The practice of serving

from Hoko

There is a guideline in formal meal practice that says we should never serve ourselves; we should always be served by someone else, and there’s a whole subset of food practice related to serving.  In the senmon sodo, it’s done in a very formal way.  It’s not just a matter of dumping pots onto the table and helping ourselves.

Traditionally, we’d be sitting and eating at our places in the zendo rather than sitting at a table as we do at Sanshin.  Technically, we eat, sleep and sit in the same place, and that’s the only space we can really think of as ours.

At mealtime, there’s a lot of coordinated sound from various instruments around the temple, communicating that the meal is ready, the fires have been put out, and it’s time to shift into meal practice.  Servers report to the kitchen to take food across to the sodo or zendo after the tenzo does the food sending ceremony, and the meal happens in coordination with instruments and chanting.  The first one served is Manjusri, to the accompaniment of drum rolls and movements by the ino.

Then servers come along and wipe the meal boards in front of each place, and participants put out their bowls.  After some more chanting, servers come around with the various dishes.  In pairs, we bow to the server, receive our food, bow again, and the server moves along the line.  You’ve seen a bit of this if you’ve been here for teatime during Rohatsu sesshin or during the honsoku gyocha before a hossenshiki.

When everyone has food, there’s more chanting and then we eat.  In the meantime, servers are taking care of remaining food and watching to see whether anyone needs help.  After awhile, seconds are served in the same way.  When it’s time to wash the bowls, servers come around with hot water.  A little later, they come around to collect the washing water and wipe the meal board again, and other than taking any remaining things back to the kitchen, their job is largely done.

That’s the abbreviated description; it’s all actually a bit complex.  There's a video from Komazawa University here that shows the entire meal with all the forms; it runs about 45 minutes, so I suggest watching on twice-normal speed and stopping when you see something you'd like to look at more closely.  The context is helpful for  understanding the attitude we take for our simplified version here at Sanshin, and also how we can  take that attitude home with us.  I’ll also suggest that there are similarities with our attitude as jikido, and our attitude toward work practice, so this is bigger than simply formal meals in the sodo.

There’s a lot written about the connection between serving and dana paramita, or generosity.  There’s also a lot about the oneness of giver, receiver and gift, and how that reflects interconnectedness and total dynamic functioning.  Those things are certainly important, but I want to take this in a particular direction that we may not often consider: serving is a practice, not a grunt job, or a low-level work assignment that someone has to do.  When we’re serving, we’re not just slopping food into people’s bowls in a chow line.  Everything from how we stand to the way we use utensils is important.  We are directly taking care of the entirety of the meal activity: the food, the bowls, the practitioners, the practice, everything.

In the very early days of the Buddhist sangha, the servers were laypeople, serving the monks.  They were known as "pure people," or "purifying people."  Eventually, serving became part of the practice of the ordained sangha, and monks rotated through the position like all the other positions.

Here’s a Japanese word that’s important for this discussion: omotenashi お持て成し.  As an everyday word, it can mean hospitality.  Omotenashi is not an exclusively Buddhist word; it pervades the Japanese culture.  There’s a very old way to translate this word that means you’re not doing something in order to present a particular public face to others.  There’s a sense that the activity of serving is transparent, and in that way unpretentious.  Aha -- unpretentious is a familiar word to us in the realm of nyoho, and we’ll come back to that shortly.

There are several themes that crop up around omotenashi.  The first one is also going to sound familiar: we can call it selfless service.  We take care of others sincerely and with genuine care, and we don’t expect anything in return.  Just like zazen is good for nothing, the practice of serving is good for nothing.  It’s a contrast to our usual North American idea of serving, or service, which is often transactional: there’s a customer and a service provider, and there’s some kind of monetary exchange, fee or tips.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what we’re talking about here, and it’s not the only possible approach to the practice of serving.  For instance, there’s no culture of tipping the waitress or the taxi driver in Japan.

We're also not engaged in serving in order to be popular, impress people or make them like us.  There’s no place for ego in this thing, and we can’t get precious about it.  We are taking care of our relationships, but it’s not personal.  Like all bodhisattva practice, we don’t pick and choose who gets good service; everyone is encountered and served equally, and we’re not getting any personal reward for what we’re doing.

Another theme of omotenashi is anticipating the needs of others.  That means we have to pay attention and read the room so we can respond appropriately to what’s happening even before someone asks for something or gives direction.  Things don’t always go the way we expect, so how do we respond when something is spilled or dropped, or the utensil breaks, or we realize that the watermelon has seeds and we need a way to collect them from everyone before we wash the oryoki?

The third theme is attention to detail.  We consider every aspect of someone’s experience in our space.  This is not managing detail to make our own lives easier, but in order to make sure others are comfortable and don’t have any trouble.

