A People from other countries probably feel it is foolish to pay for costly lessons on something trivial like leaning how to drink tea.

However, the Japanese art of tea ceremony is not simply something trivial like drinking tea. Sado (tea ceremony) has attained the level of an art. This is largely due to the spirit of the Japanese good at seeking perfection in all things no matter how trivial, as expressed in the word kyudo, meaning to thoroughly inves-tigate the way and to create a world with meaning and containing the spiritual.

The tea used in tea ceremony is not ordinary tea drunk everyday, but a special kind of tea called mattcha (powdered quality tea). Tea ceremony is an art which has been traditionally handed down through the ages of how to prepare mattcha. The art of sado not only shows how to prepare the tea, but also how to have the right frame of mind when savoring the tea.

Care must be taken to follow the right procedures in everything from: the method of preparing the tea, the type of utensils used, one's approach to preparing the tea, the kind of flowers to decorate the tea ceremony room with and the kind of scroll to hang in the room. Mastering these profound rules requires many hours of training and much money.