First,
how did tea come to be?
Its origin as a beverage is lost in antiquity, but
Chinese legend provides an answer, saying that tea
was discovered accidentally about 3000 B.C. by Shen
Nong, the Divine Cultivator. Also credited with inventing
agriculture and herbal medicine, he is honored as
one of China's three mythical early sovereigns. One
day leaves of the tea plant fell into water he was
boiling outdoors. He liked the drink, found it to
have medicinal value, and tea was born.
Another legend says that as an experimental herbalist
he sampled various kinds of plants to determine their
individual effects. This boldness sometimes resulted
in poisoning, and he used tea as an antidote.
A legend of a much later date, from Japan, concerns
Bodhidharma, or Dharuma, the Indian monk who brought
Zen Buddhism to China in A.D. 520. The emperor gave
him a cave-temple outside the capital, Nanjing, where
he proceeded to demonstrate the benefits of meditation,
a strong point of Zen (the name Zen, or chan in Chinese,
comes from the Sanskrit word for meditation). Bodhidharma
meditated for nine years while staring at a wall.
Once he fell asleep. To make sure that his eyelids
did not droop again, he cut them off and cast them
away. Where they fell a plant grew, the tea plant,
from whose leaves a drink can be prepared which drives
away sleep. The aid of tea during long hours of meditation
may indeed explain how monks became instrumental in
spreading its fame. Later Zen monks took to honoring
their founder by sipping tea before a statue of him.
At any rate, the leaves were first plucked from the
wild plant, which was later cultivated. This latter
step may have begun in China's southwestern province
of Sichuan and then moved down the valley of the Yangtze
River.
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