One Time, One Meeting

In The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi, her gentle satire on Zen practice, the writer and photographer Susan Moon invents an eccentric Zen master who answers questions in the manner of “Dear Abby”. When a young woman asks where she might go to meet cute guys, Tofu Roshi explains that if she’s looking for psychologists, she should check out a Vipassana center, but if she’s looking for poets and artists, she should do her cruising at a Tibetan monastery. If she fancies carpenters or cooks, she should head for the zendo.

Susan Ichi Su Moon is a long-time Zen practitioner, who knows whereof she speaks. Cooking and Zen practice have much in common, and over the centuries they have enjoyed an enduring relationship. Readers of a certain age may remember the Tassajara Bread Book, a popular cookbook in the days of the Whole Earth movement. Its author is Edward Espe Brown, an ordained Zen priest and one of the founders of the Greens restaurant in San Francisco. More recent cookbooks include Bettina Vitell’s A Taste of Heaven & Earth, whose simple recipes generate complex flavors, and Seppo Edward Farrey’s Three Bowls, which interleaves enticing recipes with vignettes of life in the zendo. Both Vitell and Farrey were head cooks at Dai Bosatsu Zendo, a Rinzai Zen monastery in the Catskills. Their books reflect their rigorous training.

The affinity between cooking and Zen may be traced, in part, to a classic text in the Zen tradition, Eihei Dogen’s Instruction for the Tenzo (1237).* Written by the founder of the Soto school of Zen, this text is at once a practical guide to the cook and a lucid exposition of an ethical perspective. At the practical level, Dogen advises the tenzo (head cook) of the monastery on such matters as the selection of lentils and the separation of rice from sand. At the philosophical level, he advocates a way of being and an attitude of mind. Faithfully held and thoroughly developed, this attitude will produce meals that embody the “three virtues” of mildness, cleanliness, and formality. And it will also advance the cook on the path of liberation.

Of the multiple components that make up Dogen’s attitude to cooking, the most central is “sincerity,” by which he means wholehearted attention to every last detail. “In the art of cooking,” Dogen writes, “the essential consideration is to have a deeply sincere and respectful mind regardless of the fineness or coarseness of the materials.” Rejecting conventional hierarchies, the tenzo will pay consistent attention to every task and every ingredient, however menial or exalted. “Do not be idle even for a moment,” Dogen sternly advises. “Do not be careful about one thing and careless about another.” Give as much attention to a “broth of wild grasses” as you would give to a “fine cream soup.” The tenzo who implements this advice will learn “to turn things while being turned by things.” He will realize “freedom from all discrimination.”