How To Cook Your Life
This blog post is unique in that it’s about a book and a film of the same name: How To Cook Your Life. I’d been planning to write about How To Cook Your Life the movie—whose subtitle is Find Nirvana in the Kitchen—at some point, and recently I’ve felt a need catch my breath a little by not having to read a whole book in order to make another blog post. I liked the idea of simply rewatching one of my favorite films while nerdily taking notes and then turning those notes into an essay. I told my husband about this plan and he agreed it was a good one. Good to take a little break from reading. Then he went to Mr. K’s bookstore and came back with a slender volume titled How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment.
My jaw dropped. “There’s a book?”
“Apparently.” Whitman was quite pleased with himself, and he totally should have been. Such synchronicity! So there went my break from reading.
And it was worth it. The book consists of a short, very old text by Dōgen Zenji called the Tenzo Kyōkun, or Instructions for the Zen Cook, followed by longer, not-nearly-as-old commentary on that text by Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi. After I’d started reading it, in another synchronistic moment, the topic of discussion for that Sunday’s dharma talk in the sangha (a.k.a. Buddhist community) I’m a part of, was Dōgen Zenji, and his Rules for Meditation.
=
Eihei Dōgen Zenji—also known as Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, Kōso Jōyō Daishi, or Busshō Dentō Kokushi—and more commonly, just Dōgen—although I’ve also heard it pronounced Do-gan and Do-jen—was born in the year 1200 and died in 1253. He was a Japanese Buddhist priest, writer, poet, philosopher, and founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. He is most known for the voluminous Shōbō-genzō, or Treasure of Knowledge Regarding the True Dharma, which is probably the most complete work ever written about Zen. The Shōbō-genzō contains Dōgen’s Principles of Zazen, or Rules for Meditation, which we talked about in my sangha. He also wrote the Eihei Daishingi, which deals with various aspects of Buddhist monastic life, including the role of the tenzo, who carries the responsibility of preparing the community’s meals. The Tenzo Kyōkun, or Instructions for the Zen Cook, is the first part of the Eihei Daishingi, and Dōgen gave it top billing for a reason. He thought it was that important. Totaling a modest fifteen pages or so, the Tenzo Kyōkun was written over a period of years and finally completed in 1237, when Dōgen was 37 years old.
And then about 730 years later, in the 1960s, Sōtō Zen priest, origami master, and writer, Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi, translated Dōgen’s Instructions for the Zen Cook from its archaic Japanese into a style more accessible for modern readers. He also wrote elucidating commentary to accompany the text. Taken together, these writings comprise the book Jinsei Ryōri no Hon, which was published in 1970. Thomas Wright came along soon after and translated the Tenzo Kyōkun, along with Uchiyama’s commentary, into English, creating the book How To Cook Your Life, which was first published in 1983. Shambhala books published it again in 2005, which is the copy I have.
I read this delightful, profound volume before rewatching the film How to Cook Your Life, which I’ve owned on DVD since 2013, if not longer. I cannot recall how I discovered this film. My husband owns a 1970 first edition copy of the Tassajara Bread Book (also known as “the Bible of bread-making”), by Zen priest and chef Edward Espe Brown, and maybe, as part of my graduate school research on mindful cooking, I was googling Brown and came across the film in that way, as he is the star of it. It’s odd that I can’t remember any specifics, given how much I love this movie. I’ve probably watched it at least ten times. Directed by Doris Dörrie and released in 2007, How to Cook Your Life was filmed at a Zen center in Scheibbs, Austria and at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, located in the Ventana Wilderness in California. There’s also some footage from the San Francisco Zen Center. The film documents a couple of week-long cooking classes led by Brown at the former two locations. He is the reason I love this film so much. He’s just wonderful—so funny and human and wise. And watching How To Cook Your Life this time around, after having read the Uchiyama book, I was able to appreciate it even more than ever before because I knew what Brown and others were talking about when they referred to the Tenzo Kyōkun.
Before diving into some of the ideas presented in the film, I think it would make sense for me to touch on some concepts from the Tenzo Kyōkun, just to give you that context right out of the gate. Then I can organically interweave Uchiyama’s commentary on that medieval Dōgen text with some of Brown’s teachings from the movie.
