Why Tea is a Religion and Coffee Isn’t

The role of religion is to support tradition.  Religion can be broadly seen as a way of preserving tradition by referring to the prophets of the past and venerating people and places of worship with beautifully illustrated books which repeat the same mantras. The Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony, high tea, afternoon tea – all these are akin to a religious service – the worship of the brew and the state of nirvana achieved by its priests and acolytes. The simple fact is that most books about tea are about the origins, the history, the customs and the venerated high priests from China who had made profound philosophical discourses about drinking tea, but precious little about how to make tea in a cohesive scientific way.  They are a form of ancestor worship. It is interesting to note that the tea industry looks to the past for its future while the coffee industry has changed a great deal in the last hundred years. The tea industry creates shops which are redolent of the past with fancy tins containing hundreds of different teas while modern shop coffee shops brew coffee from espresso machines demonstrating high-tech and modern design featuring new brews.

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There is a bewildering amount of information about tea available from a myriad of sources which tell you very little of substance. Names of old companies and early tea dealers fill books, together with paintings of families drinking tea. Images of vast green fields of tea bushes have a calming effect. The illustrations in books are reminiscent of icons and paintings in churches and temples and they are there so that we can venerate the past. The pictures of afternoon tea tables with elegant ladies transport us into a serene world that most of us can only dream of.

The world of tea easily divides into the Eastern Orthodox Green Tea Religion and the Indian/Ceylon/Kenya Black Tea Religion. Just as in regular religions where there are cults connected with various saints, the origin of tea is allegedly based on an Indian myth that Bodhidharma  cut off his eyelids and, in falling to the ground, they formed the first tea plants. The Chinese venerate Lu Yu who lived in the eighth century and wrote the first bible of tea, The Tea Classic. There were many apostles appearing as tea masters in the Chinese Pantheon who all added variations to the theme.  A series of famous Zen priests and tea masters including Shuko and Joo, finally culminated in the acknowledged great master Sen no Rikyu in Japan.  There are cults associated with various green teas and the ways of making tea with cult objects such as Yixing teapots and brewing cups known in antiquity. Each has become an icon of veneration for tea acolytes.

Tweezers, measuring spoons and a shovel

Just as in most religions where many ideas have to be accepted on faith, there are very few definitions of what a good cup of tea is, but rather, more subtle promises of the delights that can be attained if you follow the rules. Religious devotion would bring you spiritual experiences and closer to Nirvana. Where there is spirituality, religion cannot be far away. These notions can be seen in the writings of all the priests who talk about drinking tea slowly in a contemplative mood rather than as a quick drink, the way most of the world drinks it.

There is a broader issue to consider – why has the tea experience been so different to the coffee experience? Coffee has none of these cult figures – virtually no venerated personages as with tea.  The name Khaldi keeps popping up in the coffee origin myth but he was a common goatherd, not a saint in any way. Other names appear regularly but not as leaders of coffee cults. The tea experience has also been very different in terms of design and form.  There are countless teapots which have the form of an animal or a person or a house but not one coffee pot like that that I can remember. Perhaps coffee pots are functional vessels while teapots are ritual vessels. It is as if the spiritual qualities of the teapot have been infused into the tea by osmosis.

The broad answer to the question might be that black tea was part of the British Empire – grown in India and Ceylon by British gentlemen who supplied British companies with a product that became synonymous with the British. A case can probably be made that the British Empire was a form of religion for the British and adherents of British descent in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. If penicillin had been discovered in the 1700s, tea would have been called ‘British penicillin’.

From its very beginnings in China health benefits were attributed to tea and it was used medicinally. When you talk about tea and the Chinese you must remember that the Chinese are very superstitious and live via a host of health rules which they have been brought up with from birth. I think there is an automatic response to any health problem by asking if there is a tea that will fix it. This is why there has been so much emphasis on tea as a healthy drink coming from Chinese and Japanese sources, and adapted by the West which does not believe in the underlying philosophy.

Germans are obsessed about their health so it is no wonder that homeopathy was started in Germany in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann who believed that coffee and caffeine were major health problems. This led to major scientific investigation of coffee and coffee brewing. Although tea contains caffeine it somehow escaped the opprobrium and tea brewing remains much the same today as it did  200 years ago. The use of scientific analysis meant that there was much less mystery about coffee and everything to do with that whereas it took decades before tea was properly scientifically analysed. Religion flourishes in the absence of knowledge and so tea and relive religious observance became very much a part of modern life for those who think that there is more in a cup of tea than the cup of tea.

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