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.

Tea as a method of meditation practice is a tradition in the School of Chan (Zen in English and Japanese, but I will use Chan hereafter to designate the Chinese practice). The practice of making and drinking tea, as I have experienced it, 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 practising under the guidance of a Chinese monastic teacher of tea meditation with a group at a local Zen temple in Berkeley, California. It is an intensely personal practice – part of my project to find meaning and solace in everyday life after retirement. This PR issue on mundane performance raised many questions for me concerning the meaning of the practice, issues I have been mulling over but not bringing to full consciousness until now. What follows is a series of musings, really – me in dialogue with myself and my readers, concerning the mundanity and the art of this form of Chan through the primary frame for my understanding, that is, performance.

When I first perceived my tea practice as a performance, I felt uncomfortable because it seemed to confuse the spiritual with the secular. Although the activities were mundane in the sense of their humble simplicity and everydayness, the key point of the practice is mind-training for a way of life, expressing virtues of Buddhist compassion and wisdom, kindness and equanimity. These seemed wrapped up with the ‘skills’ of the tea master in performing the simple tasks as a virtuoso actor performs actions to create a powerful performance. The participants are actors and spectators, assisting at the event as one ‘assists’ at the theatre. ‘Surely this cannot be correct thinking!’ I told myself. I suppose I thought that my Buddhist colleagues would be put off by any associations I made to performance or theatre (the old anti-theatrical prejudice) while my professional colleagues would think I had gone soft on my Marxism and caved in to old-lady sentimentality.¹ For a long time, I did not talk to anybody about the performative aspects of tea practice, but they continued to present themselves to me. At other times it seemed benign enough to use the performance paradigm to understand the training needed to achieve a meaningful tea meditation and the sense of occasion such an event carries (an everyday, mundane occasion, but an occasion nonetheless). So, I decided to ‘go public’ and use this space as an opportunity to work out the relationship between performance theory and my ‘Chan Tea’ practice, addressing the tensions between theatricality and meditative presentness in the execution of the tea event.

As I am a neophyte practitioner compared to someone like Michelle Liu Carriger (2021), who has been engaging the Japanese form of tea practice for more than twenty years,² I will keep the aspects of my personal experience in the foreground, including citations to those who have most influenced my initial thinking about performance theory, plus some new scholars and artists who were drawn to my attention by the Call for Proposals (CfP). Perhaps a comment on vocabulary would be helpful. I use the terms ‘mundane’, ‘everyday’ and ‘quotidian’ synonymously below, hoping to evoke the ordinary simplicity and non-exceptionalness of daily life practices without having to use the deceptive binaries of ordinary/exceptional, or banal/wonderful, or worldly/supernatural – all of which would misstate the qualities of the experience of tea practice, which in some ways invokes all these terms. In fact, some of the references in the CfP that served as jumping-off points for my editors turned out to be less useful for me when I followed up on them because of this very problem: sociologist Wayne Brekhus, for example, casts the mundane as a binary form and has argued that power resides in many cases in the overlooked or unmarked rather than the highlighted. His thinking is closely related, though somewhat inverted, to Peggy Phelan’s emphasis on the unmarked in her canonical book of that name (1993). Brekhus writes:

The key cognitive perceptual element in social marking is that the most notable positive social value is not that which is explicitly highlighted and celebrated (the sacred), but rather that which is disattended, unarticulated, regarded as generic (the profane and mundane), and therefore normalized without direct acknowledgment. (Brekhus 2015: 26)

He argues the taken-for-granted generic unmarked term holds the power to exclude or discriminate against those who stand out as different; he has extended this analysis to racial and sexual discrimination and most recently to collective identity formation (Brekhus 2022). But this work, while stimulating, has too much emphasis on power relations and collectivity to be relevant to a singular spiritual practice that aims at transcending identity or at least ego. In short, it is a bit too sociological for my purposes!³ On the other hand, I was delighted to encounter the work of Marilyn Arsem, a performance artist who understands the nature of her work and aptly describes much about the nature of the practice I am trying to share as well:

Performance art is real

Performance art operates on a human scale.

It exists on the same plane as those who witness it.

The artist uses real materials and real actions.

The artist is no one other than her/himself.

There are no boundaries between art and life.

The time is only now.

