Tea Ceremony and seiza
In that the Japanese tea ceremony is conventionally conducted sitting on tatami, seiza is integral to it. Unless it is the ryūrei style of tea ceremony, which employs chairs and tables, both the host and guests sit in seiza throughout.
All the bows (there are three basic variations, differing mainly in depth of bow and position of the hands) performed during tea ceremony originate in the seiza position.
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Famous quotes containing the words tea and/or ceremony:
“It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.”
—Agnes Repplier (1858–1950)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)