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His particular focus was the tea ceremony, which Rikyū believed to hold a
superlative potential to promote wabi-sabi. He made a number of changes
to the rituals and aesthetics of the ceremony. He began by revolutionising
the space in which the tea ceremony was held. It had grown common for
wealthy people to build extremely elaborate teahouses in prominent public
places, where they served as venues for worldly gatherings and displays of
status. Rikyū now argued that the teahouse should be shrunk to a mere two
metres square, that it should be tucked away in secluded gardens and that
its door should be made deliberately a little too small, so that all who came
into it, even the mightiest, would have to bow and feel equal to others. The
idea was to create a barrier between the teahouse and the world outside.
The very path to the teahouse was to pass around trees and stones, to create
a meander that would help break ties with the ordinary realm.
Properly performed, a tea ceremony was meant to promote what Rikyū
termed “wa” or harmony, which would emerge as participants rediscovered
their connections to nature: in their garden hut, smelling of unvarnished
wood, moss and tea leaves, they would be able to feel the wind and hear
birds outside – and feel at one with the non-human sphere. Then might
come an emotion known as “kei” or ‘sympathy’, the fruit of sitting in a
confined space with others, and being able to converse with them free of
the pressures and artifice of the social world. A successful ceremony was
to leave its participants with a feeling of “jaku” or ‘tranquillity’, one of the
most central concepts in Rikyū’s gentle, calming philosophy.