The place is only here. (Arsem 2011, bold in the original)

Arsem writes to describe performance art, but it can also work well to describe Chan tea practice.

DESCRIPTION OF CHAN TEA PRACTICE

My practice began with a small group (four to six people), led by our teacher ‘Zenteaone’⁴ (we call her ‘Shifu’, meaning teacher), who arranged the tearoom, taught us to set up the table and utensils and then prepared and poured the tea. The practice was mostly silent although we severally read short excerpts of related material before the drinking began. After it was over, there was time for discussion. The sequence of actions is described in more detail in Table 1. The entire practice usually takes about an hour to complete (ninety minutes if followed by discussion). Regularly, the group set aside from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Thursday afternoons to engage in this group practice at the temple.

Table 1. Sequence of actions

In addition to group practice, our Shifu also encouraged us to engage in tea practice at home and gave us ‘starter kits’ of a tea pot, cups and other utensils, with excellent aged organic white tea from a mountain tea farm in Fuding province in China, where she had visited. Shifu stressed the tea wares were inexpensive simple things: we were to appreciate their utility more than their beauty, beauty in Chan being about simplicity and utility, not decoration (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Set-up for group practice at the Berkeley Buddhist Priory, 2023. Photographed and courtesy of Zenteaone

As the months passed, I became aware that the tea practices both at home and at the temple created experiences for me of deep relaxation and peace, tranquility and solace. I gradually cultivated the taste of the tea itself, its smell and texture, and noticed the differences that always exist between cups of tea (no two are ever completely alike). The practice also seemed to benefit my other meditation practices (sitting and walking) in terms of increased clarity and focus.

After we became familiar with the tea sessions, Shifu encouraged us to begin learning how to host tea for others, stressing close observation of and attention to detail in the ongoing tea sessions. Seeing an extreme economy of gesture and movement as well as an unselfconscious gracefulness in everything Shifu did during the practice, I began to focus on the seemingly well-rehearsed yet always for-the-first-time qualities of performance that underlay each iteration. Each ‘repetition with a difference’, each ‘showing of a doing’ connected this mundane practice to the highly skilled art of public performances. It was both perplexing and thrilling.

BUT IS IT PERFORMANCE?

Buddhism and performance are not, on the one hand, a new linkage. The modernist period saw playwrights such as Maeterlinck, Strindberg and Yates who wrote and imagined spiritual, sometimes explicitly Buddhist dramas (for example, Strindberg’s 1902 A Dream Play). In more recent times there are many actor training methods that use meditation or mindfulness training as part of their approach.⁵

Of course, there is also a long tradition of theatre training with spiritual and/ or mindfulness components in the West. Grotowski’s Holy Actor and the Open Theatre’s philosophy and exercises come most quickly to mind (Grotowski 1968; Chaikin 1972) but earlier Stanislavsky wanted to create ‘a spiritual order of actors’ and there is some evidence of Buddhist influences on his thinking.⁶

Our tea practice aligns well with defining performance features since the origins of tea drinking in the monasteries are similarly speculative and oblique. The drinking of tea in China, according to legend, dates to 2737 BCE when Shen Nung, the inventor of Chinese medicine and acupuncture, accidentally drank boiled water into which tea twigs and leaves had fallen. He soon explored the restorative and medicinal uses of tea.⁷ The first Patriarch of the Chan lineage in China, Bodhidharma, came to China from India in 520 CE. By that time other forms of Buddhism were already well established through merchants and monks who travelled the Silk Road. By 500 CE, there were 8,000 temples and 126,000 monks in China. Bodhidharma himself left behind very few written materials, so the slippages in tracing the development of Chan teaching are understandable.⁸ As for the connection to tea, the most famous teas in China came from mountains that also had important monasteries on them.