=
The Tenzo Kyōkun is the first writing or teaching of any kind (at least in Japan) having to do with the preparation and serving of meals as an expression of buddhadharma.” Uchiyama considers the it “one of the most valuable religious texts of all time, since it deals not only with the handling of food, but also with our attitude toward all matters and people we encounter in our day-to-day lives.” He himself was inspired to work as a tenzo because of the Tenzo Kyōkun, and because of the following passage in particular. Dōgen says: “Rejoice in your birth into the world, where you are capable of using your body freely to offer food to the Three Treasures: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Considering the innumerable possibilities in a timeless universe we have been given a marvelous opportunity…My sincerest desire is that you exhaust all the strength and effort of all your lives—past, present, and future—and every moment of every day into your practice through the work of the tenzo, so that you form a strong connection with the buddhadharma. To view all things with this attitude is called Joyful Mind.”
Let’s break that down a little. The first part was, “Rejoice in your birth into the world, where you are capable of using your body freely to offer food to the Three Treasures: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.” Most people are probably familiar with who the Buddha was. The Dharma refers to the Buddha’s teachings, and the Sangha, as I mentioned earlier, is the spiritual community consisting of Buddhist monks, nuns, and lay persons. Here in Asheville, we are lucky to have multiple such communities to choose from, including Mountain Mindfulness Sangha, Windhorse Zen Community, Asheville Shambhala Meditation Center, Great Tree Zen Women’s Temple, and the one whose Sunday morning services I started attending in December, Anattasati Magga. In the next part of that passage, Dōgen says, “Considering the innumerable possibilities in a timeless universe we have been given a marvelous opportunity.” He’s referring to the work of the tenzo in particular, but we can see any work we’ve been presented with as a “marvelous opportunity.” He says that his “sincerest desire is that you exhaust all the strength and effort of all your lives—past, present, and future—and every moment of every day into your practice through the work of the tenzo, so that you form a strong connection with the buddhadharma.” The word buddhadharma refers specifically to the Buddha’s teachings of, but most broadly to the reality of life as it is when experienced from the viewpoint of satori, or enlightenment. And this idea of “exhausting all the strength and effort of all your lives…and every moment of every day into your practice through the work of the tenzo” is the central tenet of the Tenzo Kyōkun, and of Zen in general. By pouring all our strength and effort—or you might say our passion for life, or our divine attention—into everything we do, we “take the utmost care,” to quote Uchiyama, “of that world in which we live out our total Self.” He says that this is the "fundamental spirit running through the Tenzo Kyōkun.” And the last bit of that Dōgen passage went, “To view all things with this attitude is called Joyful Mind.”
In Sōtō Zen, there are three different concepts of mind: Joyful Mind, Magnanimous Mind, and Parental Mind. In his commentary, Uchiyama distinguishes Joyful Mind from simply feeling happy, saying that a tenzo’s work is hard and sometimes painful, and it offers no time to “get enraptured in religious ecstasy.” That wasn’t what Dōgen encouraged through his teachings and way of life. He was interested in the challenges of day-to-day life—challenges that were of course inevitable and unavoidable—life is suffering, the first noble truth. So Joyful Mind refers to a willingness to give one’s full attention to whatever task they’re presented with, be it the chopping of a carrot or a terminal diagnosis. All of it is you, anyway, or as Uchiyama says, “Everything that you encounter is your life.” That might sound overly simple—and in a way I guess it is—but in another way, it’s kind of mind-blowing. And it’s basically the definition of Magnanimous Mind.
Also called Big Mind, Magnanimous Mind is probably my favorite concept from the book How To Cook Your Life. It’s one of those concepts that you might need to just let roll around in your head for a couple days and then it will suddenly click. Basically, at least in my understanding, Big Mind is a way of conceptualizing the Self, with a capital S. We tend to think of ourselves as existing in the world; we were born into the world, and when we die, we will disappear from the world. But Big Mind says that “we and the world we live in together make up the Self.” When you were born, you didn’t just enter the world. You created the world from your own sensory, emotional, and cognitive perceptions. No one else experiences the world quite like you do. And when you die, the world that you created, so to speak, will die, too. The being that you perceive as your Self is actually identical to the world; it contains the world (perception again) and is contained by the world at the same time, all of the time. Our working in the role of tenzo—or of anything, but cooking provides an especially rich opportunity for practice—allows for the unfolding of the Self. This must be what Edward Espe Brown means when he says in the film, quoting Suzuki Rōshi, “When you’re cooking, you’re not just working on food. You’re also working on yourself. You’re working on other people.”
