Buddhist Brews

“If you do not put your true mind into the coffee-making process you cannot call it coffee at all…” — From a Korean Buddhist brochure for a three-day course entitled “A Life of Practising [Buddhism] and Coffee”

There’s a long history connecting East Asian Buddhism to tea, both its cultivation and consumption. Buddhist monks have used tea as a meditation aid for centuries, and were responsible for its spread from China to Korea and Japan during the eighth and ninth centuries. The whisking method by which matcha is traditionally brewed was a Buddhist invention, and mountain monasteries have long grown and sold tea to supplement their income.

Its connection to Buddhism explains tea’s modern reputation as a drink of contemplation. It has also helped tea become “fetishised into such a prominent mnemonic symbol of the pure meditative life in East Asia”, as Uri Kaplan wrote in a 2017 paper in the journal Material Religion.

Despite this history and symbolism, Kaplan discovered that, for many Buddhist monks in Korea, coffee has replaced tea as both a meditative aid and an outreach tool to the general public.