Not only is the origin of Chan Tea pretty much untraceable historically, but also every time it is practised it will be different in the way that performance in its conventional sense is always a repetition with a difference. From actors who testify to difference even when they perform the same material night after night in a long running show to those who cultivate difference in order to deliberately create something new, we know that live performance is especially volatile:

Performances are made from bits of restored behavior, but every performance is different from every other. First, fixed bits of behavior can be recombined in endless variations. Second, no event can exactly copy another event. Not only the behavior itself – nuances of mood, tone of voice, body language, and so on, but also the specific occasion and context make each instance unique. (Schechner 1985: 30)⁹

True of the tea practice event, but also in the case of tea itself: it will be different in taste, texture, colour and the experience of sipping due to human physical features, the atmosphere or weather, the amount of tea steeped in water that itself will be different, and the factor of time: how long it is steeped, how slowly it is poured, how much tea is in a swallow. Thus, not only is tea practice different from the early practice in Chan monasteries, it is also different from yesterday’s tea, even if it seems almost identical. My experience is that there is always something different even if I cannot pin down exactly what it is. Sometimes I might have steeped the leaves a short time longer than projected, or perhaps used a slightly larger quantity of tea or maybe the water is from a different source or if bottled, a different brand. However, even if I have tried to duplicate the last preparation painstakingly, it still seems different. I think the context, the company of others or lack of it, even the weather or the source of light in the room can subtly affect the experience.

Apropos of our issue theme on the mundane, Schechner writes about the everyday art of Allan Kaprow:

Paying attention to simple activities performed in the present moment is developing a Zen consciousness in relation to the daily, an honoring of the ordinary. Honoring the ordinary is noticing how ritual-like ordinary life is, how much daily life consists of repetition. (Schechner and Brady 2013: 29)

If we approach the tea practice with a spiritual ‘noticing’, there is the opportunity to develop so that our whole day can be used as a spiritual gate. Everything we do, everybody we meet is part of practice. This view combines the ritual aspects of tea with the mundane qualities of the humble, simple and non-extraordinary, considered as positive and valuable for the tea-drinker (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Solo set-up for Chan Tea, 2023. Photographed and courtesy of Zenteaone

Moving from the nature of the practice as restored behaviour to focus on the doing, performance is an action or series of actions, rehearsed or repeated, and shown to others or to oneself – the willing showing of doing. Insofar as tea drinking is deliberately constituted as a ‘practice’, it is definitely an action, and can be defined as to ‘carry out or perform (a particular activity, method, or custom) habitually or regularly’ (Cambridge Dictionary 2006). But here is where the tension between Chan Tea practice and performance becomes palpable: the showing of doing implies a self-consciousness in the performer ‘showing’ the doing, and this goes against everything Chan is trying to cultivate. To experience drinking tea in the present with one’s focus fully on every moment of the doing rather than on how one is ‘showing’ is the way to the spiritual experience of the peace, joy and wisdom that is realized in being present. Self-consciousness is actually what we are trying to transcend. There is another kind of tension arising here between the selfless consciousness of Chan (empty, transparent, consciousness of), and the self-consciousness of individual identities, ego, self-referentiality.

Yet is this so far from the goal of certain kinds of actor training? Acting requires a particular combination of presence and self-effacement. Robert Cohen, my colleague at University of California, Irvine, and an internationally respected acting teacher, reminds us that ‘Presence’ has always been an important and much discussed concept in performance theory, not least because it is difficult to say precisely what the quality actually is when we say an actor has presence:

Presence derives from the word ‘present’, and can be considered to mean something like ‘now-ness’, or ‘present-ness’. An actor trying to win a victory in a situation is experiencing his action at that moment, in the absolute present. Jean Louis Barrault says that, ‘The actor lives uniquely in the present; he is continually jumping from one present to the next … Characters … are continually in action and reaction. They reason, they plead, they argue, they fight with or against others, even with or against themselves. They dispute, answer back, dissimulate, deceive others or themselves with greater or less bad faith; but they never stop.’ Being in the present – having ‘now-ness’ or ‘present-ness’ – being engaged in the experience of the situation and the feedback of the situation at the moment you are performing the situation – this is the precondition for presence. (Cohen 2013: 220)

Learning to be in the present when acting rather than thinking about the next scene, or focusing on the audience or the critics in that audience, or being self-conscious or trying too hard – these are some of the mundane alternatives to being present/having presence. Cohen’s training takes presence literally in relation to theatrical performance. For performance theorists, presence has also been a highly complex concept, and in the 1990s, when performance students and postmodern style were developing their theoretical terrain, there was a protracted discussion about presence in our field in which the metaphysics of presence was replaced with absence or perhaps more precisely dissolved, resulting in theories such as Peggy Phelan’s (1993) ‘unmarked’ ontology, Philip Auslander’s (1992) disavowal of presence in light of mediatized culture or Elin Diamond’s (1996) insistence that performance is ‘always doing and a thing done’, thereby unmaking mimesis. In visual culture, similar discussions occurred and were still pertinent in 2010 when Maria Abromović performed a retrospective of her work in NYC that stimulated new work on presence and tied it to emerging work in re-enactments. Amelia Jones, reflecting on Abromovic’s claims to be present in The Artist is Present, writes:

