Jean-Philippe Cyr, the Canadian blogger and cookbook author known as the Buddhist Chef, has heard it all when it comes to the reasons people don’t want to follow a vegan diet. It’s expensive, it doesn’t lead to instant weight loss, it angers family members. Recently, someone complained that vegan recipes create too many dishes to wash. Cyr accepted this with a laugh, as he is wont to do, knowing full well that people will always find excuses. “But when you have the why, the how becomes very easy,” the classically trained chef says of his decision to become vegan after returning from his first meditation retreat. Extending compassion to all beings was the logical next step for him when he decided to become Buddhist. 

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In French we say the tree that doesn’t bend breaks.”

Still, he knows his path isn’t for everyone, and he supports a middle way for those who aren’t fully sold on the vegan lifestyle. “The tree that doesn’t bend breaks,” he says. If everyone simply ate a little less meat, so many animals would be saved, he says, and he’s in favor of getting there however we can. As a food blogger and cookbook author, he works toward that goal by developing recipes that, as he says, seduce meat eaters—familiar dishes like shepherd’s pie, lobster rolls, and flaky apple tart. After the 2019 release of his first book, The Buddhist Chef: 100 Simple, Feel-Good Vegan Recipes: A Cookbook, he doubled down on the hearty, comforting recipes with his just-released The Buddhist Chef’s Homestyle Cooking: Simple, Satisfying Vegan Recipes for Sharing.

Tricycle caught up with Cyr to learn more about his new book, how his Buddhist practice informed his decision to change the way he cooks and eats, and how he navigates nonvegan family members.

When did you first learn about Buddhism? Seven years ago, I attended a Vipassana meditation retreat in Montebello, [Quebec]. It’s a nice center, and I’ve been back there a lot of times now to cook for people that are on retreat. When you go there for a retreat, you don’t get to know people because it’s silent. But when you go back there and cook and work with people, you realize that people are wounded. You don’t go to the doctor if you’re not sick, you know?

What compelled you to go to the meditation retreat? I was suffering. I was selfish. I’m a pretty narcissistic person. I like to be recognized. I have to be honest. But you have to separate the public figure from the person, otherwise you’ll think you’re perfect. If they say you’re the best or the worst, they’re both wrong.

When did you become vegan? I was on the verge of becoming vegan [when I attended the meditation retreat]. I had read a couple of books about veganism and the health implications of a plant-based diet, but I hadn’t made the connection between the animal and the plate yet. So I attended this retreat, and I was driving back with a woman, and we stopped at a fast-food chain. She said she was having the vegetarian burger, and I said, “I’m gonna have the regular burger.” She was shocked. She was like, “Aren’t you vegan? We just spent ten days meditating on compassion!” Her reaction made me think, maybe I should be. At this point, I was still working as a cook, because I’m a classically trained chef, and the irony is that I specialized in cooking meat. A few weeks later, I was asked to cook lamb for 400 people at a banquet that was taking place at a funeral home, and that’s when it clicked. When I saw all the meat for 400 people, and some people didn’t even touch their plates, I thought, those animals are dead for nothing. They gave their lives for nothing. At that point, I made the connection and became vegan, and I’ve been vegan ever since. 

What does your practice look like today? I practice Vipassana meditation in the morning. But my practice is more about following the principles. That’s the hardest thing, because Buddhism is not about becoming a better person for yourself. It’s about becoming a better person for everybody else. So I just try to create no harm. My wife is a doctor, and the first principle is always do no harm. That’s basic. If everybody would follow this principle, the world would be better. 

Do you follow a particular teacher? I follow the teachings of [Satya Narayan] Goenka, the founder of Vipassana here in the West. He passed away a few years ago, but his teachings are still very available for everybody. What I like about the teaching of Goenka is that it’s free. Anyone can go on Goenka retreats anywhere around the world. 

Let’s talk about your work as a blogger and cookbook author. When did you become “the Buddhist Chef”? I became vegan because of Buddhism. For the animals. Because Buddhism and veganism share a common value, which is compassion. It was after that first meditation retreat. So I called my blog The Buddhist Chef. And I’d do it again, even though I get a lot of hate. Just this morning someone in the US said, “I would prefer it if you were a Christian chef.” Some people say, “I’d love to buy your cookbook, but my family won’t let me because it’s Buddhist.” It’s strange. And you know, I have a sense of humor. Sometimes I publish a joke and people say, “That’s not very Buddhist!”