Another aspect of Big Mind is comparable, if not equivalent, to the notion of equanimity, which I touched on in my episode about the Bhagavad-Gita and has come up in at least a couple other episodes. Big Mind eschews binaries, essentially. And so “big” in this sense is not the opposite of small. It is simply open and accepting of everything that is. Most people lead lives that are largely fabricated by thought, and predetermined by assumptions of what is good and what is bad, fortunate and unfortunate, a success and a failure. But Big Mind does not claim to know what “good” and “bad” even mean, let alone evaluate anything by them. In his Instructions for the Cook, Dōgen says, “Your attitude towards things should not be contingent upon their quality. A person who is influenced by the quality of a thing, or who changes his speech or manner according to the appearance or position of the people he meets, is not a man working in the Way.” He says a tenzo should never talk badly about the ingredients he is given to work with, nor think of things they have to carry as being light or heavy. He call this taking sides. Having a Magnanimous Mind means being without prejudice.
Which makes sense when you consider that it also means that everything you encounter is your life, and you are therefore responsible for all of it—in that you must respond to it and work with it. Indeed, that is all you can ever do, unless you really want to suffer. As Brown says in the film How To Cook Your Life, quoting Suzuki Rōshi, “When you wash the rice, wash the rice. When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. When you stir the soup, stir the soup.” In this way we “take care of the activity.” We “make it happen.” I love the idea of “taking care” of an activity. We tend to think of doing an activity, or taking part in it, more than taking care of it. And when Brown says “make it happen,” I think what he really means is allow it to happen. By taking care of something—which requires giving it our full attention—we enable it to be its best self. And hopefully we do so in a loving way.
This is where Parental Mind comes in. It’s pretty self-explanatory. But I’ll explain it, anyway. Also called Grandparent Mind and Kind Mind, Parental Mind implies one has the caring attitude of a parental figure. Dōgen says we should bring this caring attitude to any and every "position of responsibility” we occupy. Where cooking is concerned, he evokes Parental Mind when he says one should handle rice, vegetables, and other ingredients “as if they were his own eyes.” He also admonishes cooks to “handle every single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf.” This has actually been a helpful reminder for me to be more cognizant of how I handle things—literally. I’m not a brute or anything, but since reading the Tenzo Kyōkun I’ve realized I could stand to be gentler a lot of the time, namely with cooking tools and the vegetables on which I’m using them. Parental Mind is also implied in something that Edward Espe Brown says in the film. He says that when we cook food, we’re essentially saying to it, “How can I help you?” In other words, we’re trying to bring out the highest potential in the food we’re working with. We’re helping it fulfill itself. This is quite different from how most of us are probably used to approaching food: with the attitude of “How can I make you be what I want you to be?”
Just this evening (I’m writing this on February 21st) I caught myself interacting this way with an onion. This onion—a red one that I intended to pickle in white vinegar and lime juice—was being quite difficult. First of all, one layer of it was kind of…not rotten, but…not right, either. So in removing that layer, I was left with something much trickier to chop than usual. And on top of that, the thin film between each layer was thicker than normal and kept sticking to my knife in a way that hindered my chopping. I thought of Edward Espe Brown, who laughs in the film about getting frustrated with a sponge that keeps falling into the sink every time he places it on the edge of the sink. “I’m going to make you stay on the edge of this sink,” he says to it. And in my own mind I was castigating this onion for being so weird and awkward—for being unlike I wanted it to be. Remembering Parental Mind, I took a breath and loosened my grip on the knife, and therefore the situation in general. It may have been a difficult onion, but my task was still the same: to help it become its best and most beautiful bright pink, pickled Self.
