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leaves his shoes outside; there are special wooden sandals provided inside. Everybody is silent, because the samovar is boiling the tea and a beautiful music is coming out of it. It has to be listened to. People sit on their knees, just the way they sit in the temple, around the samovar. They all listen silently to the boiling noise of the tea, and they smell the fresh and rejuvenating fragrance of the tea. And absolute silence falls on them.
Then the server, who is usually a woman, comes; and in a very sacred manner she provides cups and saucers, which are all handmade. In a Zen monastery they don't use cups and saucers purchased in the market; those are produced inhumanly, mechanically, for nobody particular. They are just for the market.
In the Zen monastery they make their own cups, their own saucers, with love, with meditation. Something of their love and meditation certainly enters into their cups and saucers and pots. And the way the woman places them before you -- she places them as if she is serving a god. Christians don't even know how to move Jesus' statue from one place to another.
Then she pours the tea; just the sound of the tea being poured is listened to -- no talk at all. And then people start sipping tea, enjoying it, forgetting the whole world. Just sipping tea has become sacred. It depends on you.
There is nothing profane in the world, nothing sacred in the world. The world is neutral. Now it depends on you what you want to make of it. Meditation makes it sacred; then every act becomes meditative.
I am reminded of a butcher in Japan who was considered to be a great master -- and he was a butcher! The whole day he was cutting animals and selling meat; that was his business. One Buddhist scholar could not believe that this man was thought to be a saint. He was simply a scholar. He went to the butcher and said, "This is something absolutely mad. Who are the people who think that you are a saint? How can a butcher be a saint?"
The butcher laughed. He answered, "Just by mixing meditation in the butchery. When I am cutting up an animal I am not angry, I am not hateful. I am full of love, I am full of compassion.
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