“When you have the why, the how becomes very easy.”

I wanted to ask you about your Instagram account, where you share memes and jokes. Why do you do it? I try to show people a vegan is not always a party pooper. It’s not always someone who is going to be radicalized and going to shame someone. You can have a sense of humor and be a normal person. You can be vegan and Buddhist and not take yourself too seriously.

People also think that being vegan is a restrictive lifestyle. How would you respond to that? It’s restrictive, but when you have the why, the how becomes very easy. When you shift your mindset from meat to animal, it’s easy. I don’t struggle. But people say things like, “I tried being vegan for a week and I didn’t lose weight.” Or, “My family got angry,” or, “I hate tofu.” “It’s complicated,” “It’s expensive.” The last one I heard is, “I don’t have time to wash so many dishes.” If you realize that an animal had to die for you to have a burger, you wouldn’t mind washing a few dishes. If you’re not eating vegan, it’s because you just don’t want to.

What would you say to someone who is interested in moderation? As in, not being fully vegan but being a little vegan? Do you think that’s a good thing, or do you think that’s stopping them from fully realizing compassion? I would always tell people, “Start where you are.” If you’re a hunter and you only eat meat, don’t try to quit meat altogether. Start with Meatless Monday, or one to two days a week. But, above all, start with recipes that are familiar. If you want your family to eat less meat, it has to be familiar and fun. It’s the same spaghetti sauce you like, but tonight, instead of meat, I swapped in tofu. Or if you like General Tso’s chicken, try General Tso’s tofu. One vegan meal a week is quite easy. Not everybody is going to be vegan. I’m not naive. But if everybody would cut their meat consumption just by half, it would be amazing.

Can you share a few ingredients that you use heavily in your vegan cooking that you didn’t use before? I use tofu a lot, a lot, a lot. It’s versatile, it’s rich in protein, nutrition, calcium, and it doesn’t contain any cholesterol. It’s cheap—half the price of ground beef. And it tastes like whatever you cook it in or season it with. I remember, when I was a kid, my mom would do tofu, and she would just marinate it in soy sauce. That was the recipe. But you can fry it in cornstarch, and change the texture. You can also marinate it or add spices and bake it in the oven. It’s pretty easy to cook.

Do you even grind it up and use it in place of ground meat? I use tempeh and seitan for that, but sometimes tofu too. I have tofu in my spaghetti sauce. 

I notice a lot of your recipes call for cashew cream. Can you tell me about that? I buy the cashews and then I blend them. Every cream or vegetable soup, I put a cup of cashews in and blend it, and it gives this sweet and creamy taste, because cashews are a little bit sweet. People don’t realize it, but cream is sweet. So if you want to replace cream, you need to replace it with something sweet. I also love soy milk because it’s rich in protein, but I always add a couple of cashews here and there. It’s a secret ingredient. [See below for a Tuscan Soup recipe featuring cashew cream.]

My family loved your healthy oatmeal cookies, which you say have become one of your signature recipes. What’s another go-to recipe of yours that you always tell people to try? The trouble is you’re always trying to seduce meat eaters. Buffalo cauliflower wings, for example, are a big hit. You do always get the same feedback, though, like, “Why do vegans always try to imitate meat?” But I always say I didn’t stop eating meat because I didn’t like meat. I stopped eating meat because I love animals.

And you do use plant-based meat, like Impossible beef? I prefer to use seitan, which is made with real ingredients, but once in a while, in addition to lentils, for example, I do. If I do a shepherd’s pie, I put in celery, carrots, onion, mushrooms, lentils, and a little bit of Impossible burger. 

How do you feel about cultivated meat, the meat they’re developing based on animal cells? I’m all for it, because if it means that it’s gonna save millions of animals, of course I’m for it. There are always those debates: Yesterday a girl wrote to me and said, “I thought you were vegan, but you use Impossible meat, which has been tested on animals.” Yeah, but how many animals are you going to save with those products? Some people want to be the only vegan. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In French we say the tree that doesn’t bend breaks.