‘Presence’ as commonly understood is a state that entails the unmediated co-extensivity in time and place of what I perceive and myself; it promises a transparency to an observer of what ‘is’ at the very moment at which it takes place. But the event, the performance, by combining materiality and durationality (its enacting of the body as always already escaping into the past) points to the fact that there is no ‘presence’ as such. I felt this paradox strongly as a visitor at The Artist is Present. This paradox haunts performance studies and other discourses (such as art history) seeking to find ways to historicize and theorize – to exhibit and sell – live performance art. (Jones 2011: 18) (fig. 3)

Figure 3. At home, cat Karl does not practise but he likes to be present, 2022. Photographed and courtesy of Janelle Reinelt

What has resulted from this scholarship is a new understanding of presence as present-ness, or at least the attempt at demystifying it, making actor training and performance theory more compatible than formerly was the case. Of course many other theorists have changed our thinking about these matters: philosophers such as Derrida (1978) and Deleuze (1994) have provided the primary conceptual ideas for evolving notions of difference, repetition and presence along with Judith Butler (1990, 1993) who has been a major influence on performance thinking. However, as useful as this scholarship is to contextualize the developments in our field, it ends up rather tangential to my subject here. What is more central is performance scholarship that grapples with the relational and intercultural aspects of mundane performance, which connects Michelle Liu Carriger’s work on Japanese tea practice mentioned above to my Chan practice.

THERE’S NO AVOIDING THE SOCIAL

What I mean by this connection is that while ideally Chan tea practice as I have known it can be seen as an amateur, local and unmarked performance (in the sense that Chan emphasizes letting go of ego and self), it is nevertheless characterized by marked features that are central to performance analysis. In Carriger’s recent work, she struggles with the marking of Japaneseness: aware of the national/cultural identity associated with the tea ceremony and her own contrasting whiteness, she parses the elements of cultural appropriation and ‘deep tourism’ involved in her extensive immersive experiences studying tea in Japan and elsewhere, citing the ‘vast unnaturalness that lies beneath identity formation and cultural queasiness that Tea-as-cultural/national-practice particularly evokes’ (2021). She argues for recognizing that the authentic or touristic valences of cultural practices are ‘differences of degree, not type’:

Such an understanding of culture as literally cultured – nurtured into existence with time and effort and appropriate catalysts – is certainly not unheard of, but I think perhaps obscured in the rush to preserve the purity of certain arts and activities from debauched imitation. Tea transmission makes the non-differentiation of the authentic and touristic clearer, as its existence is entirely dependent on performativity – that is, it must be constituted in endlessly reiterated, which is to say, imitated, doings in order to exist at add. (Carriger 2021)

Carriger urges an awareness of the ethico-political equation of a practice that inevitably carries identity markers while refusing cultural essentialism in favour of a focus on the culturing process.

For the Chinese version of Chan practice, with regard to tea, there is less a sense of global commodification of a national signifier and perhaps more a sense of recovery and transmission of an ancient spiritual practice native to China. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it only seems less a question of nation to me because of all the other contextual markings that underlie the here and now of my practice.¹⁰ The point for me, and what I learned because of Carriger’s work, is that being present still carries a past, and repetition has many possible reasons for being different every time. In the quest for dissolution of the self, one cannot not overlook the contributing social phenomena.

