds of water, the fragrance of tea. Even time seems to slow down, the rhythms of shared experience overriding the count of mechanized or electronic devices.

Here, we see how the process of approaching and entering the tea room tunes the instrument of the body in preparation for the tea gathering. The process is gradual and occurs organically without the guest trying to make it so. This is the genius of the roji and tea room design—the setting naturally acts to relax the mind and draw the senses forward. Now that the instrument of the body is tuned, how does it operate within the tea gathering itself to encounter what unfolds?

Embodied Practice as a Mode of Communication

I now turn to embodied practice as a mode of communication. Practitioners find tea such a richly satisfying practice due in part to the multilayered nature of the communicative experience, which begins through embodied forms. Here, I return to kata, or the set postures, gestures, and motions that hosts and guests assume during a tea gathering. In common parlance, these might be thought of as body language—the body's language—which begs the question, what is this language saying and how is it being "heard?"  

One kata, in which the host and guest jointly participate, is bowing. A tea gathering begins and ends with group bows, but there are also one-on-one bows, such as when a bowl of tea is delivered to the guest by a member of the host team. This host sits before the guest, turns the bowl, and places it, after which they back up a bit and bow together with the guest. Students in my tea course received tea in this way, and their comments reveal the communicative dimension of this shared host-guest kata. One student commented:

[B]owing [with] the host when they gave me tea was different [for me] because of the pacing. I bowed much more slowly … than I normally would, just by matching their pace. They also spent a very small, but noticeably longer time in the lowest position of the bow. This allows for the interaction with the host to move at a slower pace which allows you to contemplate the various actions of the host and yourself.

This student's attunement to the motions of the host elicited an embodied response from within the student that matched the host's pacing. Another student commented similarly:

When bowing with the host I felt a sense of sharedness and community that heightened the experience...

And a third, with regard to interacting with the host, remarked:

I felt as though I were being animated by them [at] certain points. [emphasis mine]

The embodied give-and-take of the exchanges described here illustrates the foundational importance of kata to tea room communication. The communication emerges from the participants' full attention and engagement with the embodied forms. In other words, the embodied action gives rise to the communication, which is received in an embodied way—I felt as though I were being animated by them. What exactly is being communicated here?  Before attempting an answer, I will first touch on the kata of temae.

Temae is the sequence of tasks undertaken by the host with the aim of creating a delicious bowl of tea. Temae are the kata that students of tea practice week in and week out, year in and year out, with their teacher and fellow students during practice sessions (keiko). There are hundreds of temae, from simple to complex, spanning a range of orientations with respect to season, formality, deference, and other circumstances. Generally speaking, temae proceed according to the following pattern: (1) preparation; (2) tea making and drinking; (3) closing. During the preparation phase, the host prepares each utensil for use. The host then makes tea, and the guest receives it. During the closing, the host again attends to each utensil, restoring it to its original condition and place. In this sense, temae is quite practical—a series of steps that must be accomplished in order to complete the overall task of making tea. Yet, practicality alone is insufficient to motivate temae. Equally important to the steps of temae is the way in which the steps are done, so not just the what but also the how.  

The how of temae is what students spend years training their bodies to refine. Guests experiencing temae for the first time, when asked to describe it, will often report having found it calming, relaxing, absorbing, even invigorating. They remark on how quiet it can become and how they feel drawn in by the host, some saying they become lost in the moment. How does this happen? 

The two characters that comprise the term temae may help us consider this question. They are: ten (点) which forms the verb tateru, to whisk matcha, but also interestingly means "point," while mae (前) means "in front." The host gives careful attention to "the point in front"—the object/task at hand—throughout the tea-making sequence. Viewing temae this way, we come to understand it as a gift of attention. And that attention is not only single-minded, but single-bodied. In moving through temae, the host aligns the body fully toward each item, leaning with the whole torso in the motion to take the object in hand, grasping it carefully but securely, handling it for the needed task, and returning it to position. The movements of temae are quiet and efficient, with no wasted motions or extraneous flourishes. The motions themselves are neither fast nor slow, but comprise a flow of both fast and slow within an overall rhythm of varying pace. One student in my tea course remarked:

Every action felt correct, I felt myself to be part of a greater whole, the same way one might … in a dance. 

