Tea is tea

So, it turns out the dude at Teavana was right: all teas (e.g. black, white, green, oolong, etc) are all prepared (check out the cool chart) from the same plant (Camellia Sinensis). Naturally, this excludes Rooibus and herbal teas.  But this surprised me.

Speaking of tea, I've always found this story interesting about how tea came to be.  The Bodhidharma was meditating soon after arriving in China for 9 years.  At some point during this time, he dozed off for just a second.  He was so frustrated at having broken his concentration that he cut off his eyelids so that he'd never be distracted again by sleep.  Guan Yin (Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion) caused the eyelids to grow into tea plants, used by Buddhist practitioners to this day to prevent sleep from interrupting their meditations.  The Japanese character for tea leaf is the same as that for eyelid.

The Taste of Cha

I've resumed my habit of regular consumption of green tea. Every time I do, I think of the legend of how green tea came about:

Bodhidharma set about meditating for nine years facing a wall. After five years he was so sleepy that he could not keep his eyelids open and fell asleep. When he woke up he was so angry about this that he cut of his eyelids and threw them on the ground. The eyelids grew into the first green tea plants. And from henceforth, tea has ever been the companion of monks for mediation (and apparently for geeks and programming as well).

It is said that "the taste of tea (cha) and the taste of Zen (Chan) are the same". In Japanese, the characters for 'tea' and 'eyelids' are both 'cha'.

mmmmmm.....cha tastes good.