The Philosophy of Tea Colours

Or, What a Cup of Tea Has to Say About Being, Becoming, Time and Mortality

I have long maintained that the British are at their most philosophical when they appear not to be philosophical at all.

We do not, generally speaking, announce that we are about to contemplate the nature of existence. We put the kettle on.

This is one of the great advantages of tea.

A philosopher may spend three hundred pages explaining Being, Becoming, identity, time and mortality, whereas a British gentleman may contemplate precisely the same questions while watching the colour of his tea change in the cup.

The philosopher has written a treatise.

The British gentleman has made breakfast.

I am inclined to think the gentleman has the better method.

Tea, after all, is a remarkably philosophical substance. The leaf begins green. It may become white, yellow, oolong, red, black or dark with age and fermentation. It may be rolled, fired, oxidised, dried, stored and transformed. And yet, through all these changes, we continue to call it tea.

There, in the teapot, lies one of the oldest questions in philosophy:

When does a thing cease to be what it was?

The ancient Greeks would have understood the problem immediately. Heraclitus tells us that all things are in flux. The Ship of Theseus asks whether an object remains the same when its constituent parts are gradually replaced.

The tea leaf offers a rather more civilised version of the same problem.

It changes.

It becomes something else.

And yet it remains itself.

Perhaps this is not merely a property of tea.

Perhaps it is a property of us.

White: Being

White tea seems to me an excellent place to begin because it invites us to think about being before becoming.

It is restrained. It is delicate. It does not seem to be in a great hurry to become anything other than what it already is.

There is something almost theological about this.

Before we do anything, before we achieve anything, before society tells us what we ought to become, we simply are.

This is an idea easily forgotten in an age obsessed with self-improvement.

We are constantly encouraged to become richer, cleverer, fitter, more successful, more productive, more interesting and—heaven help us—more marketable.

White tea offers another possibility:

Perhaps existence does not always require improvement.

Perhaps sometimes one should simply be.

This is not laziness. Nor is it indifference. It is the recognition that a thing possesses value before it has been converted into a product.

A child does not have to become extraordinary in order to possess worth.

A tree does not need a business plan.

And a tea leaf need not apologise for being a tea leaf.

There is wisdom in that.

Green: Nature

Green tea takes us naturally to nature.

Its character remains comparatively close to the leaf from which it came, and therefore it

suggests a philosophical question that has occupied mankind since Aristotle:

What does it mean to fulfil one's nature?

Modern civilisation has become rather suspicious of the word nature. We seem to prefer manufacture.

We manufacture identities, careers, lifestyles, reputations and personal brands. We are

forever editing ourselves.

Tea is less pretentious.

A tea plant grows.

We harvest it.

We work with it.

We do not ask the tea plant to become an entirely different species before we will permit it into the teapot.

There is a lesson here.

To live well is not necessarily to become something entirely different from what we are. It may instead mean cultivating what is already there.

The oak does not envy the rose.

The rose does not aspire to become an oak.

And, thank God, neither has discovered social media.

Yellow: The Golden Mean

Yellow tea brings us to balance.

This is where I become rather fond of Aristotle.

Aristotle's famous doctrine of the Golden Mean proposes that virtue is frequently found between extremes—not in mediocrity, but in proportion.

Courage lies between cowardice and recklessness.

Generosity lies between stinginess and extravagance.

And, I would argue, a civilised tea table lies somewhere between asceticism and gluttony.

The yellow tea leaf seems to understand this instinctively.

It occupies a middle ground.

And middle grounds are terribly unfashionable.

Our age likes extremes.

Everything must be the greatest, the worst, the most beautiful, the most terrible, the most revolutionary, the most unprecedented thing ever to happen since breakfast.

But civilisation depends upon proportion.

There is a particular elegance in saying:

"That is quite sufficient."

Not everything needs to be more.

More is not automatically better.

Sometimes better is simply better.

Oolong - Blue: Becoming

Then we arrive at oolong, and philosophy becomes considerably more interesting.

Oolong exists somewhere along a spectrum of transformation. It is neither simply one thing nor another.

And here tea presents us with Heraclitus.

Everything changes.

We like to imagine that identity is fixed. We say, I am this sort of person.

But the person who said that ten years ago is not precisely the person saying it today.

The body has changed.

The opinions may have changed.

The friendships have changed.

The books read, places visited, griefs endured and joys experienced have all contributed their little alterations.

And yet we still say:

I am me.

This is the mystery.

Change does not necessarily destroy identity.

