Characteristics of traditional tea art

At the beginning, China was the hometown of tea with a long history of tea culture, and China also had a long history of tea culture. Drinking tea is closely related to people's lives. In the Tang Dynasty, fried tea was the mainstream, also known as boiled tea, which was a drinking method of pouring tea powder into boiling water to make tea soup. Among them, the boiling state of water and the timing of pouring tea powder are the key links to test the success of decocting tea.

On the basis of predecessors' research on tea, Cha Sheng Lu Yu summed up a set of tea-making techniques, tea-drinking customs and tea-tasting methods, and wrote a monograph "Tea Classic". In the chapter "Tea Boiling", Lu Yu discussed it in detail, which was summarized as the meaning of "three boiling". It can be said that the main way to drink tea in the Tang Dynasty was to stir-fry the tea ceremony.

Tea-drinking culture in the Song Dynasty continued unabated. Scholars took tea as their friends, poems and pleasures. Tea has an indissoluble bond with people's life and culture in Song Dynasty. Tea art in Song Dynasty was innovated on the basis of inheriting the essence of the previous generation. As early as Song Zhenzong's time, there was a group cake tea, which was a household name in Beijing. The tea drinking fashion that really led the Song Dynasty was ordering tea.

Tea ordering method is to put tea powder into a tea bowl, inject a small amount of boiling water to make it paste, then inject boiling water, or directly inject boiling water into the tea bowl, and at the same time hold a tea basket (a tea-making tool made of bamboo filaments) and stir it in time to make tea soup.

When ordering tea in Song Dynasty, people were very particular about the quality, water quality, temperature and tea set of tea powder. In the eyes of Song people, mountain spring is the top grade of tea-making water, followed by well water. White tea is the top tea in tea; The finer the tea powder, the better, so that the tea powder can reach the best state when ordering tea; Heat is also important. Song people said that "it is the most difficult to wait for the soup, and the unripe floats at the end, and the Chata is ripe and heavy", so it is just right to boil the water; It is advisable to build a tea cup to hold tea; Finally, the color of tea soup should be pure white, and the tea foam should be bright white.

According to the characteristics of tea ordering, the folk culture of fighting tea has emerged. In tea fighting, two people catch and kill each other, and two wins out of three fights. There are two criteria to determine the outcome: one is the color of the soup, and the other is the flower of the soup.

The color of soup is the color of tea, with pure white as the top. Blue-white, gray-white, yellow-white and so on. Pure white color means that the tea leaves are fresh and tender, and the temperature is just right when steaming; The color is blue, indicating that the temperature is not enough when steaming; The color is gray, indicating that the heat is too old when steaming; If the color is yellow, it means that the collection is not timely; The color is red because the baking temperature is too high.

Soup flower refers to the foam on the noodle soup, and there are two criteria to judge the quality of soup flower: the first is the color of soup flower, with fresh white as the top; The second is that after the soup blooms, water marks appear sooner or later. Lose early, win late.

If the tea powder is ground very finely, it is beneficial to order soup and caress soup. The soup flowers are even and delicate, like "cold porridge noodles", which can bite the edge of the cup for a long time. This best effect is called "biting the lamp". On the contrary, if the soup is boiled, you can't bite it and it will soon spread out. As soon as the soup is scattered, the "watermark" is revealed where the soup meets the lamp.

Song Huizong made an incisive description of the tea ordering process in Daguan Tea Classic. He regarded brewing and stirring as a whole, and they were carried out at the same time. He made a subtle exposition on the amount of soup and the intensity of stirring, and divided the process of ordering tea into seven stages, namely "seven soups".

"Seven Soups and Tea Ordering" is a method recorded by Song Huizong in Daguan Tea Theory. This "Seven Soups" is named as: Sparse the stars to make the moon, the pearls are bright and straight, the Chinese crab has bright eyes, Yun Qi, the snow congeals, the milk is angry, and the milk is thick and medium. Based on this, the tea ordering process of "Seven Soups Tea Ordering Method" experienced the elegance of tea ordering in Song Dynasty, which was mainly reflected in the elegance of Tang Hua, tea sets and tea ordering techniques.

"Pure and harmonious" is the tea ceremony thought put forward by Song Huizong. In addition to the above contents, Qinghe also contains the spiritual connotations of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, such as the neutrality and humility of Confucianism, the nature of Taoism and the insight of Buddhism, which people can appreciate in the process of ordering tea.

