Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite 1AMUSE. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism – Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the 2ADORE of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday 3EXIST. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the 4ROMANTIC of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the 5PERFECT, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses 6CONJOIN with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces 7CLEAN; it is economics, for it shows comfort in 8SIMPLE rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, in as much as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.