You recently came out with your second cookbook, The Buddhist Chef’s Homestyle Cooking. Can you describe the vision for this cookbook and how it differs from the first? All of my cookbooks are inspired by my childhood favorites. In this cookbook, I have vegan lobster rolls, for example, which were inspired by camping trips to Gaspésie, [in eastern Quebec]. My bolognese sauce is inspired by my mom’s spaghetti sauce. We have a recipe in my family for pouding chômeur, or poor man’s pudding, which is a classic here. It’s a cake baked in a caramel sauce made of maple syrup and brown sugar. So it’s full of very hearty recipes. It’s not scary, it’s not salads and bowls. It’s desserts, vegan fried chicken, vegan fish and chips. It’s inspired by the time when people had a completely different vision of food. When people would just show up at your house. They don’t do it anymore—unfortunately or fortunately! But there were no cell phones, so you always had to be ready. My mom always had food, and people would just show up and stay for dinner. It’s another philosophy. Nowadays, it’s like, let’s order food. Let’s call in. Let’s meet somewhere.  

How do you navigate serving your family members who maybe aren’t following a vegan diet? Do they mind eating vegan? They like it. They’re not against it. But they’re always surprised because they expect nothing! They’re like, “Wow! That’s vegan. It’s amazing that it tastes good!” 

I notice you use a lot of maple in your recipes. I use maple, because when I traveled in Thailand and Cambodia, they always balanced the acidity with sugar. They don’t use maple syrup, of course, but this is where I learned to better balance the acidity, and I use it everywhere. Some people in France get mad at me because it’s like $20 an ounce, but we’re lucky here [in Canada]. I have a hard time using refined sugar. I prefer to use maple syrup. Every time I use refined sugar, I feel as if I just smoked a cigarette.

It seems like a big focus of yours is teaching people how to eat vegan. Do you ever teach people about Buddhism? I try to, but people are not very interested. They follow me for the food, and every time I try to talk about something else, they say, “Yeah, but we don’t follow you for that.” In the social media era, it’s very compartmentalized. But more and more people are getting interested, and they reach out and ask advice on where to start, or if they should attend a retreat. Some people come back from retreat very angry with me (laughs). But I like it because when you can have an influence on people, especially with something that’s going to change their life, it’s very rewarding, of course.

Buddhism has changed the way you eat and cook, but has it also impacted how you behave in the kitchen? I try to be more present. I try not to listen to podcasts. More and more, I try to live in silence. It’s tempting to walk the dog with your earbuds and your music, or to cook and have on the TV or a YouTube video, but I try not to do it. The first five minutes are the worst, but at some point, you get in the flow state, and you enjoy cooking and the silence.

And do you miss restaurant cooking? I miss the camaraderie. When you cook, it’s a very hard job, so usually you make a lot of jokes and talk with each other. When I cook at the meditation retreats, there are always some people, and we talk while we cook. You know, when you have guests over for dinner, they’re always in the kitchen. There’s a reason for that. Because when you prepare food, you talk, you share stories, and you share your state of mind.

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Vegan Tuscan Soup Recipe 

Serves 6 | Prep Time: 35 min | Cook Time: 40 min

Creamy, luxurious soups don’t always need to be pureed. This recipe still packs the same decadent punch, while also including nice hearty chunks of vegetables. The creamy texture from the cashew cream and the aroma from the fresh herbs make this soup an incredibly comforting dish.

Ingredients

Cashew Cream:

1 cup (140 g) cashews

2 tablespoons nutritional yeast

Tuscan Soup:

2 tablespoons olive oil
4 vegan sausages

4 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, minced

1 tablespoon dried basil

1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon dried thyme

3 yellow-fleshed potatoes (about 15 oz/425 g), diced

6 cups (1.5 L) vegetable broth

4 cups (50 g) chopped kale 

croutons to garnish

Directions

For the Cashew Cream:

• Soak the cashews in boiling water for 15 minutes. Drain.
• Add the soaked cashews, 1 cup (250 mL) water, and the yeast to a blender and blend until smooth. Set aside.

For the Tuscan Soup:

• In a large pot over medium heat, heat the oil, then add the sausages and break them up using a spatula. Increase the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes.
• Add the garlic and onions, lower the heat to medium, and cook, stirring frequently, for 4 minutes. Stir in the basil, oregano, thyme, and salt, then the potatoes and broth. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
• Stir in the cashew cream and kale, and cook for 10 minutes.
• Divide the soup among six bowls and garnish with croutons. Leftover soup can be stored in the fridge in an airtight container for up to 4 days. Reheat in a saucepan over medium heat for about 5 minutes, or until hot.

