Food according to the dharma of thusness
At Sanshin we follow nyoho guidelines most closely for meals during sesshin and retreats, particularly because they're taken using oryoki. While we maintain an attitude of care and attention to what we're serving and eating at any time, we're happy to enjoy pizza during a work day or salad dressing at a potluck. The point of this practice is not to be rigid and holier-than-thou, but to be appropriate and considerate of circumstances.
Materials (tai 体)
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What ingredients go into the creation of nyoho meals? You can use donated food and you can certainly buy groceries. Here at Sanshin, these days we’re investigating partnering with local farms as a part of our practice. It‘s an opportunity to investigate teachings about the two kinds of food: shomyojiki and jamyojiki.
Our food often comes at the cost of the lives of other beings, plants or animals. Sometimes it’s the production method of the food that costs lives, or the transportation method. Shomyojiki is food obtained the right way, but also food that’s wholesome and beneficial for mind and body and supports practice for ourselves and others. It makes best use of resources, including the lives of other beings. In general, we want to serve good quality food but not extravagant, cost effective food but not necessarily the cheapest out there if it’s no good. As part of your practice, you can consider seasonality and what’s available where you live if you wish. It's important to know that exotic Asian food is not a requirement. Asian food can work well going into oryoki bowls, but there are a lot of vegetarian cuisines in the world. Familiar food is always preferable; practitioners may be anxious about something they don’t recognize. Ingredients to avoid in Zen cooking
Five pungent herbs
Zen cooking does not use the five pungent herbs or what we might call aromatics: onions, garlic, leeks, shallots, chives. This is a very old teaching; Hindus consider aromatics to be rajasic (expanding) foods that stimulate passion and intellect, clouding the mind and interfering with meditation. In the Surangama Sutra, the Buddha explains: Ananda, all beings live if they eat wholesome food and die if they take poison. In their search for samadhi, they should abstain from eating five kinds of pungent roots (i.e. garlic, the three kinds of onions and leeks); if eaten cooked, they are aphrodisiac and if raw, they cause irritability. Although those who eat them may read the twelve divisions of the Mahayana canon, they drive away seers in the ten directions who abhor the bad odor, and attract hungry ghosts who lick their lips. The Brahama Net Sutra says: A disciple of the Buddha should not eat the five pungent herbs. This is so even if they are added as flavoring to other main dishes. Hence, if he deliberately does so, he commits a secondary offense. (Of course, eating aromatics can also result in various distracting personal odors that make living in close quarters with other practitioners somewhat unpleasant.) You might be worried that without aromatics, your food will be tasteless. Actually, without the covering of onions and garlic, practitioners are sometimes surprised that they can now really taste carrots and potatoes and that the food seems fresher. There's no heavy, lingering aftertaste that you can't wait to wash away with peppermint tea, or that you notice in your digestive system during subsequent zazen periods. The point is to support practice, not to serve an impressive dish. Oil
If you're cooking for a meal that will be eaten using oryoki, you will need to avoid anything oily. That means fried foods, salad dressing, gravy, food soaked in butter, oily melted cheese, or anything that will separate into a greasy layer. Practitioners will be washing their bowls only with hot water, not soap, and there will be nothing that prevents oil from coating bowls and linens in the process. In addition, anything that makes bowls slippery increases the chances that someone ends up with a lapful of scalding soup. What if someone donates aromatics or oil?
Sometimes a well-meaning donor wants to support practice by giving food or providing a meal, and we certainly want to encourage that kind of generosity. The donor may be someone who isn't in a position to participate in a sesshin but wants to feel connected and to enable others in a more intensive practice. However, donors don't always know which foods follow nyoho or oryoki guidelines and which don't. What do you do if a donors arrives with a box of fried potato croquettes? Well, you don't say "No, thank you." Put them on individual plates and serve them alongside the oryoki meal; this is a betsuzara 別皿, or "special plate." Instead of washing the oily plates when the oryoki are washed, collect them and take them to the kitchen for later cleanup with soap. An oily soup can go into separate bowls handled the same way. A donated dish chock full of aromatics might be saved for a meal toward the end of sesshin or frozen for a potluck. Color (shiki 色)
The meal chant says, “The five colors and six tastes of this meal are offered to dharma and sangha.” Our choice of ingredients affects what the dish looks like as well as how it tastes. The nyoho of shiki (color) helps ensure the meal is nutritionally balanced, as well as visually appealing. To the degree possible, we make sure that five color groups (red, white, black, green/blue, and yellow) as well as six tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, mild, and spicy) are all present.