I felt myself to be part of a greater whole. The student's sense of correctness or "rightness" about the host's movements drew him in in such a way that he felt part of a dance—a dance which he went on to say was not simply just between two people, "like a one-on-one," but included the entire group. How does the simple act of doing temae evoke this sense of collective embodied response?  

Some conceptualize this kind of embodied give-and-take as kinaesthetic empathy, or the capacity to sense and feel within one's body the movements of another whom one might be observing—to "dance along with the dancer," so to speak. It is sometimes described as a sort of neural mirroring that places the viewer inside the kinaesthetic experience of another, even when one has never performed the movements observed. If we expand this lens to a guest's experience of temae, we can see how the nature of the host's movements can elicit an empathic embodied response. Quiet, gentle, and seamless movements elicit correspondingly quiet, gentle, and attentive responses. The unhurried nature of temae has a slowing-down effect, while the dynamic pacing piques and engages. The guest feels "animated," to borrow our student's word, by the host's temae and the feelings that pervade it. 

Kinaesthetic empathy is considered a form of knowing by those who research it, with "knowing" as a mode of embodied reception where the viewer understands the motions of the doer "from the inside," including a sensitivity to their emotional aspect. If this is so, then what is it that comes to be known? As I mention above, temae is about the host attending to the utensils—in preparation, use, or restoration. In the preparation phase, this action is sometimes characterized as purifying, from the Japanese kiyomeru. Some protest that the objects brought into the tea room do not need to be purified—they are already clean. This is true. So, why this verb: purify? If we take a moment to demystify the notion of purification, we can think of it simply as a de-layering—a removal of any fine layer of dust that may have settled on the utensils in the interim between their readied state before the guests' arrival and the beginning of temae—so a sort of practical purification. But there is also an element of care here. The host's attention to the utensils extends an extra gesture of consideration to the guest—a sense that the moment of meeting the guest is important enough to merit preparing the utensils before them in the moment. The extension of temae in this way fosters an intimacy that arises from shared  experience in the embodied forms as they are felt in their offering and reception.

In temae practice, one instruction given to practitioners is to place one's heart in the fingertips. The way the host does this—places the heart in each step of temae—becomes part of what is perceived and understood by the guests. The content of that embodied communication, by definition, is difficult to express in words. Isadora Duncan, widely regarded as the mother of modern dance, famously said in response to a question about why she danced that if she could explain it, there would be no need to dance. 

The same applies to temae: If what can be communicated through temae could be conveyed equally effectively by other means, then it would become unnecessary to do it. This echoes my initial conundrum posited above—the difficulty of articulating in words that which is fundamentally understood by the body. By which I don't mean to imply that words are unimportant, just that words alone are insufficient. 

My students in Kyoto spent a whole term employing their senses to understand what they experienced in tea. Here are some of their responses to the question, what is communicated in tea practice:  

care, welcome, tenderness, humility, tranquility, 
unity, gratitude, contentment, nuance, respect, 
clarity, naturalness, purity

When receiving tea from the host, the guest bows with the host saying, "Otemae wo chōdai itashimasu," or "I humbly receive your temae." In light of our understanding of temae as embodied communication, the guest's expression of thanks for the temae specifically, rather than for the tea itself for example, conveys the depth of what is received during temae—not only the tea, but also all that is communicated during the making of it.     

Embodied Practice as a Mode of Perception

Having established that embodied practice is a mode of attunement and communication, I now propose that it operates as a mode of perception as well. This occurs as guests encounter objects brought into the tea setting. These objects include items placed by the host in the alcove: a scroll brushed in calligraphy and a placement of flowers. They also include an array of objects that the host brings into the tea room prior to or during the gathering that are directly used in the tea-making process: the kettle for boiling water, the fresh water jar,  tea bowl/s, the tea container, tea scoop, and whisk, to name some of the main elements. 

As the tea gathering unfolds, the guests encounter each of these objects in turn. Upon entering the tea room, they pause in front of the alcove, coming face to face with the scroll and flowers. They then progress to the host's seat, where they pause again, this time to take in the kettle coming to life over a bed of burning coals and also the fresh water jar, which the host may have placed ahead of time depending on the season or other factors. The guests then find their seats and await the host's entry.  