The post The Buddhist Chef Wants You to Start Where You Are appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Many, even those in Buddhist circles, know Deborah Madison by “the book”—the New York Times best-selling Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which was first published in 1997, with more than a thousand meat-free recipes. What many still don’t realize, however, is that Madison spent nearly twenty years living as a student at the San Francisco Zen Center, where she served as head cook and later the first chef of Greens Restaurant. Greens, which served all-vegetarian dishes before locally sourced and farm-to-table were the cool thing to do, has become a Bay Area institution since opening in 1979. In the early days, Madison balanced the rigorous demands of dinner service and training Zen students as kitchen assistants with early-morning zazen. 

Madison, who left the community in the eighties and now describes herself as a “recovering Zen student,” reflects on her monastic years and beyond in her memoir An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables. She tells the stories of the early years of American Zen, and the importance that food played in creating a community among mainly convert Buddhists who had not grown up in the tradition: “I never saw a Zen student turn down chocolate cake, buttery mashed potatoes, or a plate of cheese enchiladas. Foods like these were powerful attractors to the dinner table. Later we’d get it right again, but for the moment it was necessary to make a kind of backstitch to secure the fabric of community,” Madison writes. Woven throughout An Onion in My Pocket are reflections on what brought her to Zen, her parents’ relationships with food, as well as the vast changes in the food scene in America over the last forty years. (Madison ordered olive oil for the Zen Center directly from California’s first family of commercial producers, the Sciabicas, and writes that in order to find soy milk in the seventies, you had to venture into health food stores that smelled like fermented vegetables.)

Since leaving Zen life, Madison has gone on to write fourteen cookbooks. A chapter in An Onion in My Pocket called “My Vegetarian Dilemma” describes her ongoing uncomfortable relationship with the label “vegetarian.” Madison has served on the board of the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance, and says that labels, including vegan, vegetarian, and paleo, can be divisive and exclusive, and take away from all the vibrant, wonderful, and nourishing qualities that fruits and vegetables have on their own, and that vegetarian dishes can be, in fact, for everyone to enjoy.

We’re talking at the end of the summer. What’s in your pocket these days? Seeds, mostly. I don’t have too much to harvest. We had a huge drought, and now it’s been raining. I have some dill seeds that I got from a neighbor and other seeds that I’m looking forward to planting. I’m looking at my tall, golden purslane—it’s totally disintegrated. I’m trying to water it and hoping for hot days so that it will make its little purse again. 

I’ve listened to some of the talks you’ve given on An Onion in My Pocket, mostly in foodie circles. My impression was that people not so familiar with Buddhism still view Zen eating as super austere and restaurant eating as super decadent. But I think what you’re trying to get at in the book is that both environments need to find balance and nourishment. Can you speak a bit more on that? That was true at the time, and not just at Greens—everybody was discovering cream and how delicious it was and how you could reduce it and make a pasta with cream sauce. We never did that at the Zen Center, but I always felt it should come together a little bit. That was my tact as a cook. I introduced milk and cheese and things like that, so the pancakes didn’t come out like shoe leather, which I’m sure the vegans today would be horrified about. But at the time, it was a good thing to do, I think. I was told by the abbot, [Suzuki Roshi], that when we had guests come to dinner, they should never ask, “What is that?” And it’s hard to make familiar food without some of the basic ingredients. 

Buddhism has been in the United States since the mid-19th century, but you were at Zen Center during a time when a distinct American and Western Buddhism was developing. Can you speak about offering foods that were familiar to people with Western backgrounds and also traditional temple cooking? At Zen Center we did, of course, have Asian teachers. And the cook before me did macrobiotic cooking, and it was wonderful, and I took care of the pickles when he was away. But introducing these other foods was important for people to gather at the table. We had a hybrid menu, we had hijiki [a sea vegetable] and carrots and soup and brown rice for breakfast, but we also had muffins and scrambled eggs and things like that, too. 