All of these omotenashi themes apply to the practice of serving, and clearly, being a server is not just a low-status work assignment.  There’s a whole highly-developed culture around this practice.  Thus the question to consider is: what is the practice of being a host? 

It’s a role that starts with the jikido, who’s in charge of the zendo.  Being a jikido is more than just lighting the candle and ringing the bell.  The jikido is the host of the zendo, and responsible for the conditions there.  For instance, I’m the morning jikido two days a week, when Seigen or Hosshin is the doshi.  I get here a bit early to adjust the lights, check the flowers, make the water offering, and light the candle to welcome Majusri and the sangha.  Then I walk the perimeter and makes sure the cushions are straight and everything is ready.  The jikido hits the han to tell everyone it’s time to come in for zazen, and then stands next to the door and bows with everyone who comes in: welcome to my zendo!

We’ve seen that under omotenashi, part of being a good host is to think about the details of people’s experience, so particularly during sesshin, the jikido keeps the floor swept in the zendo and also the front entryway to the building itself so that when we arrive we have a good feeling, even though we may never actually see that sweeping happening.  

This same attitude of being a host carries over into meal practice.  It starts with the tenzo, who makes sure that the food can be easily served and eaten in these circumstances.  If the pieces are too big to fit into the appropriate bowl, or the cereal is too thick to flow off of the serving spoon, it causes trouble for others.

Then that role passes to the servers, and it’s their responsibility to see that there’s nothing causing trouble and people are taken care of.  That means things like not touching the sides or the bottom of someone’s bowl with the serving utensil, not dropping utensils onto the bottom of a bowl because it  might crack, and not dripping food down the outside of the bowl.  It means making sure that one person doesn’t get all the veggies at the bottom of the soup pot and another gets only the broth.  It might feel like the tenzo is really the one responsible for the meal, and you’re just handing out someone else’s work, but nope, it’s all you at that point—you’re in charge of the whole thing.

How you stand and how you handle your items is critical.  You don’t take care of others as a host by slouching and slopping.  You pay attention, stand up straight, hold onto the pot or the dish, and watch what you’re doing.  To top it all off, you do everything as silently as possible: no clank and clatter of utensils or lids on pots or sloshing soup.

Serving isn’t a means to an end -- it’s a practice all by itself.  All that becomes more apparent when you’re carrying food around the zendo and stopping and bowing and doing all the forms.  We do a simplified version of serving and eating here because we don’t have a lot of people engaging in it, but we need to remember the context.  What attitude we would be taking if we were sitting in a sodo with two dozen people and all the sounds and roles?

At left we've also linked to a video of the morning service at Sojiji, one of Sotoshu’s two head temples.  I invite you to watch how things are carried and delivered during the service.  People are bringing out and picking up individual books, sets of books, the ino’s stand, the doshi’s table.  There are very particular, careful ways of doing these things, which is one of the things you learn in the senmon sodo.  You don’t just go get something and plop it down in front of someone, or hand it over to to them.  You carry it just so, walk a certain way, arrive, put it down, turn to go in a certain way.  The attitude is the same as the servers during a meal, even though the meal is slightly less ceremonial.

When we first encounter the forms and the attitude related to serving and eating a meal, we might just think it’s an unnecessary layer of complication.  There’s nothing special about this rice and soup, so why are we treating it like something precious?  Why are we doing a choreographed dance routine every time we need to get food into bowls?

Well, if you’re feeding dozens of monks, it’s actually more efficient than a buffet line and having to wash up all that stuff afterwards, but more importantly, when we agree to take on forms, we have to pay attention and cultivate respect.  The point of formal serving isn’t that the food is special; we’ve seen nyoho teachings about why it’s not at all special.  If the central question of nyoho is does this thing create attachment? then the central question of life in the temple is how can we keep from causing trouble for others?  Can you imagine how this world would be if our main concern moment by moment was how to keep from causing trouble for others?  That seems like an important and useful thing to cultivate.

Rather than being a means to an end, the practice of serving is a continuation of the practice of the tenzo.  The tenzo contributes to the wellbeing and comfort of practitioners by choosing good ingredients and making appropriate food that’s appealing and nutritious.  The server continues that process of caring for practitioners by serving the food in a thoughtful and appropriate way.  The practitioner’s experience of the food isn’t only up to the tenzo.  It’s also the result of the server’s practice.  Great food served in a way that’s sloppy or arrogant or impatient is a break in the partnership between the server and the tenzo.  Yes, we need to be efficient, because we don’t want to take too long, but we also need to be careful and not make trouble for those receiving.