And this part probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it just in case: we do this with other people all the time, expecting them to be how we want them to be. And sometimes that expectation turns into forceful behavior or lingering resentment or childish, angry outbursts. How different might our relationships be if we approached every person in our life with the attitude of “How can I help you be your best Self?” Or how can I at least step out of the way? Because I am just an ordinary person. I may have ideas of how people should behave in a given scenario, but according to Zen Buddhism, that’s all I have: ideas. In the book How To Cook Your Life, Uchiyama says that this humble recognition is far more important than being “obsessively bound to one’s own ideas of justice or rightness, which will only lead to discord, fighting, and war.”
=
Now I’m going to turn my attention to the documentary film How to Cook Your Life, which stars Edward Espe Brown, who references the Tenzo Kyōkun a few times, and who is an all-around awesome person to capture on video as he leads cooking classes and gives dharma talks.
Brown was born on March 24th, 1945. His mother died when he was three years old. Three days after her death, Brown’s father decided to send Edward and his older brother to an orphanage in San Anselmo, California, as that was the only way he could visit them regularly—the alternative being to send them to live with relatives in South Dakota. Brown's father remarried four years later, and then the boys returned home. Brown discovered Zen Buddhism in 1965, when he was 20 years old. His teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, ordained him as a priest in 1971, giving him the dharma name Jusan Kainei (“Longevity Mountain, Peaceful Sea”). He was the first head cook, or tenzo, at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, which is where he learned, at the age of 21, how to make bread for the first time—something he’d wanted to know how to do—and teach others how to do—since he was 10 years old and tasted his Aunt Alice’s homemade bread, which was a revelation to him and made him wonder why people at the “puffy stuff” and “chemical-y” stuff he’d been raised on up to then—bread he describes in the film as “paper-y” and “cardboard-y.”
Just five years after learning how to bake bread and deciding it was a “precious” activity—he says it “felt like love,” not work—Brown published the Tassajara Bread Book. Subsequent books of his include Tassajara Cooking, The Tassajara Recipe Book, and The Complete Tassajara Cookbook. So it’s not just the activity of bread-making that he loves and believes to be precious. In How to Cook Your Life, Brown laments how often “give away” our capacity to cook and bake and otherwise do things with our hands and bodies—activities that “actually give us health and vitality.” When we cook, he says, our hands “get to be hands.” This alone is a kind of nourishment, not to mention the literal nourishment we receive—and provide to others—by eating the food we cook. This nourishment does not come out of a package.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I can’t recall exactly how I discovered the film How to Cook Your Life, but I most likely came across it in my researching culinary therapy and mindful cooking, which I was at one point planning to write my Master’s Thesis on for my degree in Mental Health Counseling. I wound up changing my thesis topic to in-home treatment for eating disorders, which I somewhat regret now, as I am no longer interested in the latter and still very much interested in the former. Cooking is an essential activity of my life. I am the tenzo in my household, not only preparing the majority of my and my husband’s dinners, but also deciding what those meals will be and making each week’s grocery list. Sometimes I tire of this job—though usually of the planning aspects more so than the actual cooking—and it seems impossible that I have to figure out yet another week’s worth of dinners. It’s relentless, the again, and again, and again-ness of it all. And this is just a household of two; I can imagine how cooks in charge of big families must feel. And to be an actual tenzo, in charge of providing meals for an entire monastery every day? Making it a part of your spiritual practice would be essential, lest you go crazy from the Sisyphean-ness of it all. I’m sure that would be an element—feeling like the job can never be completed—if things went smoothly every day. But of course things do not always go smoothly. Edward Espe Brown talks about fiascos just being part of the “whole deal” of cooking. Distasteful things are going to happen—sometimes literally—and all you can do, he says, is “chew and swallow.”
=
Major themes from the film How To Cook Your Life include “who is cooking whom?”, “no preferences, no aversions,” “a duck and infinity,” imperfections and blemishes, affluence, and anger. Regarding the latter, Brown says that a lot of the anger we feel is just in us. It’s old, something we’ve been carrying around for a long time, and has little or nothing to do with today. He shares the Zen story about having a little piece of feces on your nose, so that everywhere go smells bad. “This stinks,” you say. To which a monk or other teacher would reply, “Go wash your face.” Attitude is everything, basically. There’s some comical footage in the film How to Cook Your Life of Brown getting dealing with anger and impatience, with his students and with certain objects—like the little plastic thing in the bottle of vinegar—“Why do they do this?” he says, shaking the bottle. “Don’t they know you can just use your thumb to adjust how much comes out?” He also attacks a block of pepper jack cheese with a spoon, because its plastic wrapping is impenetrable and of course when in need of a proper tool for opening it, said tool is nowhere to be found.
