Southern Record (南方録 Nanpōroku) is a book of secrets describing the teachings of the tea saint, Sen no Rikyū. After the death of Rikyu, the book was lost with its author, Nanbo Sokei, a Zen priest and Rikyu's leading disciple. About one hundred years later, in 1686, Tachibana Jitsuzan, the chief vassal of the Kuroda clan happened to find the book while heading to Edo with his lord. Tachibana set about the task of transcribing the work into five volumes, adding two further volumes when more documents came to light. He then made a fair copy of the seven volumes, and the book was named Southern Record for the first time. The collection was highly regarded among researchers as a direct record of Rikyu’s teachings and exerted a great influence on the process of the concept building of wabi-cha. The original collection is now owned by a Zen temple, Enkaku-ji, in Hakata-ku, Fukuoka, where a very limited number of pupils are initiated into the Nanpo school tea ceremony.
Contents |
There are two opinions regarding the origin of the book's name. The first holds that it derived from the opening passage of the work by the Chinese writer, Lu Yu, entitled Chá Ching (Cha-kyo in Japanese, The Classic of Tea or Tea Classic in English), in which he writes "Tea is a good tree in the south".[1] The alternative view asserts that it came from the name of the original author, Nanbo Sokei.[2] .
(Japanese) Enkaku-ji Hakata