This initial viewing of objects takes place immediately after guests have entered the tea room; they have just made their way through the garden and passed through the small doorway. As noted above, this entry process attunes the body as a sensory instrument. And so this first moment of encountering objects is precisely the moment when the senses have become acutely sharpened and the thinking mind has begun to settle. The guests' encounters here happen primarily at the sensory level: sights, sounds, fragrances, and tactile sensations. We could say that the guests' engagement is at the level of aesthetics—a word whose origin reminds us how deeply integrated aesthetic perception is with the body, since the meaning of the root word aisthetikos is "related to sense experience."

This newly awakened sensory mode of perception continues to guide how guests encounter the array of objects that are introduced by the host during temae and employed in the tea-making process. To provide a "sense" of how this happens, I will take as an example one utensil, the tea bowl, and show how sensory encounter can serve as a springboard for a flow of impressionistic reception among those gathered that unifies through seasonal, imagistic, and emotional resonance.  

The guest's first view of the tea bowl is when the host carries it into the tea room. The host sits at the tea-making position, placing the bowl directly before the body, while the guest is sitting some distance away, typically one half-mat tatami's separation, or about 3.5 feet. As noted above, the lighting in the tea room is subdued. Under such conditions, the guest's first view of the bowl is general and impressionistic—what is the color, what is the shape? These features often convey a seasonal valence. In the colder months, vertical walls and narrower openings keep the tea warm, while, conversely, in warm conditions, shallow, wider bowls allow the tea to cool. Darker colors provide a hint of coziness in the cold, while lighter colors offer a sense of breeziness in the heat.  

As the host readies the bowl for use during temae, the guest's perception is sharpened by sound. The sound of water being poured into the bowl, that water being moved by the whisk, and the whisk's stem intoning off the rim of the bowl are all sounds that provide sensory cues as to the heft and solidity of the bowl, while also calling attention to immediate conditions within the tea room. Embodied concentration is honed from broader seasonal awareness to the tangible present environment, as the atmospherics of temperature, humidity, and pressure affect how the sound carries.  

The bowl then becomes a vessel for tea which makes its way to the guest's hands. The guest's encounter here engages all of the senses including smell and taste as the bowl is lifted to the lips and sipped from. After drinking, the guest takes a moment to peruse the bowl carefully. Here, finally, details of the bowl's design are seen up close. Holding the bowl in two hands, the guest feels the lingering warmth from the tea, the texture of the clay body, the carving of the foot ring. The guest takes in the visual details of the bowl: evenness, overlap, or gaps in the glaze; any applied design fine or abstract; unintended scenery left by the kiln; variations in coloration or in the shape of the rim, the body, or the foot of the bowl. As the guest's lens of encounter narrows from general to fine, the impression of the bowl continues to evolve and shift. Seasonal valence gives way to more finely tuned impressions that resonate with the season but shift in subtle ways—imagistically, emotionally, poetically.  

In the case of the tea bowl in the accompanying photo, colorful flowers on a light background hint at the warmer months. While the host handles the bowl, the flowers' bold colors reveal their shape, bringing irises into view. Irises—typically blooming in May—point to early summer. As the host prepares the bowl, the delicate intonations of whisk and moving water affirm a hard clay body structure of thin walls, a bowl likely to allow heat to escape, perfect for the season. The way the sound travels affirms the conditions in the room, perhaps light and airy with a hint of humidity.  

As the guest drinks from the bowl, the fingertips note the pleasing sensation of the bowl's smooth walls, punctuated with barely visible vertical depressions unevenly placed. Perusing the design, the guest notices watery motifs in lieu of ground, accentuated by subtle bevelling of the bowl's shape at the base of the glaze, reminiscent of gentle ebbs and flows at water's edge. The guest may be surprised to notice a new detail—a bridge that accompanies the flowers on the face of the bowl, delightfully reappearing on the interior of the back wall, "bridging" the opening of the bowl, so to speak. The appearance of the bridge might immediately call to mind a scene from the classical Tales of Ise, in which a young courtier, after having just left his beloved behind as a penalty of exile, stops at scenery of irises blooming near a zig-zag bridge. At this place, he composes a now-famous poem expressing the heart of travel in which the first syllable of each line spells the name of the iris flower: ka-ki-tsu-ba-ta. The poem and its translation appear in the photos below; use the arrows on the left and right to toggle between them.

