The practice of cooking
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from Hoko
If we’re used to cooking at home in our day to day lives, we might be sort of relieved when we’re asked to participate in kitchen practice at the temple. I don’t know anything about ceremonies or Dogen or precepts, but I know how to make soup! Sorry to say, but in the world of Zen cooking, your number one job is not making the soup. Your number one job is to be awake and functioning in real reality. It’s the same dynamic we encounter when we're already familiar with sewing before starting to make a rakusu. This should be easy, a fun craft project, because I do sewing at home all the time in my day to day life. Then immediately we discover that this is a whole new world of sewing, not just the skills but the attitude. It’s the same with cooking practice. Your job as a cook is to let go of all your fabrications and preconceived ideas and not be separate from the functioning that’s going on here and how. This isn’t the same as the ordinary process of cranking out three meals a day. This is the activity of a buddha, so you have to have the eyes and attitude and understanding of a buddha. Cooking practice is nothing more or less than zazen manifesting in your daily life. Uchiyama Roshi says: If we see this job of cooking in the ordinary sense, that is, as being just one occupation in society, then the tenzo becomes nothing more than an ordinary cook. Of, in a broader context, if being born into the world assumes no more importance than to appear on stage as another member of society, then the meaning of life stops there. However, the function of the tenzo expressing the buddhadharma in terms of living out the vivid and dynamic quality of his life lives as a total Self in whatever circumstances might arise. As long as this Self is identical with its world, when we function in the role of tenzo, this functioning becomes the life of the Self. At the same time, this is the dojo where we practice living the universe-ful Self. [How to Cook Your Life p. 44] One aspect of understanding cooking as something other than ordinary activity in society is looking carefully at what society tells us is valuable. If we think making really high-class meal is important, where does that come from? Is it really better than plain food? Are we cooking to feed our egos, or to support practice? If we step back, food is food. Yes, it should be nutritious, appealing and prepared carefully, but if we’re seeing it with the eyes of Buddha, adding our judgement to it isn’t necessary, and luxury fruit isn’t intrinsically better than apples. That means we cut and cook those apples just as carefully as if they were exotic and expensive. We approach making a peanut butter sandwich with the same care as we would if we were making a fancy dinner. This is exactly the nyoho teaching about asking ourselves whether things are creating attachment. If recipes are complicated, that’s great, and if they’re not, that’s also great. One of the challenges of cooking is that we’re likely to be doing more than one thing at a time, and that what we’re doing affects others. That means we really have to be awake in the kitchen, especially if we’re dealing with things like sharp knives and hot stoves. We’ve got to be looking at more than what’s just in front of us. Don’t put that knife down in such a way that someone is going to pick it up and get injured. Don’t stack things in a way that sets up an avalanche. Don’t lean over a burner with a sleeve trailing along waiting to catch fire. If you’re preoccupied with your fabrications, disaster is going to strike. It’s a very direct and immediate situation for understanding the importance of paying attention to our lives. Sometimes folks arrive at the dharma center without a lot of life skills. They have no idea that there’s more to practice than learning how to bow or chant sutras. Often, where they really need direction is in how to sweep floors, wash dishes, shovel snow or cook food. Somehow they’ve been taken care of all their lives and had things done for them, and they want to stay in that world of their imagination. Now suddenly they’re confronted with the reality that life in the temple requires real-world, here-and-now skills. If we’re going to eat meals, we need to cook them. If we want clean bathrooms, we need to clean them. There’s no one “outside” that’s going to do that work. Uchiyama Roshi sees the role of the tenzo as a particularly important intersection between zazen and religion, and he’s using religion here to mean an approach to living our everyday lives in the world. Cooking a meal is not spending blissful hours on a mountaintop doing rapturous zazen and drinking tea. It’s hard phyical work and you need to engage your brain and your senses. It’s also a complete expression of awakening, and it’s really important that we understand that there’s no gap. In the training temple, no one asks whether you feel like cooking or have any experience in the kitchen. Everyone rotates jobs every five days, and when it’s your turn, you need to feed everyone, like it or not. When I was training, a Western novice who was assigned as tenzo went into the kitchen and came right back out again, saying she wasn’t going to do that job because she couldn’t make anything out the few ingredients we had. At the time, our temple was the poorest training temple in the system, and we bought what was on sale