Sometimes, in the mornings, I make tea before I meditate. Then I wonder if I should practice first, and drink the tea later (when it’s not so hot), or do something else, drink the tea, and then meditate. I’m a tea addict. And I drive myself insane with order-of-operations issues like these.
Does caffeine help or hinder your meditation practice? Did the Buddha, who said a lot about intoxication, have anything to say about tea?
I’ve never heard of anything in the canon about this. Is tea the secret to perfect concentration? Instead of consulting my usual go-to dharma nerds, I asked a different kind of expert: Amy Dubin, owner of Janam Indian Tea, who knows pretty much everything about India and tea.


“Indian tea only dates back about 150 years,” Amy said. “But it does provide clarity of thought, and thus promotes understanding in some form or other.” Well, there goes my Buddha theory. According to Wikipedia, whose “discovery of tea story” sounds completely fake, tea originated in China in 2737 BCE.
So: does a little caffeine help with clarity of thought? I’ve been experimenting (and reading articles — like this one — about the results of new studies on caffeine), but I’m still not sure if I like tea as part of my meditation practice or not.
What do you all think? I think I’m going to curl up with a nice hot cup of my favorite Satrupa Assam — and meditate on it some more.