The ingredients of sesshin and your life
from Sawyer

There’s a brief sentence in the job description for Sanshin’s operations manager (a position I currently hold), under the heading, “Event Coordination”: 

Coordinate any food for the event, assuring that cooks are assigned for each meal, working with practice leadership, local volunteers and food vendors as necessary.

Working with Hoko and others over the past few years under the direction of that brief sentence, Sanshin’s Environmental Statement, and the practice framework offered by the principles of nyoho, we’ve managed to establish local farm partnerships, a community garden practice-plot, and well-defined oryoki meal planning guidelines. In short, we’ve gone a long way towards fine-tuning a practice container for engaging with the fundamental necessity for food during sesshin here at Sanshin – and sesshin, as we can see in practice, is simply a highly concentrated form and approach to everyday life.

Of course, developing and maintaining a system of practice like this requires a significant amount of activity, time, and effort. 

In the Tenzokyokun, speaking of the great effort and energy required of the tenzo to properly prepare food for the community, Dogen offers a kind of warning: “If you do not have the mind of the Way, then all of this hard work is meaningless and not beneficial.” He goes on to quote the Zen’en Shingi: “You must put to work the mind of the Way, offering appropriate variety [in the food served] so that the community can feel satisfied and at ease.” 

So we need to carefully consider: what is the dharma of all the time and effort involved in our food-related sangha operations? What does all this activity have to do with nyoho? In this essay, we’re particularly exploring ingredients: how we can learn from and make decisions about them that align with the Buddha’s teachings – and with reality itself.

A primary teaching here is that food, from soil to bowl and back, demonstrates interconnection – including, importantly, the world beyond the zendo. Encountering food with “the mind of the Way” allows the vast reality of interconnection to permeate our lives in a way that is on-the-ground, down-to-earth, taste-able. In other words, when we engage with it deeply and wholeheartedly, food is tangible thusness. Food is interconnection, just like zazen.

This past spring, I participated in a 6-week “community foraging” class through a small organization here in Bloomington called Soulcraft. Seven or eight of us, led by a woman with a lot of knowledge about local edible plants, would meet at a different location around town one evening a week. We’d walk around each place and observe, learn about, and gather up edible plants. Then we’d pull out the cutting boards and camp stoves we’d brought along and cook up and eat a little meal together out of plants (or parts of plants) we’d just plucked from the ground. 

Bluebell and pokeberry leaves, daylily and toothwort bulbs, chickweed and dandelion greens – the humble ingredients offered up by a particular piece of earth at a particular time of year – moving from soil to belly in minutes. For me, it was a clear way into tasting the dharma, to being “in accord,” grounded in direct community with many beings.

Participating in this class deepened a sense that food might be seen as the most fundamental of our three faces of nyoho. In a way, everything is food – at some point, everything and everyone is eaten by someone else, in support of the continuity of their own life. Once I watched a rabbit munching on grass on the edge of the parking lot of my apartment for several minutes. I saw it sort of slurp down some clover blossoms, and realized for the first time that, apparently, these flowers are food!

Imagine encountering your life with a steady awareness that everything is food, that everything ultimately can and will be broken down and incorporated into the body of everything else. Thus we have a solid, ever-present entry point into remembering and experiencing the deep reality of interconnection.

Going back to basics in the sesshin community

Working in Sanshin’s community garden plot with Hoko one spring evening, transplanting arugula and kale mostly in silence, Hoko said something striking, more or less out of the blue: 

“This is another great way to remind us that sesshin is not about individuals achieving a peak experience.” 

Another time Hoko said, “One of the interesting things about sesshin is that it puts us face to face with the question, What does it take to live?” 

I think these two insights are connected. In a way, sesshin practice just means coming together and going back to basics, peacefully. We get to live in a container that safely and thoroughly puts each of us face to face with the three faces of nyoho. For three, five, or seven days at a time, we just sit together on the ground of clothing, food, and shelter. We sit in the Buddha’s house, wear the Buddha’s teaching, and eat from the Buddha’s bowls. We just live together, each on our own sitting cushions, quietly cooperating as a sesshin community – everyone supporting the conditions for dropping off body and mind through their own practice.