and cooked whatever was going to spoil first. Well, if she couldn’t make anything out of what was there, were we all going to go hungry? Refusing to cook a meal wasn’t an option, but her thinking was so paralyzed that she was completely at a loss. I went into the kitchen and found potatoes, onions and cabbage, and made rice, potato soup and coleslaw. It was very plain but perfectly edible. Rather than having some idea about the cooking or the meal, we just wholeheartedly engage in that work, just like when we’re sitting, we wholeheartedly engage in that activity. However, that doesn’t mean we’re oblivious to larger affect we’re having on others. In fact, if we’re not including that in our awareness, we’re not really paying attention. In our little zendo kitchen, we have to be incredibly careful about noise. Just on the other side of the kitchen wall is a row of people sitting zazen, and the door is not soundproof, the walls are not soundproof, and noise even comes through the ceiling. That means we hear everything: knives on cutting boards, running water, the oven door banging, pots clanging in the sink, dry goods being poured into measuring cups. It’s a really great practice to have to be silent while we’re cooking. You can’t not pay attention to what you’re doing. You’ve got to think ahead to do things quietly; you can’t just march around in there waving your arms and doing whatever you want. Cedar Rapids Zen Center also has a kitchen right off the zendo, and only a curtain or two between the two spaces. Once when I was cooking during sesshin, I was scraping out a metal bowl with a metal spoon. Zuiko came in during the next kinhin period, picked up a spatula and handed it to me. Oops -- I should have seen (and heard) what to do on my own. The spatula was right there. As bodhisattvas, we vow to liberate all beings. That includes the non-sentient beings we work with in the kitchen. We need to liberate them from our own self-centeredness, and that when we’re not treating them carefully, one way they’re telling us is when they make noise. Uchiyama Roshi says: [W]hen you work with some tool or utensil you should put it back when you are finished with it and not just leave it sitting around. When you put a pot down roughly, banging it around on concrete or a tiled sink, it cries out in pain. If you still are unable to hear that cry, then you can hardly be said to be a person living out zazen in your daily life. It’s pretty easy to forget all that when the clock is ticking and you’re in a hurry to get the food ready. Oh well, there’s no time to be careful -- I just have to get this done. That’s when we become self involved and stop paying attention. Our consideration as cooks is not just for the beings we’re feeding but for the beings with whom we’re partnering to get that meal made. We don’t need to get precious about it; that’s just another idea. We just need to pay attention and listen. Okumura Roshi has said: The tenzo as a person and the fire and the other things working together is samadhi. It’s not a matter of the tenzo using things, but the tenzo and those things working together seamlessly. That samadhi is possible by seeing impermanence and egolessness. Even when you’re by yourself in the kitchen, there’s really a team of beings all functioning in there together, so there’s interconnectedness across space, but also across time. Dogen says when we’re cooking for others in the temple, we need to make a plan the night before so we know what we’re going to make and how much we need. That might seem strange, because we’re always hearing that the only place where we can take action is here and now; the past is gone and the future isn’t here yet. Not only that, we also hear that because we can’t act in the future, we shouldn’t get too caught up in clinging to outcomes. We don’t know what the future will bring and we can’t live there. Sometimes folks here those teachings and they ask: does that mean we should just float along without a direction or a roadmap? The answer is clearly no. You might be making a plan for the future, but the activity of planning is happening here and now. Even though we can’t control the outcome, the responsible thing to do is to prepare as best we can, act as wholesomely as we can, and then let go. The activity of making a meal plan for the next day is the work of tonight. Because of impermanence, anything can happen between tonight and tomorrow morning, so we can’t become attached to a goal, but we do need to have a direction in order to carry out bodhisattva work. Anyplace attachment comes up is an opportunity to think about nyoho. We can ask ourselves not only whether this food create attachment, but whether the activities of cooking create attachment. If they do, where are we stuck and how can we get back to a nyoho attitude? In the simple act of getting ready for breakfast, we have a dharma gate into cause and effect, impermanence and interconnectedness. The practice of cooking sits right in the middle of those intersections. We have to recognize interconnectedness across both space and time. We can’t be absentminded in the kitchen, focusing on somewhere other than here and now, or disaster will happen. We also can’t be so singleminded that we’re oblivious to what’s going on around us and the effect our actions have on others. Traditionally, the tenzo is one of the highest ranking officers in the temple because you need real practice maturity