In the book How To Cook Your Life, Kōshō Uchiyama addresses this idea being frustrated with our circumstances when he says that “the highest, ultimate truth in life is grounded in the fact that there are no favorable or adverse circumstances, no fortune or misfortune. All there is, is the life of the Self.” He and Brown both reflect on the all-too-common occurrence of people approaching life as an exercise in striving, in chasing after things because we hope they’ll make us happy. Uchiyama elaborates, saying that “the idea of seeking happiness presupposes that at present we are unhappy. In Buddhism, this kind of dualistic thinking has no place.” Dualism is a way of constructing the world so that it stands in opposition to us; we see the world as something that puts obstacles between us and our “happiness.” With its notions of Heaven and Hell, Uchiyama says that Christianity appeals to man’s “egocentric desires” for concepts to be fixed as either bad or good. “It is easy,” he says, to comprehend the idea of there being such and such a god, with a certain teaching, who, if you follow that teaching will bestow divine favor on you and guarantee your ascent into heaven.” Buddhism, on the other hand, sees that the whole world is our true Self, thereby erasing the illusion of “other” altogether—be it a god or a fellow human—which leaves us with nothing to be dependent on or blocked by.
This ties into another notion that Brown touches on in the movie: our desire to be liked, and to please others. He says that for many years his unconscious goal in life was to not only make food that everyone liked, but to also be a person whom everyone liked. And of course the harder he tried to meet this goal, the more upset he’d become when someone inevitably didn’t like him or his food. He said that this way of life is incredibly depressing, and can lead to feeling a lot of anger. It is utterly unworkable. So instead of trying to please others because you think that doing so will ultimately please you, just follow Dōgen’s advice, which he himself borrowed from a text from the year 1103 called the Chanyuan Qinggui, and “Pay full attention to your work in preparing the meal; attend to every aspect yourself so that it will naturally turn out well. Brown further references Dōgen in saying that one need not make a masterpiece, but simply put forth “a sincere and honest effort.” The word “sincere,” Brown points out in the film, literally means “without wax,” so it it is therefore “the quality where your imperfections show.” He uses and dented and banged-up copper tea pot as an example and ends up having a good a little cry of appreciation in recounting a story about some other tea pots whose persisting cheerfulness—because they were so plump and bright—despite being banged up, once gave him the motivation he needed to make it through an hard night of cooking. “If they can do it,” he said to himself, “so can I.” I’m sure many people would cock their heads at Brown imbuing so much personality into some tea pots, but it doesn’t seem so out of the ordinary when you recall how everything you encounter is your life. And therefore everything—including inanimate things—is a teacher.
Brown says that our culture’s M.O. is to disregard things. We’re overly materialistic, yes, but in another way, at the same time, we do not care for the things in our life. We’ve lost sight of how those things are the result of human effort, of “our labor, and our good hearts, and our care for one another, and our blood, and our sweat, and our tears.” The food we eat has also been turned into a taken-for-granted commodity, merely “fuel for the human machine.” In reducing or even eliminating the role that cooking plays in our lives, we sever our connection to what we eat. We are not a part of that food’s story, never had a relationship with it. And it’s therefore so much easier for us to waste it. In the Tenzo Kyōkun, Dōgen admonishes cooks not to waste a single grain of rice. In the film, one modern-day tenzo talks about making left-overs, and then making left-overs from the left-overs, and then taking anything that’s left to a homeless shelter.