There’s a harmony that happens between tenzo, servers and practitioners that enables the practice of cooking, the practice of serving and the practice of receiving and eating, and there’s also the cooperation of the entire team of servers.  Here we only have two at a time and they’re standing in one place,  but in larger temples there are four or more moving all over the sodo and a soku, or head of the serving crew, that’s directing traffic.  Soku 送供 is literally the person who sends out the food, so he/she/they are watching not only their own activities but also monitoring all the servers and how that’s going, as you can see in Komazawa video.

As we’ve seen, both nyoho and omotenashi remind us to be unpretentious and unassuming.  When we’re serving, we don’t try to stand out or call attention to ourselves.  Again, we’re not doing this for recognition.  We take care of people in unobtrusive or even invisible ways.  If we’re really seamlessly doing serving practice, folks may not even be aware of everything we’re doing.  For instance, if we’re being as silent as possible while serving, then no one will notice the absence of noise, but nonetheless, we’re taking care of others by not being out of control.  Having said that, it’s also the practice of those being served and cared for to not be oblivious to how we’re being supported, but probably no one is going to call attention to it.

One of the things that ties together the “ways” (way of tea, way of calligraphy, way of flower arranging), or do 道, is that they’re simple everyday activities done with a high degree of cultivation.  We can apply that to any action, including serving: can I put that bunch of salad greens in your bowl with a high degree of cultivation?  In other words, I’m paying attention to deportment.  The root of deportment is portare, to carry.  How do I carry myself during this simple act of serving salad?

Omotenashi reminds us to pay attention, and if I’m paying attention, there’s no wasted motion or energy.  Movements are conscious, deliberate, precise, and that doesn’t necessarily mean slow.  One of the real misunderstandings about “mindfulness” is that everything has to be done at a snail’s pace.  There’s a story from many years ago about a Zen center that opened a restaurant and employed mainly practitioners.  There was a problem when one or more of them was being so slow and meticulous about setting the table that lines at the door were backing up and diners were becoming impatient.  These folks thought only way to practice and to do “mindful” work was to disregard the rest of situation and focus only on themselves and what they were doing.  They ended up causing trouble for others, not only diners but their bosses.

We need to not stand out, and sometimes what’s happening is that things are moving quickly, so then we also need to move quickly.  Yes, deliberate and precise are good, but not at the expense of being a roadblock.  To be unpretentious and unassuming means not to be self-involved.  We have to balance attention to detail and not sticking out.

There's one other way in which we need to practice paying attention.  Particularly during sesshin, it may seem like we’re doing the same thing over and over during three meals a day.  In fact, the repetition of sesshin is helpful because we always know what the next thing is -- usually zazen -- and we don’t have to spend time thinking about that, but the practice is not about just getting into a rut and coasting along.  As we know from practicing with forms in general, at first we’re hyper aware because we’re trying to do things properly, and watching others and ourselves and trying to keep up.  However, once things become familiar, we can find ourselves going through the motions and doing things “properly” but without real attention or sincerity.  Actually, it’s good if we treat every gassho as the first gassho, every bow as the first bow, every robe chant as the first robe chant.  This may be the 20th time during sesshin that we’ve put up tables and carried out a meal, always doing everything the same way, but this moment is this moment, as we learn every time someone falls down while carrying bowls of soup or pours scalding hot water into a cracked bowl.  Anything can happen, and every time is a little different because of impermanence.

Two more nyoho characteristics are that we use what exists, and we maintain a connection to the past  Our serving process here is based on Antaiji’s process, which in turn is derived from the full formal process you can see in the Komazawa video.  We didn’t make up this process for ourselves; we used what existed.  When it was time to revive our formal meal practice here, I started with what our immediate ancestors were doing at Antaiji, but we’re not Antaiji, so we had to make some modifications.  I hope we’ve retained the spirit in spite of that, and because of impermanence, adaptations will continue to happen.  For example, at our last sesshin we didn’t have enough people to do our usual process, and we had to simplify.  In order to keep our connection with the past, we have to understand the context for our serving practice.  That keeps us from making assumptions and helps us make good decisions when we have to adapt something.

As we can see, it’s important to approach a serving assignment with attention and intention.  It’s not just one more task on a work list.  It’s as highly cultivated a practice as zazen or bowing or being a tenzo, and that makes it a huge dharma gate for us.  There are also many ways in which we can take this practice into our daily lives.  Maybe we’re actually offering food to our families and friends, or maybe we’re serving people in our jobs, taking care of clients, or welcoming people into the workplace.

Every month during ryaku fusatsu, we hear the line in the Kyojukaimon that says "We should respectfully accept, attend, and serve the Three Treasures."  Sometimes that looks like the head server or the tenzo making a food offering to Manjusri during a formal meal, and sometimes that looks like simply engaging in activity with others without being disconnected and without expecting a reward.

Hoko on the practice of serving

Formal meal process in the Japanese sodo: chanting, serving, eating
from Komazawa University

Morning service at Sojiji, one of Sotoshu's two head temples