Over the past forty years the name of Rick Hirsch has, like that of Paul Soldner, become synonymous with the word raku. Yet, for the objects that Hirsch has been making for the past ten years the idea of raku as a mode of firing has had a very little part to play. Here I endeavour to tease out the way in which we might consider raku as not merely a practical technique involving fast firing and an enjoyable participation sport involving fire, but more profoundly the way in which a process and its associated baggage can come to be a way of thinking. 'The way of tea' is a more useful translation of chanoyu than the phrase 'tea ceremony'. It is informed by the Zen Buddhist and Taoist attitude to life and implies an emphasis on a state of being or a state of mind that the words 'ceremony' or 'ritual' do not. This refinement of a difficult translation of a foreign cultural concept, which has occurred in the West, is a process that has also informed Hirsch's own recent thinking.
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