For anyone who had occasion to read—or to reread—Okakura Kakuzō's The Book of Tea in 2005, the centennial anniversary of Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, it was difficult not to be struck by Okakura's contention, occurring a third of the way through the text, that “Zennism, like Taoism, is the worship of Relativity” (Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea [New York: Fox Duffield, 1906], p. 65). Okakura was, of course, writing in English in 1906, shortly after the still-obscure Einstein published his first account of the special theory of relativity in Annalen der Physik. Okakura almost certainly had no inkling of the revolution that was under way in the scientific community, but his book is an odd testament to how an observing subject's location determines his view of the world. For Okakura, “relativity” meant that “nothing is real except that which concerns the working of our own minds”; for Einstein,...
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