Ideally, the house for chanoyu is a small hut set apart from the main dwelling in its
 own garden.
 The hut is floored with tatami, or straw mats, enclosing a fire pit.
 The roof is usually thatched with rice straw, and the walls, as in all Japanese homes, are
 paper shoji, supported by uprights of wood with a natural finish.
 One side of the room is occupied by an alcove, or tokonoma, the position for a single hanging
 scroll of painting or calligraphy, together with a rock, a spray of flowers, or some other
 object of art.
 The atmosphere, though formal, is strangely relaxed, and the guests feel free to talk
 or watch in silence as they wish.
 The host takes his time to prepare a charcoal fire, and with a bamboo dipper pours water
 into a squat kettle of soft brown iron.
 In the same formal but completely unhurried manner, he brings in the other utensils—a
 plate with a few cakes, the tea-bowl and caddy, the whisk, and a larger bowl for leavings.
 During these preparations a casual conversation continues, and soon the water in the kettle
 begins to simmer and sigh, so that the guests fall silent to listen.
 After a while the host serves tea to the guests, one by one, from the same bowl, taking it
 from the caddy with a strip of bamboo bent into a spoon, pouring water from the kettle
 with the long-handled dipper, whipping it into a froth with the whisk, and laying the
 bowl before the first guest, with its most interesting side towards him.
 The bowls used for Chan-o-yu are normally dull-colored and rough-finished, often unglazed
 at the base, and on the sides the glaze has usually been allowed to run—an original
 fortunate mistake which has been seen to offer endless opportunities for the controlled accident.
 Specially favored are Korean rice bowls, of the cheapest quality, a peasant ware of
 crude texture from which the tea-masters have selected unintentional masterpieces of form.
 The tea-caddy is often of tarnished silver or infinitely deep black lacquer, though sometimes
 old pottery medicine jars are used, purely functional articles, which were again picked
 out by the masters for their unaffected beauty.
 A celebrated caddy once smashed to pieces was mended with gold cement, and became the
 much more treasured for the haphazard network of thin gold lines which then covered its
 surface.
 After the tea has been drunk, the guests may ask to inspect all the utensils which have
 been used, since every one of them has been made or chosen with the utmost care, and often
 brought out for the occasion because of some feature that would particularly appeal to
 one of the guests.
 The style of garden that goes with Zen and Chan-o-yu is not, of course, one of those
 ornate imitation landscapes with bronze cranes and miniature pagodas.
 The intention of the best Japanese gardens is not to make a realistic illusion of landscape,
 but simply to suggest the general atmosphere of mountain and water in a small space, so
 arranging the design of the garden that it seems to have been helped rather than governed
 by the hand of man.
 The Zen gardener has no mind to impose his own intention upon natural forms, but is careful
 rather to follow the intentionless intention of the forms themselves.
 The major art which contributes to such gardens is bonseki, which may well be called the growing
 of rocks.
 It requires difficult expeditions to the seashore, to mountains, and to rivers, in search of
 rock forms which wind and water have shaped into asymmetrical living contours.
 These are carted to the garden site and placed so as to look as if they had grown where they
 stand, so as to be related to the surrounding space or to the area of sand, in the same
 way as figure to background in Sung paintings.
 Because the rock must look as if it had always been in the same position, it must have the
 air of moss-covered antiquity, and, rather than try to plant moss on the rock, the rock
 is first set for some years in a place where the moss will grow by itself, and thereafter
 is moved to its final position.
 Every one of the arts which have been discussed involves a technical training which follows
 the same essential principles as training in Zen.
 The best account of this training thus far available in a Western language is Eugen Herigel's
 Zen in the Art of Archery, which is the author's story of his own experience under a master
 of the Japanese bow.


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