Finally Understanding Grace Through Lu Yu’s Ninth Chapter In a Lost Book
I always thought the inspirational/motivational talks on self compassion were exhausting. If to love myself is an inside job, implying a development in the natural order of my being, how can an outsider teach me MY self-compassion, self-respect, self-worth? If anything, continuously telling me to have these things pushes me further away from acquiring them.
And for the longest time, I thought of these qualities as something you are either born with and later develop on your own, are lucky to acquire right from childhood in a “perfect” family, or you live your entire life without. They are not particularly useful to your physical survival.
The whole industry was made more complex by the Biblical mentions of Grace to love, grace to enter heaven, grace to be good, etc. Also implying that it is impossible to attain these things by one’s might or another’s teachings. That always rubbed me the wrong way…Does God not have faith in us to redeem ourselves?! And it gets worse because accepting that grace needs a whole new grace.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them,” Ephesians 2:8–9.
Until Tuesday, November 22, I always maintained that these things were fancy traits you either had or didn’t get.
Ch’a Ching
Lu Yu was an orphan of Jinling county (now Tianmen City in Hubei Province, China) who was adopted by a Buddhist monk of the Dragon Cloud Monastery. He refused to wear the monastic robes and was assigned menial jobs by his stepfather. After some time, Lu Yu ran away and joined the circus as a clown.
At age 14, Lu Yu was discovered by the local governor Li Qiwu, who offered him the use of his library and the opportunity to study with a teacher. During the An Lushan and Shi Siming rebellion period, Lu Yu retired to Shaoqi (now Wuxing county, Zhejiang). He made friends with many literati, including a calligrapher called Yan Zhenqing and a poet, Huangfu Zheng.
Lu Yu was the first man to write a book about Tea. The book, “The Classic of Tea” (Ch’a Ching) is the first known monograph on tea in the world written between 760 CE and 762 CE during the Tang dynasty. This original manuscript is lost but the earliest editions available date to the Ming dynasty.
The book is not large, about 7000 Chinese characters in the literary language of the Tang dynasty, a condensed, refined and poetic style of Chinese. It is made of ten chapters.
For Lu Yu, tea symbolized the harmony and mysterious unity of the universe.
“He invested the Ch’a Ching with the concept that dominated the religious thought of his age, whether Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian: to see in the particular an expression of the universal.”
And after eight chapters talking about the origins of tea, the fifteen tools using in processing tea, the art of tea making, the utensils used, the boiling, drinking, history of tea, and listing the growing regions, Lu Yu talks “Simplifies” the whole book in chapter nine.
“Chapter Nine: Simplify (九之略)
This chapter lists procedures that may be omitted and under what circumstances, tools and methods that can be excluded in cultivation and processing under abnormal conditions, and tea utensils and brewing methods that can be simplified or improvised under various outdoor and unusual habitat environments.”
Now, it did not click right away. It was hours later in the night, while watching a TikTok of Leslie Jones recounting her start in Hollywood where she said,
“You have to stop being your own c*ck block. Stop being so hard on yourself, give yourself some grace.”
This is when it clicked why that ninth chapter in Ch’a Ching had affected me so much. I had been surprised because I had never read a book that made room for “other” conditions (no fault to any writer) until Ch’a Ching.
In that moment, I went to my notes app and typed in, “Grace makes room for perfection. The opposite of perfection is grace.”
I got a different perspective to the Biblical teachings on grace. It is not that a God doesn’t have faith in our abilities or sees us as a lost cause. That grace is a soft landing for whenever we fall from building our own Babel.
Imperfection is the natural way of life. It is life as seen through evolution and civilisation. Some of the life-saving things we have today were discovered by accident. Hell, tea was discovered by accident. So imperfection does not go in any direction, it is not bad, it just is.
Perfection, on the other hand, especially the pursuit of perfection, is a natural unnatural way of life. However, rather than be the opposite of perfection, grace is a gentle medium through which we return to our perceived imperfection and eventually to natural imperfection.
Here’s a bonus poem Huangfu Zheng wrote about Lu Yu
“A Thousand mountains will greet my departing friend,
When the spring teas blossom again.
With such breadth and wisdom,
Serenely picking tea —
Through morning mists
Or crimson evening clouds —
His solitary journey is my envy.
We rendezvous at a remote mountain temple,
Where we enjoy tea by a clear pebble fountain.
In that silent night,
Lit only by candlelight,
I struck a marble bell —
Its chime carrying me
A hidden man
Deep into thoughts of ages past.
— “The Day I Saw Lu Yu off to Pick Tea”