Indeed, perhaps identity is partly constituted by change.

An oolong leaf has not betrayed itself by becoming blue, by becoming oolong.

It has fulfilled another stage of its existence.

Perhaps we should extend ourselves the same courtesy.

Red: Time

What much of the Western world calls black tea is traditionally described in China as red tea, and I rather like this distinction.

Red tea reminds me of time.

Time does something to everything.

It does something to buildings.

It does something to books.

It does something to friendships.

It does something to faces.

And, if we are fortunate, it does something to our understanding.

We tend to regard ageing as a process of loss.

But this is only half the truth.

A book that has been read bears traces of its reader.

A church whose stones have endured centuries of prayer possesses a different character from one completed yesterday.

And a person who has suffered, loved, failed, forgiven and begun again may possess something that cannot be acquired by youth alone.

Time changes us.

The question is not whether it will.

The question is what we shall allow time to make of us.

That is a rather more useful question.

Black: Mortality

Black tea is where I would advise the cheerful reader to pause before accusing me of becoming morbid.

Mortality is not morbidity.

Mortality is simply the fact that things have endings.

The tea leaf undergoes a profound transformation. It is no longer green. Something has

happened to it.

And eventually the tea is brewed.

The leaf gives itself to the water.

There is something almost sacramental about this.

The tea cannot become a cup of tea while remaining forever untouched in its original state.

Transformation requires surrender.

That is true of many things.

A seed must cease to be a seed in order to become a plant.

A manuscript must leave the scriptorium to be read.

A young person must eventually leave childhood.

A traveller must leave home in order to arrive somewhere else.

And we, whether we like it or not, move towards an ending.

The wisdom is not to pretend otherwise.

The wisdom is to live properly because there is an ending.

This is not despair.

It is urgency.

Mortality gives weight to life.

A cup of tea matters precisely because it does not remain hot forever.

Pu-erh: Wisdom

And then there is aged tea.

Here I think we encounter one of the most important distinctions of all:

Age is not the same thing as wisdom.

One can become old without becoming wise.

One can accumulate years, opinions and grievances without acquiring a single ounce of

understanding.

Time does not automatically improve us.

It merely gives us opportunities.

Wisdom depends upon what we do with them.

An aged tea has undergone time, but its character depends upon what has happened

during that time.

So it is with us.

Have our years merely accumulated?

Or have they been transformed into something useful?

Have we learned to forgive?

Have we learned when to speak and when to remain silent?

Have we learned that being right is sometimes less important than being kind?

Have we learned that some arguments are not worth having?

Have we learned that the kettle should be filled before the pot is empty?

The last of these is, naturally, the most important.

The Cup as a Philosophical Instrument

Perhaps this is why I am suspicious whenever someone tells me that tea is merely a beverage.

Merely?

A cup of tea contains an entire philosophy of existence.

It begins with being.

It encounters nature.

It undergoes transformation.

It passes through time.

It reaches completion.

And then—if it has been treated properly—it is shared.

That final point matters.

For tea is not ultimately about the leaf.

It is about the table.

Tea becomes most itself when it becomes something given to another person.

This is why the solitary cup and the shared pot are not quite the same thing.

One warms the hands.

The other can warm a friendship.

And here, perhaps, tea becomes less philosophical and more Christian.

For the deepest wisdom is rarely possessed.

It is given.

The Six Questions

If I were forced—under considerable duress—to reduce this entire philosophy to six questions, I should probably write them on cards and leave them beside the teapot:

White: What am I?

Green: How should I live according to my nature?

Yellow: How much is enough?

Oolong: What may I become without ceasing to be myself?

Red: What has time made of me?

Black: To what must I eventually surrender?

And finally, for the aged teas:

Pu-erh: What have I learned?

One might spend a lifetime answering those questions.

Or one might spend an afternoon with a teapot.

The advantage of the teapot is that it does not demand that the answers be final.

It merely asks that the water be hot.

And perhaps that is the great philosophical lesson of tea:

We are all being transformed.

The leaf becomes the cup.

The child becomes the adult.

The traveller becomes the storyteller.

The reader becomes the writer.

The present becomes memory.

And, if Providence is kind, experience becomes wisdom.

So put the kettle on.

Choose your tea.

Watch the colour emerge.

And before you take the first sip, consider what the leaf has already taught you:

To exist is to change; to change is not necessarily to lose oneself; and to live wisely is to become something worth having become.

Now, if you will excuse me, I believe the kettle has boiled.

Philosophy can wait.

Tea cannot.