You write in the book that while living at SFZC’s Page Street, each house collectively decided about house rules around food. Are there any lessons like that for us today, whether we are living as a traditional family or intentional community? What questions should we be asking about the food we shop for and bring into our home? I do remember that incident quite well, when we decided as a group to be vegetarian. We had a lot of dockworkers and people who did really heavy physical work, and they wanted meat for breakfast, so they would fry bacon and chops and things like that in a small kitchen off of the main kitchen. And that offended people, so we decided we’d be vegetarian. But what people did on their own was [their own business]—you couldn’t be over their shoulder saying, “You shouldn’t eat that,” you know? I didn’t really care whether we were vegetarian or not. I was just happy to be able to cook.

And in terms of questions: are the foods that we bring into our lives benefiting the earth? Are they benefiting ourselves? 

And in many ways our consciousness has changed, because we better understand mass production and what it’s doing to the planet. And then in Buddhist circles, you have the precepts and cultural and ethical things regarding the treatment of animals, and people can start scolding real quick. Do you have any thoughts on being more flexible in our thinking? I think we do need to be a little more tolerant of each other. I tend to be vegetarian because it’s what I cook, what I know really, really well. But I’m married to someone who is not, who grew up eating steak three or four times a week. It changes. My own health has changed, too. You never know where people are at, and it pays to be more tolerant. 

You write that when you ordained in the seventies, you and others didn’t have much life experience. Do you have any advice for people who are considering monastic life? That was true. I had more experience than a lot of people, and I didn’t have very much experience. None of us did. But that’s OK, you don’t need a lot of experience, really, to practice Zen. And would I advise anybody? No, I wouldn’t. I consider myself a recovering Zen student [laughs].

Fair enough. You write about your parents and their very different relationships to food, particularly your mother growing up during the Depression. Have you noticed any trends we’ve inherited around eating and food since the COVID-19 pandemic began? I’m quite nervous that we’re going backwards. Even at our farmers market (in Santa Fe), the farmers can’t get help. They don’t have squash blossoms, because they don’t want to pick them because of the drought. I think we’re so naive about food and the labor it takes to bring it to us. And we’re going to have to come to terms with it. For example, most people don’t realize that endive is a vegetable that’s grown in two parts, the leaves are locked off and left in the field to curl up, and the roots are harvested … they’re wonderful, they’re delicious, but it’s a lot of work to do that. 

I think we also need to think about the people who are working in the fields in the terrible, terrible heat, and support them. Food is getting harder and harder to come by, and the price is going up. And the drought is going to continue in the Southwest, and California, and so on, and that affects what we eat and what we grow. 

What are you working on next? I’m working on two things now. One in grain: I’m working with a group to grow more grain that is interesting and wholesome and good for us. The other is a book, which I’m not sure what it’s going to be about yet exactly, but it is around the 72 laborers that brought us food, and the chant about us knowing how food comes to us. [Residents at the SFZC used to recite before meals a chant that went, in part, “72 laborers brought us this food.” The chant has since been changed to “innumerable laborers.”] 

I’m intrigued by the number 72. Why is it not more? Not fewer? Is it really 72? I love that 72, and I’m sorry that it was changed to “innumerable” because “innumerable laborers” is too many to think about. But 72 you can think about and ask questions about.

The post Chef Deborah Madison Thinks It Pays to Be More Tolerant appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Fourteen years ago, when Jonathan and Diana Rose created the magnificent Garrison Institute, a repurposed monastery on the banks of the Hudson River, they asked if I’d cook a meal for the Dalai Lama, who was coming to visit. I declined. Maybe insecurity got in the way, but it felt more like fear. Although I was well known as a chef with a Zen-like approach to cooking, I believed that the honor should go to a practitioner of Buddhism or at least someone who would be more fully awake to the experience than I would have been. Ever since, I’ve had a recurring thought whenever I shop, cook, or daydream. “What would I have made?” Sometimes the question makes me smile; other times it triggers great anxiety. But in the end, I realized that the food itself was not at all what mattered. 

My search for a satisfactory answer to this question started with the Zen meal chant. I first uttered the meal gatha (a short verse for recitation) at the Garrison Institute not long after I declined the Roses’ offer. I fixated on the line “72 labors brought you this food; we should know how it comes to us.” It sounded so much like the contemporary value placed on “sustainability” and the goal to honor all the steps involved in getting a meal on the table. Where does it begin—with an embryo, a seed? Does it mean the farmer who plants the seed? The migrant who picks the grapes? The slaughterer who kills the calf? The trucker who hauls ingredients to market? The cook who washes grit from the field greens? The chef who prepares the soup? The artisan who crafted the bowl? The server who presents the food? The dishwasher who scours the pots? Yes, all of it. And so with every part of the meal, I would consider the source, and path, of each ingredient to fully sanctify its importance.

