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Jason Cohen

Jason Cohen

Master of Ceremonies here and on Tea Technique. Previously, Founder and Executive Director of the Tea Institute at Penn State (defunct).

http://teatechnique.org/

Satire of Gongfu Cha

The art of satire is in rendering the serious absurd. Good satire is the opposite of slapstick; the humor isn’t in the performance of something inherently funny – it’s in the serious performance taken to its logical extreme, such that the fans of the object of satire themselves find

Phenomenology and the Analytical Mind

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. – Monk Linji Yixuan (f. 851 CE) Phenomenology is the study of experience. The phenominist approach is the practice of creating and controlling experiences. Throughout our lives, individuals attempt to create a variety of experiences: birthday parties, dinner parties, dates, and

A Poem to Commemorate the Completion of Book 1 – On Theory, Meta Theory, and Culture

The Editorial team and I have just published the final installment of our first book in the series An Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony. Please do check it out on www.teatechnique.org! To commemorate the publication of the first book, I’ve written a

A poem on how I study

I’ve been asked about my method for studying Chinese tea and culture many times, and unfortunately my answer has and always will be “time and patience”. While I don’t have any revelatory insights on faster methods of study, I do have a new poem that I hope inspires

A Poem to Commiserate the Long Recovery from Knee Surgery

After 10 years of waiting, the partial tear in my ACL (high-school fencing injury) finally snapped (rock climbing injury). Since the surgery a few weeks ago, I’ve been in a full leg brace and have very limited mobility, which will last for another 5 – 6 weeks, when I

First AMA Thank you and Recording

Thank you to all the listeners and subscribers who attended our first AMA last week! You can listen to the recording of the event here: It was great to have so many of you join us, and we look forward to hosting the next one in a month or two.

This Week on Tea Technique (7/8/2021)

This weeks chapter published on Tea Technique marks the half-way point in the first book of the series An Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony – Book 1: On Theory, Meta-Theory, and Culture. The editorial team considered this chapter, A Bourdieu’dian Analysis for the

Extreme ChaXi: Rocky Mountain Mountaineering

Not content to leave our adventures to the hot and dry desert, we exchanged our crashpads and climbing chalk for crampons and ice axes. Starting the team off with a mid-level alpine route, we hit the trailhead around 6am. Our objective – to summit the ridge-line above Emerald Lake

Extreme ChaXi: Moab Desert

We marched into the hot and dry desert surrounding Moab, Utah. A dry wind blew dust around us. Lizards fled from our path. The boulders were hard, smooth sandstone marked with pockets and smooth ledges, leading to high top outs. We found a shady spot, protected from the sun, under

Google Maps Strikes Again

Or: Oops I did it again…. A few years ago I wrote about riding my motorcycle into the jungle of a small Javanese Sultanate by blindly following Google Maps… In theory, that experience should have prepared me for a future of skepticism and hesitancy whenever Google Maps recommends routes, or