《茶之书》中英文对照I仁者之饮(徐恒迦译)选编.doc

The Book of Tea 茶之书 by Kakuzo Okakura 冈仓天心（日） I. The Cup of Humanity 仁者之饮 Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism--Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. 茶，始于药，而后为饮。在八世纪的中国，茶就作为一桩雅事而进入一个诗意王国。而日本则在十五世纪将其尊崇为一种美的宗教——茶道。茶道，是在日常染污之间，因由对美的倾慕而建立起来的心灵仪式。茶道教人纯净和谐，理解互爱的奥义，并从社会秩序中开发出浪漫情怀。它是一种温柔的尝试，试图在我们所知的生命无穷尽的不可能中，来成就那些微小的可能，因而本质上是对不完美的崇拜。 　 The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste. 茶之哲学，并非像我们通常对此理解的那般仅是一种唯美的趣味，它同时融合伦理与宗教，表达了我们对于人类与自然的全部见解。茶是保健学，因它强调洁净；茶是经济学，因它显示了朴素中的舒适而非繁复昂贵的乐趣；茶是精神的几何学，因它定义了我们对于宇宙自然的分寸感。它使它的信仰者成为精神上的贵族，故而代表了东方民主的精髓。 The long isolation of Japan from the rest of the world, so conducive to introspection, has been highly favourable to the development of Teaism. Our home and habits, costume and cuisine, porcelain, lacquer, painting-- our very literature--all have been subject to its influence. No student of Japanese culture could ever ignore its presence. It has permeated the elegance of noble boudoirs, and entered the abode of the humble. Our peasants have learned to arrange flowers, our meanest labourer to