promise of enlightenment

(The tea Buddha)


One of my pet peeves is people ascribing to tea qualities that it doesn't have. If I were to believe every claim made by tea advocates/marketers, I'd blindly accept that this plant was able to cure most any disease as well as cure a few geopolitical disturbances. The problem with many of these claims of tea's powerful properties is that they're just not quantifiably provable.




These preposterous statements sell tea and (more importantly) magazines, but they're disingenuous and irritating. To be clear, I'm aware there've been scientific studies to support some of these miracle claims. Nevertheless, I still question the validity of many attempts to extoll the health benefits of drinking tea.

A Promise

But there is one thing I can without any reservation promise that tea will do for you. Drinking good tea will ultimately bring you true and sustained enlightenment.

I'm sure you saying to yourself, 'He can't prove that.'

Oh, do you really believe I can't?

I'm sitting here in an ocean of fully-evolved enlightenment-type thoughts, and have come to the simple and lazy conclusion that trying to explain them would only lessen my own personal enlightenment.

To get here today, I chose to brew some Pu-erh fannings, and it's doing the job quite nicely. I doubt that you drinking the exact same tea is going to bring you anything even resembling enlightenment, but it certainly couldn't hurt.