Word: rikyu
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...incense jars. The amateur Koetsu sometimes worked with potters and sometimes commissioned pieces from them; his approval became a signature of authorship. His passion was tea bowls--the "active," intimately handled objects of a ceremony that, imported from China, had been turned by its first Japanese grandmaster, Sen No Rikyu, into a cultural rite linked to Zen Buddhism. The "way of tea" had become an essential part of the samurai-influenced code of upper Japanese behavior. It connoted roughness, naturalness and--at its origins, at least--lack of pretension. In it, aesthetics and morality were conjoined, under the sign...
Koetsu was the first Japanese to sign one of his own tea bowls--the famous "Fuji" bowl, now designated a national treasure by the Japanese and hence unable to be shown in the U.S.--but he never ran his own kiln. Like Rikyu before him, Koetsu worked with a family of potters whose name came to stand for a whole class of rough, low-fired pottery: raku ware. Unlike Rikyu, though, Koetsu got his hands dirty, shaping the clay, carving it with knife and spatula...
...incense jars. The amateur Koetsu sometimes worked with potters and sometimes commissioned pieces from them; his approval became a signature of authorship. His passion was tea bowls - the "active," intimately handled objects of a ceremony that, imported from China, had been turned by its first Japanese grandmaster, Sen No Rikyu, into a cultural rite linked to Zen Buddhism. The "way of tea" had become an essential part of the samurai-influenced code of upper Japanese behavior. It connoted roughness, naturalness and - at its origins, at least - lack of pretension. In it, aesthetics and morality were conjoined, under the sign...
...Koetsu was the first Japanese to sign one of his own tea bowls - the famous "Fuji" bowl, now designated a national treasure by the Japanese and hence unable to be shown in the U.S. - but he never ran his own kiln. Like Rikyu before him, Koetsu worked with a family of potters whose name came to stand for a whole class of rough, low-fired pottery: raku ware. Unlike Rikyu, though, Koetsu got his hands dirty, shaping the clay, carving it with knife and spatula...
...into wholly Japataken foreign forms and metabolized them into wholly Japanese practices. In time, tea came to define the difference between the Chinese and Japanese ideals of exalted beauty: the former based on symmetry and minute gradations of fixed etiquette, the latter on irregularity and "natural" grace. Sen No Rikyu (1521-91), greatest of the tea masters, established chanoyu as a kind of psychic enclave in which warlord, samurai, priest and scholar could shed the burdens of rank and power by refreshing themselves at the well of nature. A developed Japanese form of Rousseau's "natural man," living...