What is tea? The sound of wind in the pines, painted in ink chanoyu to wa ikanaru koto o iu yaran sumie ni kakishi matsukaze no koe 茶の湯とはいかなることをいふやらむ 墨繪にかきし松風の聲 joshinsai 如心斎

Word for word: 茶の湯とは, as for tea; いかなることを, what kind of thing; いふやらむ, do we call it, I wonder; 墨繪にかきし, painted in ink; 松風の聲, the sound of the pine wind.

In デジタル大辞泉, 松風 is the wind blowing in the pines, and in tea the sound of the water coming to the boil in the kettle. Seven articles for a tea gathering, dated 1584 in a later copy, tell the guests to come back in when the boiling water reaches the pine wind and the bell sounds.

The last line answers with a sound inside a painting. A book of 1880 explains the line as the sound no painter can paint, beyond words. Read in the tea room, the line also names the sound the guest sits listening for.

Joshinsai (1705–1751) was the seventh head of the Omotesenke house of tea. The poem stands in a note added at the end of one volume of a book of his tea talk. The note is signed 宗雪 (Sōsetsu), the tea name Kawakami Fuhaku took from Joshinsai.

In Fuhaku's own notes, as later books quote them, a man named Fuyuki Kiheiji asked Joshinsai for something on tea. Joshinsai wrote the poem out and gave it to him.

In 1784, under a later name, Fuhaku wrote out a short text on tea that gives the poem as Joshinsai's and ends what is not tea is tea. The Zen painter Sengai wrote out the same text, signing it as written on another's behalf.

The heart poem asks what the heart is, and the tea poem puts tea where the heart was. In 1967 the scholar Furuta Shōkin named it as the older poem the tea poem takes its words from.

The last word here is 聲, koe, voice or sound, as a print of 1905 gives it. Sengai's sheet ends with 音, oto, sound, as do Fuhaku's notes in the books that quote them.

From 1973 the poem has also been given to the tea master Sen Sōtan, Rikyū's grandson. In everything read for its history, that attribution goes back to one essay of that year, which names no source in the passage read.

Dennis Hirota's English of 1995, in Wind in the Pines, renders the form given to Sōtan: If asked the nature of chanoyu, say it's the sound of windblown pines in a painting.

In the oldest records of it found for this history, the poem is the tea master Joshinsai's answer to a question about what tea is, set down by his pupil Kawakami Fuhaku between 1740 and 1773; it remakes an older poem on the heart printed under Ikkyū's name by 1632, keeping its last line.