Sesshin can appear to be a kind of strange, extreme, even irrelevant activity. Actually, it’s just a really concentrated form of the everyday life we all share, thoroughly lived out in peace (which certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy). We become a profoundly functional community. We become a small group of people doing our best not to get in the way of each other’s awakening – and that is awakening. We just take care of and express our basic life force. We have the chance to really see this shared life unfold – we have the space and structure to really experience it without distraction.

That’s sesshin. Without losing our own place on our own cushion, we fold ourselves into the community. 

I think that’s the key point in Hoko’s comments. Sesshin is not primarily about me, personally, sitting and facing my narrow section of the wall in order to achieve a profound interior breakthrough into awakening. Sesshin (接心 - touching or gathering the heart/mind) means completely not separating myself from the whole reality and experience of this moment – which already includes everything and everyone else, both within the zendo and far beyond. Sesshin means engaging the reality of community, fundamentally seeing what it is to live simply and wholesomely together. Interestingly, we can each only really participate in this reality through our own bodies and minds, continuously opening the hand of thought, releasing self-involvement.

In Sanshin’s style of sesshin, we live in the same room together for seventeen hours a day (twenty-four for those sleeping in the zendo). For fourteen of those hours, of course, most of us are just sitting, and walking (kinhin) for ten minutes between each sitting period. Three of those hours, though, are set aside for meals.

Surrounded by the shared silence of zazen and simple ritual forms, meals may take on new significance for us. If we’re paying attention, it becomes very clear that in order to live, we need “to put other forms of life… into our mouth.” If even the simplest form of practice can’t go on without the lives of other beings coming to an end, we might do well to consider: where does that life come from? 

Within the intensity of the many hours sitting together in one room, apparently secluded from the rest of the world, three meals appear in the zendo each day. We might approach these meals as arrivals from the world outside, reminders that our practice, even as it involves quietly setting ourselves apart for extended periods, never cuts us off from anything.

In fact, we can see that the opposite is true. These meals, these arrivals from outside, don’t interrupt or provide a little break from some purely inward exertion that we may think of as zazen. They can help us remember that our zazen already includes the whole world, that zazen actually means dropping any fixed idea of inside/outside. It’s no accident that the first of the Five Contemplations in the meal verses is, “We reflect on the efforts that brought us this food, and consider how it comes to us.”

Nyoho meal planning: picking and choosing, giving and receiving

During sesshin, most of the practitioners, most of the time, really can completely let go of picking and choosing. We just follow the schedule of the bells: sitting, walking, bowing, eating home-cooked meals, and sleeping at the appropriate times. Usually, someone else is taking care of the necessities, making the decisions, keeping track of the distinctions of time and space that allow everyone to just sit and immerse in the undivided reality of life. 

It’s vital to remember that those involved in attending to the practicalities that enable sesshin are themselves doing sesshin. In our tradition, we tend to pretty readily understand this (at least in theory) in terms of those cooking the meals. Can we widen our view even further to include the practice of procuring the ingredients for those meals?

How might the simplicity of zazen show up in a grocery store or a farm field? In terms of sesshin meal planning, Hoko once framed the apparent dilemma like this: “If we are supposed to avoid picking and choosing, and not have opinions, how can we go to the grocery store?” How do we drop off body and mind and still manage to gather up all the various ingredients of 14 meals for a dozen practitioners living together through a 5-day sesshin?

There are of course various ways to put this question into practice. During the last few years at Sanshin, one aspect has been to source a significant portion of our sesshin meal ingredients from the surrounding local community. 

