Composing a Tea Gathering I — Yin and Yang

At a recent tea gathering, I paired a hanging scroll for the Chōyō Festival by Konoe Iehiro (1667–1736), a court noble and calligrapher, with Yasumoto Kajiwara’s Kuro-gourai large sake-bottle flower vase.

Chōyō, the Double Ninth Festival, falls on the ninth day of the ninth month: nine multiplied by nine, a moment when yang is thought to reach its fullest expression. It is therefore considered an auspicious day. At the same time, however, the philosophy of yin and yang holds that when yang reaches its extreme, it turns into yin. Chōyō was thus not simply a day of celebration, but also a seasonal threshold associated with warding off misfortune.
For this reason, customs developed such as transferring the dew gathered on chrysanthemum-covered cotton onto the body for protection, or drinking chrysanthemum sake.

The Black Goryeo sake bottle can itself be imagined as a vessel for such chrysanthemum sake. It also bears the characters dokushaku (独酌, “drinking alone”), rendered in a scraped-back decorative technique. I therefore placed it in contrast with the scroll: against the strongly “yang” quality of a Double Ninth inscription by a member of one of the Five Regent Houses, the elements of blackness and solitary drinking seemed to introduce a balancing note of yin.

I felt that a basket flower container would not quite balance the force of that yang element, so instead I chose this more subdued, wabi-inflected sake-bottle vase.

That said, I did not arrive at the arrangement through some rigorous intellectual exercise in yin and yang. Quite simply, unless the overall balance is drawn somewhat toward the everyday and the wabi side of things, I do not feel entirely at ease. So that is what I did.

If one were to use this Black Goryeo sake-bottle vase more straightforwardly, it would also seem especially suited to the season of nagori, or to gatherings in November and December.

Drinking alone on a long autumn night brings to mind these lines by Li Bai:

Among the flowers, a jug of wine;
I drink alone, with no companion near.
I raise my cup and invite the bright moon;
Facing my shadow, we become three.

They seem perfectly suited to the mood. In autumn and winter especially, I sometimes think it is good to compose an entire gathering from things that feel cold, dry, and withered. Precisely within such a setting, flowers, sweets, and tea may stand out all the more clearly as things that remain close to life.

It would also be interesting to compose a gathering entirely around objects connected with Goryeo and Korean ceramic traditions. In such a setting, this flower vase could provide an effective accent.

Part of the pleasure of this vase is the way it sets the imagination in motion.