Delve into the soulful connection between tea and wabi-sabi in our article, Steeped in Imperfection: Tea and the Spirit of Wabi-Sabi, published in our Fall 2025 Quarterly. To download a PDF version of the Upton Tea Imports Spring 2025 Quarterly, please Click Here.
A cracked tea bowl mended with veins of gold. A faded, dog-eared paperback. A tea-darkened patina, formed over time in your favorite mug. A river stone worn smooth by years of movement. The fleeting beauty of cherry blossoms in spring. Dry tea leaves that gently unfurl in hot water. They embody the spirit of wabi-sabi (wah-bee-sah-bee).
The moment of transformation — from dry, curled leaf to softened, open form — is fleeting. Each infusion is unique, never to repeat itself in quite the same way. You witness time passing in the cup, leaving behind flavor and memory.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
— Leonard Cohen
In a modern society constantly in a state of unsettled change, people gravitate toward finding the time to slow down and search out what matters to them. They reach for simple, ordinary rituals — spooning tea leaves, pouring hot water, lifting a steaming cup for that first sip — that bring meaning and quiet contentment. A perfect pause in an imperfect world. These everyday experiences reflect the essence of wabi-sabi: joy felt in that moment, tinged with a whisper of sadness in the knowledge of its impermanence.
Wabi-sabi is an intuitive response to beauty that reflects the true nature of life.
Wabi-sabi is an acceptance and appreciation of the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete nature of everything. Wabi-sabi is a recognition of the gifts of simple, slow, and natural living.
— Beth Kempton, Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life
Rarely discussed and not found in any Japanese dictionary, wabi-sabi — a worldview, a soulful concept, a fascinating enigma — has guided the way Japanese people have experienced life for centuries, with an underlying grace, calm, and appreciation. It is hard to articulate, yet it is something felt deeply. As Beth Kempton writes, “The secret of wabi-sabi lies in seeing the world not with the logical mind but through the feeling heart.”
One discovers variations of the same theme — finding value, beauty, and appreciation in unlikely places — when trying to define wabi-sabi. According to Leonard Koren, “Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic appreciation of the evanescence of life.”
Initially, the Japanese word wabi meant “living alone in nature,” and sabi meant “withered.” They pointed to the austere life of an ascetic. The 14th century saw a movement toward a more positive way to approach these meanings. A life spent in nature encourages spiritual richness and appreciation for the simple moments in everyday life.
The complete term wabi-sabi describes a way of life practiced by those who notice and appreciate the significant moments of each day, live fully in each change of season, and connect with nature and those around them in meaningful and gentle ways.
— Richard R. Powell, Wabi Sabi Simple
Over time, these words have evolved to describe a state of mind that finds beauty and acceptance in what already is, knowing that everything is affected by the passage of time.
Consider the humble tea leaf and its transformation from the moment it is plucked to the moment it is steeped in your cup. If the leaf is processed as black or Oolong tea, it goes through oxidation, a fundamental chemical process whereby a substance loses electrons, changing its chemical composition and causing a natural aging effect: the leaves turn dark. This aging brings out its true beauty, which is experienced and savored through the senses in a cup of tea. When tea leaves are exposed to oxygen, the darkening result is similar to the way a green patina forms on copper or the tarnishing of silver. Even though green tea is not oxidized, the plucked leaf is transformed through chemical changes during processing, which speak to the ephemeral nature of all things. In Embracing Life As It Is, Alan Gettis and Carl Genjo Bachmann write, “Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in and accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death.”
In exploring the historical tea connection with wabi-sabi, let us travel back in time to 12th–century Japan.
Myōan Eisai, also known simply as Eisai, was a Japanese Buddhist monk who traveled to Song Dynasty China to deepen his understanding of Zen Buddhism. In 1191, he returned from his second trip with a gift: tea seeds. He planted the seeds in temple gardens — most notably in the regions of Kyushu and later Uji, the latter becoming Japan’s most famed tea-growing province. These were likely Camellia sinensis var. sinensis — small-leaf tea bushes, well-suited to the Japanese climate and terrain.