to be managing all the aspects of that operation. You’re taking care of the resources of the temple, which came from donors so they can’t be wasted. You’re responsible for making sure practitioners have what they need to keep them physically healthy so they can practice. You’re probably managing other workers, with all the complexity that goes with that. That’s not even to mention having and using actual cooking skills. Dogen shows us clearly that cooking is not a menial chore that we do on the way to something better. Of course, although he’s talking about cooking, he’s really talking about all of our everyday activities. If we try to understand nyoho food, we can understand a lot about the rest of our lives. We can follow a recipe, or follow a set of instructions, or a strategic plan, and that’s good, but what do we do when something changes and we have to pivot? More than once in my tenzo life I’ve had to go to plan B in the middle of cooking a meal. Once I was cooking for a seven day sesshin with at least a couple of dozen participants, and I had half of the week’s groceries in my car while someone else was bringing the other half. That person had car trouble halfway to the temple and didn’t arrive. I had to rearrange meals on the fly using whatever I had. We need to make plans to be responsible, but we also have to be engaged with what’s happening in the kitchen rather than being on autopilot. Even if things are going well, we still have to carefully manage the food with wisdom and compassion so that things are cooked properly and presented in an appealing way, and nothing is wasted. Efficiency is good, but it’s not the only objective. Timing is important; you can’t make cereal so far ahead that it sits on the stove for an hour becoming paste. Sometimes you really do have to be working on three dishes at once. There has to be a balance between efficiency for yourself and taking care of the food and the people. That takes creativity and responsiveness and figuring things out in the broadest possible way, which means you have to be alive in the kitchen and recognize the total dynamic functioning in which you’re participating. Otherwise, rather than bringing out the best in the food and the workers, something is going to be less than optimal. The food won’t have a good flavor or texture, or ingredients will be wasted, or things won’t happen at the right time, and the meal will be late and everyone will be waiting, or the food will have gotten cold. In addition to the workers and the ingredients and the utensils there in the kitchen with you, the people eating the meal are also in there. We have to remember why we’re cooking and who we’re doing it for. I often say that cooking for sesshin, or nyoho cooking in general, isn’t like cooking for a party or a family reunion, where you might decide to cook twice what you need just to make sure that everyone gets enough and you don’t run out. You want to be a good host. We don’t have that luxury when we take cooking as a practice. That’s the easy way out that doesn’t require us to carefully consider exactly who and how many we’re feeding. Ending up with mountains of leftovers is not a good outcome in a temple. Either we can’t eat it fast enough and it spoils, or we’re so tired of whatever it is that it’s not appealing. That means as we get started with the cooking we have to know how many people are in the temple complex somewhere, including people who may be out of the zendo but still need to eat. Maybe they’re working, or they’re in the infirmary. Then we have to consider whether it’s a formal meal or not. People sometimes eat less when they’re using oryoki than when they’re using plates and forks because they're caught up in the mechanics of that. Also, one thing I noticed over time was that people who might eat one or two scrambled eggs at home would eat four during sesshin. Somehow I could never make enough eggs; whatever I made always went. I think it’s because they’re being spooned out of a pot into an oryoki bowl, and it’s not obvious how many eggs they're taking. I learned to make a lot more per person than you’d think. In one dharma center, sesshin included a work period and informal teatime in the afternoon, and tea food was pretty substantial because it was following work and people were hungry. I learned that people filled up on tea food in the late afternoon and dinner was at 5:30 or something, so I made a lot less dinner. I also had to consider the weather; on a really hot day, fresh cold fruit went like gangbusters and there had to be a lot. Clinging to expectations didn’t work. I really had to consider the individual changing circumstances of the actual people who were eating. That had to be very real, and not my assumption or hope, so that there would be the right things in the right amount, not too much or too little. Our attitude in cooking practice is that yes, we’re using the intellect but also more than the intellect. We need every kind of wisdom and compassion. When it’s our turn to go into the kitchen and prepare a meal, the important thing isn’t having professional cooking skills. It’s remembering that this everyday activity, like all everyday activities, is practice. Simple food is fine as long as we’re clear and sincere. Not only are we feeding buddhas and enabling their practice, it’s a real practice development opportunity for ourselves as well. |
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