One of my favorite moments in the film How To Cook Your Life comes near the end, when Edward Espe Brown shares a sweet, childlike poem by Donald Babcock, which his birth mother copied down just a week before she died, when Brown was three. He never says how his mother died, but he does say that she knew she was dying, so I assume she had an illness of some kind. The poem she wrote down is called “The Little Duck,” and it describes a duck who is not disturbed by the waves of the ocean, because he is resting in the ocean. The duck “rests in the immediate as if it were infinity. That’s religion. And the little duck has it.” Have you ever heard a lovelier definition of religion? To rest in the immediate as if it were infinity. And of course the immediate is infinity, because all there ever is, is right now. To quote Jack Kerouac as I’ve already done at least a couple times on this show, “Eternity and the Here-and-Now are the exact same thing.” Dōgen Zenji certainly had this notion in mind when he wrote in his Instructions for the Zen Cook about hearing another tenzo say of his work, “If I do not do it now, when else can I do it?” Anytime we ever do anything is always now. In his commentary, Uchiyama says that when we fully grasp this concept, we see that the only thing stable and constant in life is in “living it out as it is.” Only by doing that, can we be free of pain and suffering.
=
One Zen tenet that I haven’t mentioned yet involves the notion of shikan-taza, which Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi explores in the book How to Cook Your Life, which is his own reflections on 13th century Zen Master Dōgen Zenji’s Instructions for the Zen Cook, a.k.a. the Tenzo Kyōkun. Actually this concept has been running through my entire discussion, and as far as I can tell is just another way of talking about Joyful Mind. Shikan-taza means “just doing zazen”—zazen being meditation, essentially, or the practice of identifying with the true form of the Self, as Dōgen says in the Shobo-genzo—but the concept can also be applied to everything we do, including the work of a tenzo or cook. Shikan-taza is the act of concentrating wholly on one thing, which is what Uchiyama says is the “cornerstone of the teachings of Dōgen Zenji.” When it comes to concentrating wholly on meditation, one should not strive to empty the mind of thought, because that, according to Dōgen and Uchiyama, “is just another form of fantasy.” When we understand zazen as the mind being “innately one with all phenomena,” then we no longer pursue thought or try to chase it off. As Uchiyama says, “We let arise whatever arises and allow to fall away whatever falls away.” He says that the practice of shikan-taza is not a step towards enlightenment, but is in itself enlightenment.
Applying this notion to cooking brings us back to Suzuki Roshi’s advice to Edward Espe Brown: “When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots.” It’s simple, but that doesn’t means it’s easy. It means that your mind is focused on the activity of cutting carrots, as opposed to any other number of enticing thoughts that have nothing to do with carrots at all. It also means, at least for me, that your body is focused on that activity, too—giving it no more and no less effort than the activity requires. When I’m chopping vegetables, for instance, I’ll sometimes become aware of clenching my jaw, or furrowing my brow, neither of which are necessary, or I’ll realize I’m not breathing deeply enough, which is necessary.
It’s a testament to the power of language that, in simply learning a new term for what is basically the practice of being truly present, of being mindful—in this case the term shikan-taza—I have become more intentional than ever before about engaging in that practice. Writing this blog post has felt really good and unstressful because I’ve approached it with that shikan-taza mindset. There’s one step in my process that I have historically done with a rushed energy, and with that nagging sense of “there’s gotta be a better way!” It’s the step where I type up all the passages I flagged while reading whatever book is the focus of that particular blog. For this episode, I typed up five-and-half single-spaced pages of Uchiyama passages. But instead of approaching this step as a means to an end, as something to get through so that I can then do the “real" work of synthesizing the information and writing my reflections on it, I simply gave my full attention to it. And the activity of reading the passages I flagged because they struck me as important or profound was, as a result, a thoroughly pleasant and fulfilling one. And I realized that the work of typing wasn’t a big deal and really didn’t take that much time, since I’m a fast typist and I genuinely enjoy typing. Also, that step of the process is just another way to absorb the material and, in a sense, meditate on it. Sometimes I realize it isn’t worth typing up. But for the most part, it is worth this extra time and attention, and it supports my value of learning. Someone else might have a faster method for compiling notes, but as Dōgen Zenji would say, “someone else” is not me, and faster does not necessarily mean better. By keeping the concept of shikan-taza in mind, my typing of How To Cook Your Life passages felt like self-assured prayer instead of tedium tinged with self-doubt.