The “Five Contemplations” verse, as translated by the Soto Zen Text Project, presents a similar sentiment to that of the meal gatha: “We reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us.” Considering, to me, goes deeper than knowing, for how can anyone really know? An alternate translation by Plum Village, the homestead of late Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, puts it rather succinctly: “This food is the gift of the whole universe—the earth, the sky, and much hard work… In this food I see clearly the presence of the entire universe supporting my existence.”

Seventy-two labors, then, symbolizes the infinity of conditions bringing us our food at any given time, representing all efforts that contribute to life (inside or outside the monastery), past or present. I also have read that the number 72 refers to the posts within the monastery, including those of the abbot, administrators, and the cook.

There are other, more complicated, explanations: that at age 72 the Buddha preached the Lotus Sutra, or that it’s related to the 72 devas, or to the 72 words with which Brahma saved the world. These references, too obscure for me, might be of interest to His Holiness. In any case, it is clearly an important number. 

I was familiar with the idea of oryoki and wondered if this style would appeal. Oryoki, meaning “just the right amount,” is the formal monastic ceremonial meal eaten during sesshin (Zen meditation retreats) and is one of the tradition’s most essential rituals. It is a precise and conscious way of eating—choreographed to the minutest detail. The meal is served in three to five bowls, with elaborate napkin folding, utensil placement, and frequent bowing. 

Lovely to watch, but I want my imagined meal for the Dalai Lama to be of a more casual nature. I will serve the main course in one beautiful bowl—preferably a bartered one—and design its contents to be eaten with chopsticks, and then, with his hands cradling the still-warm vessel, drink the remaining broth until the very vapor was gone. This preserves the sacredness of the bowl—the “miraculous utensil” (the 13th-century Zen master Eihei Dogen called it).

Daido Loori Roshi, the late abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York, says “A meal is a state of consciousness that we receive with great gratitude. Whether it’s cabbages or cows, it’s life that we consume. That’s the nature of life on this planet. We nourish and sustain each other with our lives and the truth of 10,000 dharmas is revealed… Food is thusness. We begin by giving and receiving and in that process there is unity and perfect harmony. A meal is the dharma nature.”

I vowed to be fully awake to that idea as I planned His Holiness’s menu. Ten thousand dharmas in a bowl sounded good to me.

When preparing any meal, I always try to anticipate and consider the desires and priorities of my guests. I had assumed the Dalai Lama was a vegetarian but that is not the case outside of his residence at Dharmasala. I’m told His Holiness eats meat following doctor’s orders.  So I was free to choose whether to include “flesh” in my menu while remaining mindful of the Buddhist reluctance to “taking life.”

I initially had planned something vegetarian—a beautiful bowl of soup, the color of saffron, flecked with edible gold and brimming with the finest soba noodles. Then, Eureka! I happened upon a recipe in the New York Times for one of His Holiness’ favorite dishes—momos.  These Himalayan treats are juicy beef dumplings perfumed with ginger, onion, and cilantro and shaped like half-moons. In Tibet, finding beef (or yak) is not so easy, but finding grain to make the thin wafers of dough is even more difficult. Momos are generally made for Losar, the Tibetan New Year, a holiday that incorporates the comforts of food. 

The narrative for my menu was beginning to take shape. Resolving what to feed someone engenders awe and humility. It goes beyond verbal communication into a more sacred realm. It is intention, without words. A fragrant way to awaken. 

I n his Instructions for the Tenzo (the head cook of a monastery), Dogen Zenji wrote that a tenzo should have three important qualities: Joyful Mind, Great Mind, and Mature Mind. According to the Zen teacher Eido Shimano Roshi (1932-2018), “Cooking is not only the preparation of food but a practice of spirituality. It means not wasting even the stem of a vegetable.” (A new generation of American chefs has recently taken this value to heart unaware, perhaps, of the Buddhist practice.) “It involves an economy of movement, punctuality, and beauty of presentation. These are the elements that make our lives spiritually rich.” 

