A great master of the tea ceremony, born in 1522 (Oei II).
His family name was Tanaka, but he took his grandfather’s name, Hoshi, as his family name. His first name was Yoshiro, later Muneyoshi, and he went by the name of Posenzai. His name Rikyu was given to him by Kokei Souchen of Daitokuji Temple. He also called the tea ceremony room in the residence of Rikyu Jyuraku “Fushin’an”. His distant ancestors were the Satomi clan of Awa province (Chiba prefecture). His grandfather Sen’ami was a comrade of Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. He took the family name Tokihaya from his father Yohei, a fish wholesaler in Sakai, Izuminokuni (Osaka Prefecture), where he amassed wealth and became a member of the barnyard class. Rikyu enjoyed tea from early on, and at the age of 16 he had already invited Hisamasa Matsuya to join him. In 1540, at the age of +9, Rikyu began to work for Takeno Shao? He shaved his head at the time and was given the name Soyei by his Zen master Sokan Shominei. Since then, he has exclusively followed the teachings of Shao Yi. He was also known to have attended tea ceremonies in Kyoto and Nara. According to the “Imai Munehisa Diary Excerpts” dated April 2, 1570 (Genki 1), Rikyu first held negotiations with the rising power, Oda Nobunaga, in Sakai, where he is seen to have “touched the famous tea utensils of our city with the old man Matsui Tomohisa to have Nobunaga see them, and to make thin tea balls with them in front of the courtesy of Muneyoshi”. After Nobunaga’s death at Honnoji Temple in June 1582, he became close to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and after the defeat of Akechi Mitsuhide, he became the tea master of Nobunaga. After the death of Akechi Mitsuhide, he built a two-tatami-mat tea room at Myokian in Yamazaki (Oyamazaki Town, Otokuni-gun, Kyoto Prefecture) on Hideyoshi’s order and established himself as Hideyoshi’s tea master, both in name and reality. During the tea ceremony, he was especially honored with the title of Rikyu, and served as the tea master to the Emperor Shojincho. In 1587, he participated in the management of the Kitano Grand Tea Ceremony on October 1, and served as the tea master with Hideyoshi, Munehisa, and Munenoh. On February 13, 1591, he was exiled to Sakai for an incident involving a wooden statue placed on the gate of Daitokuji Temple, and was exiled to his residence for 15 days. In his poem of resignation, he wrote, “I will leave the sword in my hand to the heavens now and then. Rikyu was involved in Hideyoshi’s internal affairs through the tea ceremony, and it is rumored that “Muneyoshi, the Prime Minister (Hidenaga), knows nothing about the internal affairs of the court” and “Muneyoshi would not have been able to say a single word to the Sekihaku-sama”. Rikyu’s disciples included Yabuuchi Shochi, Satomura Shoboe, Nomura Sokaku, Kuda Gyobu, Yamaoka Munenashi, Bandaiya Munayasu, Hirano Omachimichi, Yamagami Soji, Kinoshita Katsutoshi, Ueda Sokatsu, and Nanbo Sokei, and those who are known as the seven Rikyu disciples include Gamo Ujigata Sobe, Hosokawa Sansai, Takayama Ukon, Makimura Hyobu, Shibayama Komonotsu, and Furuta Oribe. His biological son was Doyasu (Shoan), and his adopted son was Shoan. Sotan was the son of Shoan.
Later, he succeeded to the tea ceremony of his father, and it flourished as the Senke school from generation to generation. Tanaka Sokei, who is considered to be an ancestor of the Raku family, is said to have been given the family name Tanaka by Rikyu, but this is not necessarily true. The Rikyu tea bowl by Chojiro Rikyu is also famous.
Rikyu’s Tea] It is universally agreed that Rikyu is the greatest master of the tea ceremony. Rikyu was also the founder of the Sakai school of tea ceremony. Rikyu was originally a tea master who used Chinese tea utensils as one of the great merchants of Sakai, but he was also a master of the tea ceremony at the time of Shoko Shuko’s death. He further deepened the spirit of Wabicha, and regarded Ierataka’s poem “Hana wo mitsukeranan hito ni yukima no yukima no kusa no haru wo shimemba ya” as the profound meaning of the tea ceremony, and he also regarded So-an tea as the ultimate expression of the Way, saying “If you do not know the true nature of the tea ceremony, you will never be able to take a bath and never be able to make a grass-oil tea” (Sokaku Nomura, in a letter addressed to him), He also reduced the size of the tea room from four and a half tatami mats to three and a half to one and a half tatami mats, and even Soji Yamagami said, “Muneyoshi began to make one and a half tatami mats in Kyoto, which was rare at the time, but useless to ordinary people. Thus, Rikyu expected the spiritual world of chanoyu to be more expansive by compressing and converging all things, which is why he created or adopted the following items: the Imayaki raku tea bowl, bamboo vase, ita-furnace, tsuribin mizusashi, nijiriguchi, under-ground window, 1 shaku 4 sun furnace, 4 shaku 3 sun doko, round table, four shelves, large and small, chabuku, chashyaku, itabidansu, chashyaku, itinerant chest of drawers, chashyaku, chabusubi, and chashu. The Rikyu school dominated the tea ceremony of the day, as described in the Bizenrin, “The tea ceremony of the day is based on the old ways of a sukiyoshi called Soyoshi and a few other tea masters, and is characterized by a few simple and simple handholds. The tea bowl is also used as a substitute for the tea utensils…. It is also known for the sentence, “It is said that this is done to keep in mind the world’s concerns, and to show that the tea ceremony should be universal, both in utensils and utensils, and to set one’s mind on the path of the tea ceremony. It was his disciple Furuta Oribe who attempted to “open up” Rikyu’s “convergence” to suit the times. However, both Oribe and later Enshu Kobori made it clear again and again that the basis of the tea ceremony was always Rikyu.