I remember once going up to Okumura Roshi’s office to ask him to sign a check for one of the nearby small, sustainably-minded farms from which we buy produce. Curious about the arrangement, the first question he asked was, “Do you get to choose the vegetables?” I told him that, ideally, we just ask the farmers to select $50 to $75 worth of whatever vegetables they’re currently harvesting, and proceed to plan our menus around what they’ve made available.

In a way, this calls back to the practice of the Buddha’s own sangha, simply holding out their bowls to receive whatever almsfood was offered by nearby community members. In our context, letting the farmers and the seasons choose a significant portion of the ingredients for sesshin meals is just another embodiment of letting go and folding into the healthy functioning of the community – participating in the contemporary practice of a CSA (community-supported agriculture) subscription.

For similar reasons, one of the names we’ve come to use for our own little community garden plot is sesshin garden. Coordinating with farmers, working in the garden, can we hold our practice with the kind of maturity that remembers that sourcing and growing food for sesshin is deeply embedded in sesshin itself? Can we accord with the dharma, with the broad reality of giving and receiving, to the degree that the very earth, close at hand, helps us to decide how and what to eat?

There’s another line from the meal verses that directly guides our menu planning these days at Sanshin: “The three virtues and six tastes of this meal are offered to the Buddha and Sangha.” This line can be traced back to the first chapter of the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra, in which lay followers offer the Buddha and his ordained sangha a final meal before Shakyamuni’s impending death and parinirvana:

They carried in various utensils, to prepare meals for the Buddha and the Sangha… The dishes were sweet and beautiful in six tastes: bitter, sour, sweet, hot, salty, and plain. Also the virtues were three: 1) light and soft, 2) pure, and 3) true to cuisine.

Not coincidentally, that third virtue, “true to cuisine,” is actually a translation of “nyoho.” In fact, in Charles Patton’s translation of the same sutra, this third virtue is translated as “like the dharma.” The phrase is translated variously elsewhere as “conscientious and thorough,” and “in accord with dharma (prepared appropriately).”

In the meal planning documents included at the end of this essay, you can see the concrete principles we use to approach nyoho in developing meal plans for sesshin at Sanshin. This is where our three aspects of nyoho – tai (materials), shiki (colors/form), and ryo (size/amount) – offer a solid, yet dynamic, structure for bringing together the elements of a meal. 

When I first encountered these very specific teachings, I was a bit perplexed. If zazen and sesshin are about letting go of discriminative thinking, and if, as Dogen reminds us, “a monk’s mouth should be like an oven,” what’s all this fuss about making sure to include five colors and six tastes (derived from Indian Ayurvedic and Japanese shojin ryori food traditions), scrupulously avoiding onions and oil, separating the proper food groups into the proper bowls?
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In the Tenzokyokun, Dogen offers this guidance:

If the food is without the excellence of the six flavors and without the endowment of the three virtues, the tenzo is not serving the community… While examining the rice, watch for sand; while examining the sand, watch for rice. If you minutely observe from different viewpoints without absentmindedness, then naturally the food will integrate the three virtues and the six tastes.

Of course, these tips are quite practical in a time long before the advent of industrial cleaning and processing facilities. But I think what Dogen is getting at here is that when we let go of the personal preferences that so often control our decision-making, there’s space to see what’s really going on, and to act accordingly for everyone’s benefit. 

So at Sanshin, we’ve decided to take the tangible specificity of these teachings at face value, to strive to be “conscientious and thorough” in giving form to thusness in these particular ways. In zazen, we just give ourselves to the posture. In planning the meals that allow us to sustain that fundamental posture, we just give ourselves to this framework. Thus, even in our operational planning for sesshin, body and mind drop off and wholesome nourishment circulates through the community.

After all, each of the guidelines of material, color, and amount are aimed at ensuring that each meal is wholesome, nourishing, and undistracting for all involved – that the three meals each day actually scaffold, rather than interrupt, the immersion in interconnected reality that the whole sesshin container is meant to nurture and reflect. 

