Tea Mind: Living the Way of Tea

When we drink the tea, we need to slow down and feel the different kinds of energy in each small sip of tea with different parts of the mouth and the heart.

—Zhongxian Wu

My partner Shanti and I often invite friends over for tea. We find it a more simple, less complicated thing than inviting them over for dinner. We have tea and snacks and often spend hours visiting. Yet our tea party is a little different than what most people are used to.

Our type of tea is called gongfu cha 功夫茶. Gongfu is one of those misunderstood terms in Chinese that most people associate with martial arts (wushu 武術). It actually means anything that you study (time and effort) and get good at. It can be gongfu gardening, gongfu painting and yes, gongfu martial arts.

Another name for what we are doing here is pinming lundao 品茗論道 or "savor tea, discuss Dao." Usually, when we talk about drinking tea we would say hecha 喝茶 but here we use a different term, pin. Pin means something more than just drinking tea. The character for pin is made up of three squares, which represent three mouths, as in the three sips we take at the beginning of the ceremony. Not only that, but it has a quality of savoring or going slowly and really letting not only the flavor of the tea, but the energy of the tea, to enter our being in a deep way.

The next character, ming, means high quality tea or a special kind of tea. This can be an expensive tea or just one that carries a lot of meaning for us. In this way, we are offering our guests much more than just a cup of tea. We are sharing something deep and profound.

The last two characters, lundao, refer to lifting the conversation into the realm of philosophy or some other high-minded conversation. I find when I do Daoist gongfu tea ceremonies that the tea really opens people up to better able to grasp the Taoist teachings that I share as well. There is just something that is relaxing yet also stimulating about this simple ceremony.

The type of tea most gong fu tea practitioners use is called Puerh 普洱. This kind of tea has been used for many hundreds, if not thousands of years for tea self-cultivation practice. It grows in trees, high in the mountains of Southwest China, in Yunnan province. The tea trees can be hundreds of years old, and have roots growing hundreds of feet into the earth. Puerh tea is a fermented tea, so it has lots of good qualities for our digestion, and is low in caffeine, among other wonderful attributes. This kind of tea is often pressed into cakes and you need to break them open in order to drink the tea. But, by being pressed this way, the tea will last a very long time without going bad.

There are actually two kinds of Puerh. One is naturally fermented over a long time, called "raw" (sheng 生). And one that is quickly fermented called "cooked" (shou 熟). Each one of them has its own characteristics. The aged sheng versions can cost thousands of dollars, just like finely aged wine (see Towler 2010).

But really, you can use any kind of tea you like. The practice is the same. The attitude we bring to the ceremony is really the most important part.

So, we put a measure of tea into the pot, let is steep for just a few minutes and then pour it out as well. This is called "washing the leaves" and gets rid of any dust left on the leaves. I also call it "waking up the leaves." It allows the flavor and goodness of the leaves to really open and improves the flavor of the tea.

Then we let it steep a few moments more and pour it into the small cups. We pick up the cups, holding them with our thumb and first finger on the sides with ring finger on the bottom, and align them with our heart so that the...