For instance, we wouldn't serve a meal of oatmeal, peanut butter toast and cinnamon applesauce. It tastes good and is nutritionally balanced, but it's all brown. For the same reason, we wouldn't make a lunch menu that included jasmine rice, cream soup and a cauliflower dish, making everything white. Carrying this balanced approach forward, we also have to consider cooking method; we shouldn’t be cooking everything the same way such that participants are eating three dishes that are all boiled, steamed, braised, baked, pickled or raw. (As we've seen, frying is not an option if practitioners are using oryoki.) Amount (ryo 量)
One phrase you hear a lot in the training temple is mottainai もったいない : what a waste, or don’t waste anything. You may know the story of the monk who chased a single cabbage leaf down a river so as not to waste it. There's an expectation that you don’t lose even a grain of rice in preparing, serving and eating a meal.
Our practice is to find a way to use almost everything. If you boil vegetables to make a soup stock, you use those vegetables in another dish. If you have leftovers, you turn them into something else. There’s an understanding that almost no garbage is produced in the kitchen of a great tenzo. Dogen advises counting the practitioners and then determining how much food it will take to feed them, including people who are working as servers during the meal and those who are out of the zendo due to illness or other things. It's important to have enough food for everyone at the sesshin without an overabundance that will go to waste. This is not like cooking for a party or family reunion, where you might say to yourself, I’ll just cook twice what we think we need to make sure there’s enough. The practice is instead to pay attention and cook the right amount. If there’s no one at your center outside of sesshin to eat the leftovers, that’s a waste. Not only is it poor stewardship of temple resources, but all of that food was donated, whether it was directly given or bought with money donated by practitioners. We’re not allowed to treat donations that way. All donations are an offering to Buddha, not different than the flowers and incense on the altar One way we manage ryo is by understanding the role of dinner. Dinner is not a meal, but medicine (yakuseki 薬石). It's an approach that harkens back to early sangha in India that completed its alms rounds in the morning, ate a noon meal, and didn't eat anything else that day. There are only two, rather than three, dishes at dinner, and since it's not really a meal, there's no chanting. It's a fine opportunity to turn leftovers into two acceptable dishes by combining soups or salads with each other, or cooking pasta in leftover soup to make casserole. |
Other resources
Hoko's article in Buddhadharma magazine: The Taste of Thusness (Vietnamese translation is here.) ryo 量 色 shiki 体 tai (?) Parking lot
Shurangama Sutra Ven Hsuan Hua The Shurangama says ... Avoiding the Plants of the Onion Group Beings who seek to enter samadhi should refrain from eating five pungent plants of this world [onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and chives]. If these five are eaten cooked, they increase one’s sexual desire; if they are eaten raw, they increase one’s anger.Therefore, even if people in this world who eat pungent plants can expound the twelve divisions of the sutra canon, the gods and immortals of the ten directions will stay far away from them because they smell so bad. However, after they eat these things the hungry ghosts will hover around and kiss their lips. Being always in the presence of ghosts, their blessings and virtue dissolve as the days go by, and they experience no lasting benefit. People who eat pungent plants and also cultivate samadhi will not be protected by the Bodhisattvas, gods, immortals, or good spirits of the ten directions; therefore, the tremendously powerful demon kings, able to do as they please, will appear in the body of a Buddha and speak dharma for them, denouncing the prohibitive precepts and praising lust, rage, and delusion. When their lives end, these people will join the retinue of demon kings. When they use up their blessings as demons, they will fall into the Unintermittent Hell. Ananda, those who cultivate for Bodhi should never eat the five pungent plants. This is the first of the gradual stages of cultivation. Master Hsuan Hua comments, in case we missed the point ... After people eat these strong-smelling foods, the odor lingers around them and attracts ghosts. The ghosts boldly go up and kiss those who partake of the five pungent plants, in an attempt to taste what they’ve eaten. Ghosts eat by contact, as we have learned, so those who eat these impure things are literally in the hands of ghosts who hang around and keep touching them. You may not be one who can see them, but they are really there doing just that. ... ... people who eat the five pungent plants. Because they eat such things, the gods, immortals, Bodhisattvas, and good spirits do not protect them. Therefore, the demon kings who possess great power can have their way with them. The demon king appears as a Buddha and speaks demonic dharma to them, praising sexual desire, anger, and stupidity. Having been confused by the demons, these people lose their proper knowledge and proper views and any real wisdom. Instead, they harbor deviant knowledge and deviant views. The demon king says sexual desire is good, and they believe it. “The Buddha told me so! He said it’s no problem.” That’s called mistaking a thief for one’s own son. One mistakes the demon king for the Buddha. Therefore, “When their lives end, these people will join the retinue of demon kings.” When their worldly blessings are used up, they die and obediently go over to the retinue of the demon king. |