Tao, Zen & a cup of humanity

In 1906, Kakuzō Okakura published an extraordinary short book, The Book of Tea, which beautifully expressed the core ideas of Japanese syncretic thought, which he called Teaism. A century later its core ideas are as pertinent as ever yet it is framed in a tea ceremony tradition that is both peculiarly Japanese and more or less extinct.

So 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.”

In this talk, Baggini will explain what Coffeeism is and argue that it is a philosophy for everyday life, a religion of the here and now that requires no gods or anything supernatural. As he says in the book, “It invites us to reject the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. It suggests a spirituality which is focused on the immanent rather than the transcendent, the impermanent rather than the eternal, the material rather than the immaterial.”