By bringing these seeds to Japan, Eisai was not just importing a crop — he was planting the roots of a culture that would flower for centuries: the spiritual, medicinal, and aesthetic path we now know as Chanoyu, the Way of Tea. He recommended tea not only for monks seeking clarity in meditation, but also for samurai needing calm in battle.
With the rise of the samurai class and the military feudal lords (daimyo) they protected, the next several hundred years in Japan were a period of upheaval, when the people sought solace in Buddhism, a significant part of their lives. Samurai warriors developed a keen interest in tea, both for its physical boost during long night watches and for its ability to create peaceful moments amidst the violence that marked their lives. They hosted extravagant tea gatherings, decorated with valuable Chinese tea bowls and utensils as status symbols — a divergence from Eisai’s vision of tea as a metaphor for Zen Buddhism: earthy, immediate, and without ornament.
In the 15th century, monk and tea master, Murata Shuko, took the act of preparing and drinking tea to a deeper level when he helped to develop the tea ceremony. In his 1994 book, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Leonard Koren writes about the evolution of the wabi-sabi state of mind as it approached the 16th century, “Although wabi-sabi quickly permeated almost every aspect of sophisticated Japanese culture and taste, it reached its most comprehensive realization within the context of the tea ceremony.”
Bringing together the skills of garden design, flower arranging, architecture, painting, food preparation, and performance into an “eclectic social art form,” the tea ceremony is the quintessential expression of wabi-sabi.
A small bowl sitting in one’s hand
Contains the whole of the universe.
— Raku Kichizaemon XV, Fifteenth Generation Japanese Potter
Tea master and poet Takeno Jōō took this concept further when he helped transform tea from an aristocratic display to humble art. He reduced the size of the tearoom and simplified it with rustic implements in their natural state. He was a major influence on his student, Sen no Rikyū, who became known as the greatest tea master in the history of Japan as well as the father of wabi-cha: the tea ceremony style rooted in simplicity, imperfection, and spiritual depth. Where others craved gold, he cherished a cracked bowl and the hush of falling ash. The word “wabi” had evolved from its linguistic beginnings to now mean “subdued taste.”
Rikyū replaced an expensive celadon vase with a bamboo flower container…a bamboo tea scoop instead of an ivory one and upcycled a humble well bucket in place of an extravagant bronze water container.
— Beth Kempton, Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life
Legend has it that before Rikyū began his studies with Takeno Jōō, he was asked to clean Jōō’s garden. He carefully raked the garden until it was spotless. Then, in the spirit of wabi-sabi, he shook a tree so a few leaves would fall. Perfection in imperfection.
In his definitive 1906 work, The Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzō never utters wabi-sabi by name, yet he is one of its earliest modern storytellers.
Tea with us became more than an idealisation of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life.
— Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
His writing hums with the spirit of wabi-sabi — its melancholy grace, rustic reverence, and poetic imperfection woven through his words like a fine tapestry. When he praises the humble tearoom, the natural patina of utensils, or the “art of imperfection” in flower arrangement and pottery, he is speaking the language of wabi-sabi.
In the hands of Sen no Rikyū, the tea ceremony became a quiet revolution — a turning away from wealth and symmetry, and a return to what is real, imperfect, and alive. A cracked bowl, a bamboo scoop, a leaf shaken loose from a freshly raked path — these simple gestures became expressions of a deeper truth. In this way, tea became not only an art, but also a way of seeing.
And it continues to be.
In the quiet swirl of steam, in the worn rim of a teacup, in the hush between sips — wabi-sabi lives. Tea teaches us to slow down, to find beauty not in perfection but in presence. Nothing lasts. Everything changes. And still, there is wonder. As Beth Kempton reminds us, “Wabi-sabi is an intuitive response to beauty that reflects the true nature of life.” The tea cools. The moment passes. And that, too, is beautiful.