The recalled poem transports guests to our courtier's plaintive scene. While they may not be moved to tears, as the poet's attendants were upon hearing the poem first recited, maybe their hearts break just a little bit for our forlorn traveler or for the poignancy of their own distant journeys or loves bygone but not forgotten. The poem shifts the mood from the delight of seasonal awareness to this more highly charged emotional state. As this happens, the tea bowl keeps moving. It is returned to the host, and attention shifts to other pieces, such as the bamboo tea scoop, which guests typically ask to view as the temae closes. It has become conventional for the tea scoop to be assigned a poetic name by its carver. For a given grouping of utensils (toriawase), the host will select a tea scoop with a poetic name that resonates seasonally and poetically with the other utensils. In the case of our toriawase here, a tea scoop with a poetic name such as hototogisu, or "mountain nightingale," might nicely close the emotional loop by returning guests safely to the season, this time by evoking the auditory cue of the nightingale’s voice, which is understood as a harbinger of summer.  

By this small example, I hope to demonstrate how embodied encounter with objects in the tea room invites imagistic and emotional responses that serve as points in an associative chain of connection that draws guests together. It is perhaps no surprise that poetry features so prominently here, since poetry is a language uniquely proficient at layering image and emotion. The canon of Japanese poetry in particular is replete with concrete seasonal imagery that doubles for emotional states, as in the case of the kakitsubata irises. The tea bowl, as an aesthetic object, operates in much the same way as critic Viktor Shklovsky describes the workings of art—as existing so "that one may recover the sensations of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony." In our example, the tea bowl imparts the sensations of early summer by bringing the irises alive—making them "irisy," or presenting their "suchness" as Buddhists might say—and in so doing, making the guests feel things. What is felt is palpable to the body but never fixed as each sensation calls for a new response, and poetic nuance shifts interpretations in ever-changing ways.

Conclusion

Throughout an experience of tea, the body operates as the leading instrument of encounter. First, it becomes attuned as the guest moves through the garden, the entryway, and into the tea room itself. These settings create the conditions for the thinking mind to quiet and the sensory capacity of the body to awaken. The newly sensitized body becomes acutely aware of the movements in the tea room, receiving and responding to the "body language" of tea room kata as sensed by the body. An embodied mode of seeing guides how guests encounter objects brought into the tea room, allowing them to be taken in at a sensory level. From this sensory contact, emotional or imagistic responses may spring, evoking a flow of associative poetic response among those gathered. The language of poetry, rich in concrete seasonal imagery palpable to the senses, allows that associative journey to be felt on an embodied level, further connecting those present with a sense of unified experience.  

I return to my assertion above that intellectual and embodied approaches ask different kinds of questions: the mind wants to know, "What does this mean?" while the body asks, "What do I notice or sense, and how am I moved by that?" From our understanding of tea as an embodied practice, we can indeed see that meaning is not its pursuit, as meanings are ever shifting according to the flow of sense perception and poetic nuance. We might even say that tea practice is not even primarily about tea, the tea of course being a necessary but insufficient ingredient. The powerful unifying and communicative impulse of tea practice is made possible because tea is shared through the physical forms of setting, objects, and temae—forms that are fundamentally experienced, perceived, and understood by the body.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my students in Stanford University’s Bing Overseas Study Program in Kyoto (Spring 2024) for their earnest and insightful engagement. Warm thanks also to the expertly supportive staff at the Stanford Japan Center. Deep gratitude to the worldwide community of tea practitioners, past, present, and future, especially to the Urasenke tradition and to my teacher and fellow practitioners at the Urasenke Foundation of San Francisco. Special thanks to Michelle Liu Carriger, Lindsey Stirek, and Bruce Hamana who reviewed this manuscript and offered generative comments.

Hamilton, Nancy J. "Tea as Embodied Practice." Teaching Tea: Culture, History, Practice, Art on Japan Past & Present. 2025. https://japanpastandpresent.org/en/projects/teaching-tea-culture-history-practice-art/resources/tea-as-embodied-practice