The Korean Way of Tea in History and Today

Brother Anthony
Name in Latin Alphabet:	Brother Anthony
Nationality:	Republic of Korea
Affiliation:	Sogang University

강연 소개

The history of tea in Korea goes back a very long way, but records are few. Buddhism came to Korea from China and in the Tang dynasty learned Korean monks frequently went across the sea to study there. They must have brought tea seeds back to Korea, and planted them in their temples, where “wild tea” can still now be found growing. This was the time when the Chinese scholar Lu Yu composed his “Tea Classic” which taught a sophisticated “Way of Tea.” Lu Yu’s tea was “caked tea” but in the later Song Dynasty Chinese monks began to drink whisked powdered tea and this was taken to Japan, where it became the standard Japanese “tea ceremony.” With the Mongolian invasions of China and Korea, followed by the abolition of Buddhist influence at the start of Korea’s Joseon dynasty, tea seems to vanish from Korea almost completely. The young scholar Yi Mok wrote the first surviving Korean text devoted to tea in the 1490s, but he only mentions Chinese tea.

Late in the 18th century, some Korean scholars began to explore the medicinal value of tea. When the scholar Jeong Yak-Yong was exiled in Gangjin and suffered digestive problems, he was delighted to find wild tea growing nearby. He prepared caked tea and shared that with monks who came to study the Chinese classics with him. One of them, Cho-ui, later wrote two “Korean tea classics,” the ChaSinJeon and the DongChaSong. He brought tea with him when he visited Seoul in 1830 and shared it with a number of high-class scholars, who were delighted; later, the great calligrapher Chusa benefitted from gifts of tea from Cho-ui while he was exiled in Jeju Island.

In the 20th century, the Ven. Hyodang developed a way of drying tea leaves to produce a Korean form of green leaf tea. This he shared with his many visitors and so stimulated a tea revival, which he sustained by his book about “Korea’s Way of Tea.” Today tea is grown and dried in various forms, the “Korean Way of Tea” is widely practiced both privately and in a variety of performance and ritual forms. Coffee is the main enemy.

강연 영상

The Korean Way of Tea in History and Today