The Oneness of Zen and the Way of Tea in the Zen Tea Record (Zencharoku)

This article is aimed at the analysis of Jakuan Sōtaku’s Zen Tea Record from the perspective of the teachings of the Zen masters included within it. In my book entitled Estetyka zen (Aesthetics of Zen), in relation to the ideas of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), a philosopher who was also a Zen practitioner, I explained how in Zen art there must be conveyed certain aspects of reality grasped in the act of enlightenment. Nishida called this reality the “absolutely contradictory selfidentity” (zettaimujunteki jikodōitsu), meaning such a paradox unity of all that does not exclude the distinctiveness of singular elements. The aspects mentioned above are: surpassing the dualism of the subject and object of cognition (“one is all and all is one”, ichi soku issai, issai soku ichi), affirmation of the common perspective of perception of reality (“form is emptiness and emptiness is form”, shiki soku ze kū, kū soku ze shiki), internally contradictory unity of oppositions (like motion–motionlessness, sacred–profane), “eternal now” as paradox unity of past and future, state of “no-self ” (mushin) as the creative act and absolute freedom of the enlightened person (for example braking the rules and canons of artistic creation). In the article I want to show that Sōtaku in his treatise included most of those aspects.