Lu Yu Soul Man Part 1
Posted on Friday the 7th September by James Norwood Pratt
Once upon a time in China a man discovered a Spirit inhabiting a plant. The Spirit entered every one who imbibed the nectar of this miracle of vegetation the Spirit inhabited. If you were cold it would warm you, if you were hot it would cool you, if you were weary it would refresh you, if you were stressed it would relax you. It protected you against countless ills and ailments and provided end less hours of leisure, friendship, sociability, and conversation.
This vegetative Spirit gradually became the man’s Familiar Spirit and from then on they remained inseparable. Now this was a man with no other calling except to give utterance to what exists in realms no word has ever entered. He longed to express somehow the mysteries his Familiar Spirit revealed to him daily, but how could he hope to succeed—how convey goodness the mouth discovers, how boiling kettles sound like wind in the pines?
Aided by the Spirit’s patient inspiration, he found words or rather, since he was Chinese, characters—just over seven thousand—which concealed as much meaning as they revealed and thus perfectly expressed the gospel and mystery of tea. After perhaps 26 years in the writing, Lu Yu completed The Book of Tea about the Chinese Year 3458, or 760 AD.
Lu Yu, shown here as a dignified older man, perhaps perusing his Book of Tea, literally ran away to join the circus at the age of thirteen and had a successful career as a clown and playwright before turning to the study of tea