Another example is the tea drinker's utensils, which are required to be simple, clean and tidy; The selected tea set must be clean, and the prepared tea leaves are all picked from nature in person, which has the taste of nature and so on. Secondly, the action and process of ordering tea require tea drinkers to have moral sentiments of respect, courtesy, restraint and calmness.

When ordering a drink, you can get a fresh and clean feeling through the natural cleaning characteristics of tea, so as to purify your body and mind and reach the realm of clear mind and harmony between man and nature. The balance of tea requires people who order tea and drink tea to know how to advance and retreat, behave appropriately, and not be arrogant and impetuous, so as to order a good bowl of tea, taste its fragrance and taste its taste.

Finally, Buddhists pursue perfection. Only when they understand the true meaning of tea can they order a bowl of good tea soup and truly appreciate the beauty of tea and achieve the perfect state of "taste, rhyme and virtue".

The milky white, bright white and other colors, changing flower shapes and long fragrance of the soup flowers in tea vividly show the beauty of the soup flowers to people. The beauty of brown mainly refers to the beauty of soup flowers, which requires milky white or bright white, and pure white is the best. A thick layer of white foam will rise on the surface of the tea soup after the injection. Foam is often called "soup flower". Scholars in Song Dynasty often compared it to milk spots, clouds and snow.

For example, in Ding Wei's Tea Classic in the Song Dynasty, the phrase "grinding fine fragrant dust and cooking new jade milk" compares pure white soup flowers to jade milk, clouds and snow. Melt the water in the teacup and light the white soup flower. The soup is tumbling in the cup, just like the snow waves in winter. White soup brought wonderful experience and spiritual enjoyment to Song people when ordering tea.

Another example is Ouyang Xiu's poem "Try to cook it with a well, not with people's fragrance", which describes the extraordinary taste of tea soup and brings a taste experience different from life. The sensory experience of fragrance often brings us spiritual beauty that is extraordinary, far away from noise and calm.

There is a unique aesthetic tea set in the tea ordering method in Song Dynasty. In the process of ordering tea, tea set is the main brewing equipment and the most important. In China, Fujian Jian 'an Kiln black glaze lamp is the best tea set. Among the black glazed cups, the rabbit's millie cup is most suitable for ordering tea.

Because the soup flower pursues white with tea, the black tea set is convenient for observing the shape of the soup flower and will form a strong black-and-white contrast effect. The texture of rabbit hair is also easy for tea drinkers to have obvious visual effects of "biting". When the white soup flower moves in the black tea cup, it has a feeling of smooth and slow movement, forming a vivid and interesting dynamic scene.

The color and heavy feeling of the rabbit's Millie lamp also contain a quaint and elegant life breath. Black is calm, the glaze is warm and crystal clear, and there are irregular and winding images like mountains and rivers under the glaze. The image is integrated with the rabbit's Millie lamp, giving people a simple, calm and elegant aesthetic feeling.

The seven-soup tea method is divided into seven times of water injection, and each time there are strict requirements, such as returning to the first line every week, fixed-point water injection, hanging water line and so on. Only by strictly ordering can the soup flowers meet the requirements of milky fog, overflowing and circling, and the real good tea can be ordered.

Starting from the first soup, the seven-soup tea-ordering method gives birth to the natural scene of "the stars scatter and the moon shines"; The second soup blows out the shape of tea soup with the gradual decline of "pearl"; After the third soup, the "cloud" rises slowly; After the fourth soup, coagulate the snow; Finally, "milk fog" appeared in the lamp.

When people in Song Dynasty ordered tea, they used natural aesthetic methods to explore the aesthetic connotation and spiritual connotation of tea ordering, and realized the beauty of natural images from the simple tea ordering activities, and integrated artistic beauty with natural beauty to form a state of interdependence between beauty and nature. The fun and interest in the whole process of ordering tea suddenly emerged through the embodiment of nature and objects, making people quickly capture and feel the beauty of tea just by reading words.

The tea preface in Song Dynasty is the crystallization of the wisdom of Song people, which has a strong promotion value to the study, inheritance and tea aesthetics construction of modern tea art. We can combine the methods and techniques of tea preface in Song Dynasty with the aesthetic direction of tea art to create a tea ceremony and form with the characteristics of contemporary China, and also promote the development of modern tea culture and tea aesthetics in China, thus forming a tea preface form with the characteristics of contemporary China tea ceremony.