From an abandoned baby to a tea saint, he created a tea ceremony from Buddhism.

Lu Yu's The Book of Tea is considered to be the earliest, most complete and most comprehensive tea monograph in the world. In the era before Lu Yu, "tea" was written as "荼", which had the attribute of medicine. Drinking tea is similar to drinking soup, and ingredients such as green onion and ginger should be added. Lu Yu gave tea an independent temperament and advocated clear drinking.

The "Book of Tea" begins with the words: "Tea people, Jiamu of the south." ”

He seems to be a historian to make a biography, and then tells the shape, origin, and habits of tea one by one, especially the relationship between tea and people. This is of groundbreaking epoch-making significance.

Lu Yu believes that tea is meaningful because of people, and people should be pious to tea so that they will not lose tea.

The word "荼" can be interpreted as "the remaining blades of grass", and if you reduce one stroke to the word tea, it becomes "people standing among the grass and trees".

It is said that the monk Jigong of Jingling (now Tianmen, Hubei) in the Tang Dynasty was good at tasting tea, and he could not only identify what kind of tea he was drinking, but also distinguish the water used to make tea, and also judge who was the person who made the tea. This kind of tea tasting ability, one to ten, ten to hundred, people regard the monk Jigong as a "tea fairy" down to earth.

Later, the news reached the ears of Emperor Daizong. Daizong himself is fond of drinking tea and is also a tea connoisseur, so the palace hired some people who are good at tea tasting. When Daizong heard this rumor, he was skeptical, so he ordered to recruit the monk Jigong and decided to be the interview tea.

One day, the monk Jigong was summoned to the palace. The sencha expert in the palace uses high-quality tea leaves to fry a bowl of tea, and ask Jigong to taste it. Ji Gong took a sip and never tasted the second sip.

The emperor asked him why he didn't drink it.

Ji Gong said: "The tea I drank was fried for me by my disciple Lu Yu. After drinking his fried tea, others felt that it was light and tasteless. ”

After hearing this, the emperor took it to heart, and afterwards sent people to look for Lu Yu, and finally found him on Tianzhu Mountain in Tiaoxi, Wuxing County, and summoned him to the palace.

The emperor saw that Lu Yu was not good-looking, and his speech was a little stammering, but he could see that he was knowledgeable and extraordinary, and he was very happy. Immediately ordered him to make sencha.

Lu Yu immediately brought the purple bamboo shoot tea carefully fried before the Qingming Dynasty and presented it to the emperor, and sure enough, the tea was fragrant, the tea tasted fresh and mellow, and the clear soup was green, which was really different.

The emperor hurriedly ordered him to fry another bowl, and asked the palace maid to send it to the study for Ji Gong to taste, Ji Gong took the tea bowl, took a sip, and even called for good tea, so he drank it all.

After he put down the tea bowl, he walked out of the study and shouted, "Where is Gradual'er (Lu Yu's character)?"

The emperor hurriedly asked, "How do you know that Lu Yu is here?"

Ji Gong replied: "The tea I drank just now can only be fried by him, of course he came to the palace."

It can be seen that Lu Yu is proficient in tea art.

Lu Yu (733-804), a native of Jingling, Fuzhou (now Tianmen City, Hubei Province), was a famous tea expert in the Tang Dynasty, and was praised as "Tea Fairy" and "Tea Saint" by later generations.

Lu Yu has been fond of tea all his life, proficient in tea ceremony, and is famous for the world's first tea monograph - "The Book of Tea", and is enshrined as the "God of Tea". He was also very good at writing poetry, but not many of his poems have survived in the world. He has a strong interest in tea, insists on long-term investigation and research, is familiar with tea cultivation, breeding and processing technology, and is good at tea tasting.

As described in the poem "Ordinary people drink a lot, who helps the fragrance of tea", how to taste tea and follow the tea ceremony in reality has to be said to be an anecdote that Lu Yu is talked about by future generations.

Legend has it that Lu Yu went south, inspected the tea leaves all over the country, and tasted a lot of tea spring water, and once wrote the article "Water Quality".