I’d wager that people who claim to dislike cooking have not approached it enough as a way of practicing shikan-taza or Joyful Mind. They’re likely rushing through it as just a means to an end, perhaps all along thinking, on some level, that there’s got to be a better way. And if cooking is merely viewed as a process that results in a meal, then it really would make more logical sense to buy a meal that’s already cooked, seeing as how it takes far less time to eat a meal than to prepare one using fresh ingredients. The inherent value of cooking does not lie in its efficiency. One must value the process of it at least as much—if not more than—one values the resulting product. And so the importance of working unhurriedly cannot be overstressed. Whenever I feel rushed in the kitchen, cooking changes from an enjoyable activity to a stressful one. And I’ve realized that the best thing to do when feeling rushed is to slow down. The seconds saved in hurrying are not worth the loss of shikan-taza such hurrying implies. When we hurry, we give our life force to hurrying, rather than to whatever activity we’re hurrying through. Uchiyama puts it beautifully when he writes, “By throwing our life force into our work, every situation literally comes to life and that in turn generates clarity and vividness. When the situation is full of life, we become more alive as a result. This means, then, that our life force has breathed a vividness into the situation.”
In last week’s episode I talked about walking my dogs in weather that would typically be judged—by dualistic, non-Buddhist standards—as dreary or unpleasant. I said that through moving my body in that weather, the weather becomes more beautiful. I see it through eyes that are enlivened by physical movement, and I feel the air through skin that is warmed by blood pumping faster through my veins. My whole organism is more awake, and therefore the weather has the same awake quality. This phenomenon strikes me as a wonderfully concretized example of what Uchiyama’s talking about. In walking, the activated life force become more literal—apparent in an increased heart rate, accelerated respiration, and rosy cheeks—but the basic concept is the same when it comes to any other task or activity. Devote your whole self to it, and it becomes more beautiful.
=
In reading this blog post, you have born witness to part of my process of falling in love with Zen Buddhism. Another other part of that process has involved finally joining a sangha, which I did back in December, and attending the service and dharma class every Sunday morning, and in April I’m going to take the Precepts—basically officially calling myself a Buddhist, which I admit feels odd to me, but I think it’s a necessary step in a journey that might eventually find me a Lay Buddhist Minister. Or it might not. But this feels like the right time for me and Buddhism to take our relationship to the next level. We’ve been flirting with each other for literal decades. And Zen Buddhism—Sōtō Zen in particular—is just. So. Wonderful. In what other religion (and I’ll return to that word in a minute) is there a major, highly revered text that provides instructions for cooking? In the book How To Cook Your Life, Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi says that Dōgen Zenji’s Instructions for the Zen Cook is “religious in the sense that it teaches us most fundamentally how to live out our own lives.”
This morning, in the midst of my usual morning routine, I realized what Uchiyama meant. Zen is not a religion in the sense of there being a godhead to worship, but in the sense of doing things “religiously,” that is, with consistent and conscientious regularity, as well as with the sense of everything being connected and sacred. Just as the Sufis pray five times a day, the Buddhists apply the dharma to everything they do. I was having some anxiety this morning, worried something bad might happen to my husband and my dogs, who were going to hang out on some property we have in Madison County. I thought of various traumatic misfortunes that could befall them there, or on the way there, or on the way back. Then I remembered Zen, and how all thought is illusion, and I asked myself what was actually happening in my world—a world from which I was not separate—and I decided to focus on recording this radio show, to channel my life energy into that, instead of into worry. This kind of practicality, as Uchiyama says, is what makes the Tenzo Kyōkun a religious text, and I’d say what makes Zen in general a truly lovely religion.
Uchiyama also says, “The degree of separation from the reality of life appears as suffering and struggling.” Anthony de Mello echoes this notion in his book Awareness, which I talked about in my very first blog post. He says that if you’re suffering in any way, then you’re not seeing things clearly, not seeing reality for what it really is. And a great way to get back in touch with reality is to do something real. Chop wood, carry water, as they say. Make something happen, as Edward Espe Brown says. And when we give our energy to real things instead of imagined ones, it seems only natural that goodness would then emanate from us, and according to Uchiyama, this natural emanation of goodness means—more than any supposed satori experience—that we are truly living the Way.