THE QUESTION OF RELATIONALITY

Certainly the emphasis in Chan tea practice on presentness and doing the thing done (preparing and drinking the tea) can be recognized as compatible with actorly performance. However, the emphasis on showing the doing to others in performance raises further problems for my Chan practice. The emphasis in tea practice is not on the ensemble per se. Each person conducts their own tea practice and is not ostensibly concerned with the others who are there. The ability to practice at home alone sits uncomfortably with the notion of performance that is almost always for others, either present or implied (as in virtual realms). How important is this feature? For the actor, it is very important, as the relationship between the performer and the spectator is what constitutes the performance. For the tea practitioner, the presence of others is optional. The relationship is rather about co-presence: if others are present, then the tea experience will be different, but the spiritual experience will not depend on any overt interaction or communal bond – except perhaps with the tea itself. As Aaron Fisher¹¹ writes, ‘By being in the present, fully committed to the moment and the tea, we may lose ourselves, acting without ego or attachment – we are the tea, in other words. There is no “Self”, no you or I, just tea’ (2010: 130–1). If this is the ideal, I would add that on the other hand there is a sense in which a group session does involve showing a doing in the sense that one is paying attention to an economy of motion, an attempt to instil in oneself a quiet and gentle mood so that it might contribute to the overall quietude, peace and clarity of the event (for both oneself and any others present). So perhaps an implied spectator is always there? And as in theatre where the character of each audience matters for the performance experience, in group tea practice the occasion will be what it is in relation to the energy or presence brought into the space by each person and their different valences, even though we are a rather homogeneous, limited, even humdrum group – by general standards we are the epitome of mundanity! Yet the event always has the potential to be special and sacred at the same time.

The tea host, the one who pours the tea for others, has the most actorly role in the practice, and can most easily be seen as an actor. The quality of the tea and the experience of its recipients is definitely affected by the one who offers the tea. Fisher explains:

There is a very real sense in which the mind of the one brewing tea has a tremendous impact on the quality of the flavor, aroma, and Qi of the tea liquor: a sense of sharing from the one pouring to the one drinking … And the more sensitive you become, the easier it is to recognize just where a person’s mind is from the taste of their tea alone. If one is rushed, the tea tastes so. If a businessman is trying to sell his teas [or an acting teacher his methods] and has money on his mind, the liquor will taste of the proverbial coin. Only you are responsible for the mind and mood of those you prepare tea for, as they are – in part at least – drinking the vibrations of your mind. And if you’re at peace, you make peaceful tea. Couldn’t the same be said of any art? (Fisher 2010: 110)

This observation chimes with my experience of slowly coming to realize how much Shifu was creating the high quality of experience of tea for me in my first encounters. Indeed, like a gifted master or superb actor there is a feeling of trust in the authenticity of the ‘actor’ that leads to a different kind of experience.¹² It was important to Shifu not to call our practice a tea ‘ceremony’ – not because it is not, I think, but because ‘ceremony’ calls up the more elevated, theatrical forms of tea known in Japanese Tea Gardens or special formal occasions. The tea practice she wanted to share with us was truly mundane: a daily practice of everyday life, emphasizing the spiritual essence of Chan – simplicity, quietude, purity and stillness. Aesthetic qualities of beauty, grace and harmony arise from the care and skill, mind and heart of those who practice. The ego recedes, but the doing is accomplished.

There is yet another way in which tea practice challenges the borderlines between everyday activities and ritual or spiritual practice. In the call for proposals for this issue, the editors noted the well-known distinction between a doing that is performance and a doing seen as performance, based on the assumption that ‘context distinguishes ritual, entertainment, and everyday life from each other (Schechner and Brady: 38–40).’ While I might exempt entertainment, ritual and everyday life in the case of tea practice are not distinguishable by context because the one is a requirement for the other: the tea must be brewed, poured, tasted, swallowed humbly, in the very spirit of mundanity in order for it to serve as a ritual or spiritual practice that leads towards wisdom and peace.

CONCLUSION

As a result of these musings, I think that such tea practices trouble clear distinctions between performance and Chan meditation through tea. I no longer feel any discomfort about contemplating my Shifu as a skilled performer as long as I acknowledge the deeply spiritual and ego-less path of her actions. Similarly, as she said herself, great actors can become Chan Masters. Tea Practice might even be seen as an important part of the training for both callings. Both the solo and group performances of tea practice that I have attended have cultivated simplicity, harmony and clarity in a mundane modality: sometimes rising to the level of aesthetics, sometimes attaining spiritual wisdom, but sometimes being only an attempt, a quotidian experience, of value for its repetition and practice of present-ness but less accomplished than other occasions. That, too, is Chan Tea and it is well worth the practice. Mundanity is all.

Chan is well-known for its koans: a riddle, story or enquiry that is solved not by logic or intellectual reasoning, but by insight. Amusing, wise or mystifying, they are often a wonderful sum-up of a particular insight or teaching. Zhaozhou was a Chan Master during the Tang Dynasty famous for his koans; especially appropriate is this one:

Go Drink Tea

Master Zhaozhou asked a newly arrived monk, ‘Have you been here before?’

