The Book of Tea (茶の本, Cha no Hon) A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life (1906) by Okakura Kakuzō (1906) is a long essay linking the role of chadō (teaism) to the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Japanese life and protesting Western caricatures of "the East". Addressed to a Western audience, it was originally written in English and is one of the great English tea classics. Okakura had been taught at a young age to speak English and was proficient at communicating his thoughts to the Western mind. In his book, he discusses such topics as Zen and Taoism, but also the secular aspects of tea and Japanese life. The book emphasizes how Teaism taught the Japanese many things, the most important of which were simplicity and humility: It (Teaism) inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. This, Okakura believed, was an aesthetic that should inform everything from the arts and architecture to daily life and was already informing them in Japan. In his "sleek complacency", however, the Westerner tended to see in the tea ceremony only "another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him". Writing in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, Kakuzō commented that the Westerner regarded Japan as "barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace", and began to call her civilized only when "she began to commit wholesale slaughter on the Manchurian battlefields". In the book, Kakuzō states that Teaism, in itself, is one of the profound universal remedies in which conflicting parties might find reconciliation. He ends the book with a chapter on Tea Masters and spends some time talking about Sen no Rikyū and his contribution to the Japanese tea ceremony. The Book of Tea has been cited as an important influence on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Georgia O'Keeffe.