Coffee, Philosophy and the Good Life

In 1906, Kakuzō Okakura published an extraordinary short book, The Book of Tea, which beautifully expressed the core ideas of the Japanese blend of Zen and Daoist thought. A century later, Julian Baggini has updated the book for the 21st century, with coffee at its centre, showing “Coffee’s capacity to awaken within us a proper sense of the world and our place in it.” As Okakura said, it is an example of the importance of finding “beauty among the sordid facts of everyday life” in which we are reconciled to the transient, impermanent nature of being.