Sen no Rikyū
Master of the tea ceremony.
Sen no Rikyū refined the tea ceremony according to the ideal of wabi and was tea master to Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, who forced him to commit suicide in 1591.
Sen no Rikyū was born in 1522 in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, into a merchant family. Sakai was a rich, self-governing trading city, and the tea ceremony was popular among its merchants. Rikyū studied tea with masters such as Takeno Jōō and developed his own approach early on.
He became tea master to the warlord Oda Nobunaga and, after Nobunaga's death in 1582, to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who unified Japan. Rikyū gained great influence at Hideyoshi's court. In 1587 he organised Hideyoshi's Grand Tea Ceremony at Kitano in Kyoto, open to all regardless of rank. Paradoxically, Hideyoshi loved splendour, and a teahouse made entirely of gold was created for him.
Rikyū steered the tea ceremony towards the ideal of wabi: simplicity, poverty, imperfection and stillness. He advocated very small teahouses with a low entrance that forced everyone, even samurai, to bow. The Taian teahouse in Kyoto is thought to have been shaped by him and is a National Treasure. He had the potter Chōjirō make hand-formed black and red tea bowls, which gave rise to raku ware. He also preferred simple, local objects to costly Chinese imports.
In 1591 Hideyoshi ordered Rikyū to commit ritual suicide. The reason is disputed. One explanation is that Rikyū had a statue of himself placed in the gate of the Daitoku-ji temple, so that Hideyoshi had to walk beneath him. Others point to political conflicts.
Rikyū's descendants founded the three Sen schools of tea, Omotesenke, Urasenke and Mushakōjisenke, which are still active. His ideas have shaped Japanese aesthetics far beyond the tea ceremony, in architecture, ceramics and design.