A remarkable feature of drinking tea in Song Dynasty is that it pays more attention to "tea ceremony". Drinking tea is not only to quench thirst with taste, but also to show the meaning of simplicity, simplicity, tranquility, elegance, indifference, no desire and no struggle. The pursuit of elegance and rhyme in Song Dynasty established the specific spiritual connotation of tea. In this process, the Song Dynasty literati were the main contributors, especially Su Shi (Su Dongpo).
Su Shi (1037-11year), a native of Meishan (now meishan county, Sichuan), was an outstanding writer and calligrapher in the Northern Song Dynasty. Politically, Su Dongpo was frustrated all his life. At first, he followed Sima Guang against the political reform of Prime Minister Wang Anshi, and was demoted to "exile" and served as a local official in many places. After Sima Guang came to power, Wang Anshi's new law was abolished, and Su Shi proposed that it should not be abolished. He was hated by the "old party" and continued to be exiled to the ends of the earth.
Su Shi was frustrated all his life, but he loved tea all his life. When writing poetry, before going to bed, and when doing business at night, he always drinks tea. He is also keen on studying tea picking, tea making, tea making and tea ordering, and even studying tea sets, tea water and tea fire.
Understanding tea is not only to taste its taste, but to sublimate it to taste its rationality, which is Su Shi's outstanding place and his outstanding contribution to tea culture.
Tu Long, an Amin, recorded such a thing in "Examination of the Afterward":
Su Shi loves tea and is good at calligraphy. One day Sima Guang asked him: "The whiter the tea, the better the ink; The heavier the tea, the better, but the lighter the ink. The newer the tea, the better, and the older the ink-people pursue the opposite, but why do they like these two things at the same time? "
This is a difficult question to answer. Sima Guang's question is reasonable (he observed the sharp difference between them in detail), but it is also unreasonable (the difference between them has nothing to do with people's likes and dislikes). But Su Shi was not stumped by this intentional "spite". He just smiled and said:
"Good tea and wonderful ink have an intoxicating fragrance, which is a kind of' character' they have * * *; Both of them are very solid, which can be said to be their' moral integrity'. For example, a saint and a gentleman may have dark skin, white skin, beautiful and ugly, but their moral character and moral integrity are the same. "
In a short sentence, Sima Guang was deeply impressed.
In Su Shi's eyes, tea and ink (and calligraphy) have the same philosophical and moral connotation, and tea and calligraphy are, in the final analysis, a kind of human and moral cultivation. As far as tea is concerned, this is a realm pursued by the "tea ceremony".
In this regard, Tu Long once commented: "Tea is the best way to drink, and it can best shape people in Xiu De. There are white stones and clear springs, which are familiar with the law and sometimes abandoned or restored. You can be familiar with it, you can taste it deeply, you find it fascinating to compete with dewdrops, just enjoy it. It is a great sin to make a good cup of tea instead of drinking it, but to draw water from the spring to irrigate Artemisia! Others don't know their interests, and they are exhausted and can't tell the taste. Too vulgar! " Say it!