The monk answered, ‘Yes, I have’.

Master Zhaozhou: ‘Go drink tea’.

He then asked another monk the same. The monk replied, ‘No, I haven’t been here’.

Master Zhaozhou: ‘Go drink tea’.

The head resident of monks asked the Master, ‘To the one who had been here, you say “drink tea”, and to the one who hadn’t been here, you also say “drink tea”. Why?’

Master called the head monk loudly. Upon his responding, Master Zhaozhou said,

‘Go drink tea’. (Zenteaone 2020)

Notes

1 ‘Old Lady’ is not meant as a pejorative: I use the term fondly, recognizing that at 76 I am indeed an old lady, and that if spoken with a light touch it can be both a reminder and a term of endearment. I refer to myself quite often in these terms, and to others who will know it is not meant as a slur.

2 Although Carriger’s work may seem to be quite different from mine in its focus, I found important overlapping concerns about the role of identity in shaping our scholarly conclusions. I discuss this in more detail below.

3 Brian Singleton recently drew my attention to an area of tourism studies that would see Brekhus’s work in another light: while much mass tourism poses as ‘extraordinary’, Tim Edensor argues instead ‘that it is more typically associated with habitual routine, cultural conventions and normative performances which circumscribe what should be gazed upon and visited, and modes of touristic comportment and recording’ (2007: 199). Notice the binary between mundane and extraordinary is firmly in place here, too.

4 ‘Zenteaone’ is the name Shifu uses in publications.

5 I am grateful to Chris Megson who drew my attention to the work of Middleton and Plá (2018).

6 Franc Chamberlain dates Stanislavsky’s interest in Buddhism to 1906 (Chamberlain et al. 2014).

7 There are many versions or legends concerning Shen Nong and he was surely an experimenter with herbs, teas and many other ‘traditional’ remedies. It is said that he tested everything on himself and even that he had a glass stomach. For more on his discoveries see Shen Nong Ben Cau Jing (1998).

8 There are various literatures on the history of tea, Buddhism, and the Chan School. Because of the oral tradition of Chan, multiple languages, general opaqueness of the facts and so forth, they differ in some respects among most historians. One of the simple and clear discussions of how Buddhism developed in China, merging Taoist and Confucian elements, as well as the spread of teadrinking and the developing Chan School after Bodhidharma’s time can be found in Wilson (2012). For more detail, see Yu-shiu Ku (2018 [2016]).

9 Richard Schechner is the theorist who systematized performance studies with his particular articulations during my formative years. While performance scholars have modified and expanded his definitions of performance and performance studies, his words historicize my generational connections to this theory. (I am after all, an ‘old lady’.) I have cited some other contemporaries of mine such as Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander and Elin Diamond; I have also been far from accepting all of Schechner’s formulations, including my gentle accusation of imperialism (Reinelt 2007). I have, however, seen fit to quote him on key points for my argument: on restored behaviour, on repetition with a difference, on everydayness of Kaprow’s performances and on the singularity of performance events. Underlying all these is the broadspectrum approach to performance he advocates.

10 In other words we share a specific environment (affluent bay area location, near the University of California, Berkeley, with its academic and activist history), and we tea practitioners represent a similar demographic of races, genders and class. This will inevitably affect the character of our solitary and group practice, even as we seek to release our egos and identities. This deserves a full discussion of how these markers shape our tea experiences but is beyond the scope of this essay.

11 In this essay I have quoted extensively from Aaron Fisher because his book The Way of Tea: Reflections on a life with tea was recommended to our tea group as the main reading reference by Shifu with the comment: ‘The author wrote what I would like you to know – it contains the essential or almost the whole holdings of our tea practice. The author is himself a spiritual practitioner, not just someone who writes about tea.’ In addition to Fisher, there are a number of good volumes on tea and tea practice or ceremonies. See Wilson (2012), and for a Japanese commentary Okakura (1964).

12 When I shared this discussion of presence and its cultivation in actor training with Shifu, she smiled and said, ‘A true Zen master may not have anything to do with “acting”, but a great actor can be a Zen master. In both, the heart is “Presence.”’