Door Dash and life in a funyo world

Working in the vegetable garden this summer, spreading mulch on pathways, a very down-to-earth question arose from a fellow practitioner, Owen: “How are we supposed to practice nyoho food when we can just pull out our phones and order whatever we want from Door Dash?”

One way I interpreted his question was, “Can we really be expected to put so much care and time into deciding what’s for lunch, in the middle of our busy (often stressful) lives, especially when there are so many apparently more convenient and stimulating options available all around us?”

Again, it’s worth remembering that sesshin is a concentrated form of our everyday lives. We might even venture to understand it as a simple extended ceremony demonstrating the wondrous, bare-bones reality of life itself. In the midst of this, a very refined opportunity to engage with food as dharma emerges. 

In the lead-up to sesshin, looking ahead to a few days of simple yet highly scheduled communal activity, those responsible for planning and preparing the meals can give this level of care to each offering, bound for its pre-appointed time (though of course plans always adapt as the meals unfold, as any cook will tell you). We could say that each time we carry out a formal meal in sesshin, we re-enact the Buddha’s final meal with his community. And so we feed the Buddha – we keep the Buddha alive through our own diligent practice.

With some  intention, the rarefied rigor of sesshin can diffuse into the looser, more unpredictable terrain of our everyday lives in the big wide world – Door Dash included. No one is chiding us to hold the sesshin container 365 days a year. Still, we can’t help but recognize that the human-built world we tend to encounter outside of the zendo is decidedly not designed to reveal to us the true reality of all beings. This has been true since long before the Buddha described samsara and the four noble truths, and it’s not hard to see that many aspects of our current society tend to turbocharge our impulse to avoid the truth of our shared life and death.

Early on in our inquiry into nyoho this year, Hoko offered some basic definitions: “Nyoho is something consistent with, or the same as, the dharma.  The opposite is funyo  不如法: fu 不 makes a word negative.  Funyo is something out of step with the dharma, something that’s gone amiss or gone awry.” 

Part of what I hear in Owen’s question is a recognition that we are living in a funyo world. Rather than being a cause for despair, we can see that this actually gets at something fundamental to our tradition of bodhisattva practice. In a way, just as we experience samsara and nirvana as one, nyoho and funyo are one. The bodhisattva’s delicate and dynamic path is to not flounder in samsara due to wisdom, and not stagnate in nirvana due to compassion for struggling beings. 

In other words, how can we live “in step” with a world that appears to be deeply “out of step”? This is nothing other than our core practice of peace and progress in modern daily life. Can we work to maintain balance in ourselves and others in an imbalanced world that kind of feels like it’s tipping over? 

We should remember here that there is a danger within nyoho practice of clinging to a kind of ego-boosting ideal of “purity.” In the odd context of our current social and economic systems, aspiring to source food locally hits real road blocks like higher prices, or can fall over into a kind of pretentious identity: being the kind of person who gets boutique, local, health-conscious produce – the opposite of humbly receiving what’s offered. At the level of so many people’s everyday experience today, Door Dash and supermarket grocery stores are the unpretentious reality of our life in a globalized world too large and unwieldy to grasp. They’re also a manifestation of complex systems of greed, anger, and ignorance that are destroying the natural balance of life on earth.

Can we remain grounded and humble as we navigate this complex, wobbly world? Rolling our cart through the grocery store aisles, sitting down to a restaurant meal, strolling around a Farmer’s market, ordering Door Dash on our smartphones: can we experience food as dharma? We might engage in various tangible dharma-inquiries: What’s in accord, what’s in season, what’s extra? How did this banana or bacon arrive on my plate? What causes and conditions make fresh, locally grown food tend to cost more than highly processed food assembled and shipped from thousands of miles away? How do the five colors and six tastes show up in my morning oatmeal?
Thus, our everyday meals too can embody our fundamental practice of nurturing the seeds of Buddha right in the middle of samsara. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner become doorways through which sesshin enters our life, quietly sitting down at the table with us – and our practice continues to nourish and be nourished by many beings.