After defiantly eating from the family heirloom bowl, Yoshio finds himself in ancient Kyoto during the eleventh century. Taken in by a kindly old woman, he learns his way around the old city. It is on the street of the potters that one fateful day he sees the very bowl he knows so well first unpacked from its fiery furnace. At a tiny wayside temple the Spirit of the Shrine decrees that Yoshio can return only after he has learned Three Great Lessons. After an encounter with his samurai ancestor, Yoshio gets a chance to prove he has learned the great lessons and returns to his own time through a tea ceremony with an ambitious master potter.