One day, Li Jiqing, the assassin of the history, met Lu Yu who was inspecting the tea affair here on the bank of the Yangtze River, and invited him to go on the same boat. When Li Jiqing heard that the Nanling boiled tea in the center of the Yangtze River near it was excellent, he ordered the soldiers to drive a small boat to draw water. Unexpectedly, the soldier spilled a bottle of water more than half on the way, and secretly scooped up the river water on the shore to fill it.

Lu Yu scooped a sip and immediately pointed out: "This is the water in the near-shore river, not the water in the south." ”

Li Jiqing ordered the soldiers to fetch water again, and after Lu Yu tasted it, he smiled and said: "This is the zero water in the south of the river center." The soldier who fetched the water had to obey, knelt in front of Lu Yu, and told the truth, and Lu Yu's fame was then spread more and more.

Some tea art experts in the Ming and Qing dynasties believe that it is not difficult to distinguish between Nanling water and Lin'an river water, one clear and one turbid, one light and one heavy, for the tea saint Lu Yu.

Lu Yu died, and later generations respected him as the "God of Tea", which began in the late Tang Dynasty. Zhao Phosphorus, who served as the assassin of Quzhou in the Tang Dynasty, had a deep relationship with Lu Yu. He said in "Because of the Words": "Lu Yu is a tea lover and pioneered the sencha method. So far, the tea house, the pottery statue is placed between the tinware, and the cloud Yi tea is ashikaga. ”

As for his birthplace, Lu Yu has unspeakable bitterness. As long as you open the autobiography he wrote, "The Autobiography of Lu Literature", you can smell a strong sad atmosphere. He wrote: "(Lu Yu) is gradual, I don't know who there are, there are Zhong Xuan and Meng Yang's ugly appearance; Similarly, Ziyun's stuttering. Although the language is witty, it is actually a matter of helplessness. It's just ugly and stammering, but the sentence "I don't know who is also" is really infinitely sympathetic.

Lu Yu is an abandoned baby, and in "Supplement to the History of the Tang Kingdom", "New Tang Book" and "The Biography of Tang Caizi", there is no secret about this. One early morning in the late autumn of 733 A.D., the Zen master Zhiji of Jingling Longgai Temple passed by a small stone bridge in the western suburbs, suddenly heard the sound of a group of geese under the bridge, and took a closer look, only to see a group of geese guarding a baby boy with their wings, the baby boy made the frost shiver, and Zhiji carried him back to the temple to adopt. This stone bridge was later called "Ancient Wild Goose Bridge", and the nearby street was called "Wild Goose Street", and the ruins are still there today.

Ji Gong was a famous monk in the Tang Dynasty, and in the nearby Sixi Village, there was a well-educated Confucian scholar Li Gong living at that time. Li Gong was a shogunate official, but he abandoned his post during the turmoil and taught village children at the foot of the beautiful Longgai Mountain, and had a deep relationship with Ji Gong. At that time, the daughter of the Li couple, Li Jilan, had just turned one year old, so she named Ji Yan according to Ji Lan's name and regarded it as her own.

Ji Lan Ji Ji Ji ate at the same table, played on the same meadow, and grew to seven or eight years old, Li Gong and his wife grew older, homesickness became more and more serious, and the family returned to their hometown Huzhou thousands of miles away.

Ji Wei returned to Longgai Temple and boiled tea and served water by Ji Gong's side. Ji Gong intended to cultivate him, and painstakingly named him for the hexagram, and used "Yi" to occupy the "gradual" hexagram, and the hexagram said: "Hong gradually in the land, and its feather can be used as a ritual." It means that the wild geese fly in the sky, their wings are fluttering, the geese are neatly arrayed, and all directions are thoroughfares. So the surname was "Lu", the name was "Yu", and the word "Hong" was taken.

This Jigong also brewed a good hand of tea, so that Lu Yu learned the art of tea since he was a child. At the age of 12, Lu Yu finally left Longgai Temple. Since then, Lu Yu has worked as a harlequin actor in the local opera troupe, and has also worked as a screenwriter and composer; Appreciated by Li Qiwu, a famous minister who guarded the tomb, he went to Huomen Mountain to study under the old master Zou for seven years, and did not learn to go down the mountain until he was 19 years old.