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context: tea ceremony > history > Rikyu
Rikyu's Importance
It's just about impossible to overstate this. He's a godlike figure in Japan, and his influence stretches into many areas. Obviously he's by far the most important person in the history of the tea ceremony, but his importance in ceramics is almost as crucial, and he also had a big impact on architecture, garden design and flower arranging. This amounts to being probably the single most significant figure in the history of Japanese aesthetics.
While this means there is an endless supply of material, it also means he is highly mythologised, so it is hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Much of the material is from the schools claiming descent from Rikyu, and they clearly have a large interest in spinning his image.