In addition, being fully awake in the kitchen leads to what is known as “spontaneous generosity,” an awareness about using everything and offering whatever food you have. 

The tenzo’s responsibilities go beyond cooking, to ensuring that all the ingredients gathered will become nutritional meals to sustain the monks during work and sesshin. My menu must be creative enough not to waste one morsel and substantial enough (“just the right amount”) to satisfy His Holiness until the early hours of the morning. As an ordained Buddhist monk, he does not have dinner. He does, however, take tea at 6 p.m. 

The Zen Monastic Standards (a 12th-century work by Changlu Zongze) states that the tenzo “puts the mind of the Way to work, serves carefully varied meals appropriate to each occasion, and thus allows everyone to practice without hindrance.” 

In the Zen tradition, the preparation of food is considered a sacred act. The cook’s intention is to handle each slice of radish, grain of rice, or leaf of mustard green as if it were the sixteen-foot golden body of the Buddha. My menu needs to fulfill this obligation. “The right qualities of heart and mind in cooking are just as important as a stove or a knife,” said the tenzo at the Dai Bosatsu Zendo perched high atop a mountain in the Catskills. I wonder what he would make. 

I recently learned the concept of takuhatsu—a traditional form of collecting alms by Zen monks-in-training who beg for their food. In return, the monks teach he dharma. In India this was the only way that monks were able to eat—from the food they were given in their begging bowls (“the miraculous utensil”). Later in China and Japan, monks began farming and growing all their own food, making takuhatsu dispensable—except for getting money or, perhaps, for more spiritual reasons.

There’s something here that I like! What if I engaged in takuhatsu and thereby gave everyone in the community the honor of participating in the Dalai Lama’s menu? I am happy with this notion! It feels organic and timely, locavore. I would go from farmer to fisherman, beekeeper to shopkeeper, baker to brewer, from home to hut, with a large basket in each hand. I would humbly say that I was cooking for the Dalai Lama. What would they like to offer? Needless to say, I don’t need their food, but in the spirit of giving and receiving and giving again, it feels that the whole sangha would be involved in this divine meal. At that moment, in a gust of spontaneity, I would create the menu around what I received. It is actually the way I most enjoy cooking. I value this idea because it leads to sanshin: that of magnanimous mind (by inviting everyone to participate); joyful mind (creating something out of nothing with whatever is available), and tender mind (a loving state of giving and receiving.)

By stripping recipes to their essence, I can fully appreciate the value each ingredient brings to a dish. When I inhale the sweet perfume of a ripe red pepper I can intuit the flavor it might add to the recipe; when I see the green-gold color of a first-pressed extra-virgin olive oil I can imagine its taste before it reaches my tongue. My menu will use seemingly prosaic ingredients treated with the same reverence and nuance of a sommelier sniffing the aroma of a rare vintage before finally discerning its myriad flavors upon the palate. This idea can be easily applied to fill our “miraculous utensil.” The ingredients for our menu would certainly be fresh and seasonal. There is a Japanese proverb I love that has always informed my cooking: “If you can capture the season on the plate, then you are the master.” 

It has been said, “Imagination is the instrument of compassion.” There are many ways to interpret this but I believe that the creation of something “out of nothing” connects one human being to another—through art, music, literature, or cooking, and has the potential to heal or spark something divine in each. All this adds up to “mindfulness” says Jan Chozen Bays, Roshi, co-abbot of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon, and the author of Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food. “Mindfulness,” she says, “is the most powerful tool for assessing the sacred aspect of eating.” And very imaginatively she adds, “mindfulness is the best seasoning you can add to food.” There are many ways to nurture and nourish. As I create my menu, I will use mindfulness as the predominant spice. And I will cook in silence, listening to the sounds of the kitchen for instruction. 

We usually think that cooking involves our five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, but I’d add “contemplation” as a sixth. In planning my meal, I would consider the “seven hungers” described by Chozen Roshi—eye hunger, nose hunger, mouth hunger, stomach hunger, cellular hunger, mind hunger, heart hunger. And I would consider all the taste elements of sour, salty, bitter, sweet, umami, and astringency. Does the Dalai Lama like cilantro? An enzyme in it makes it taste like soap for many people. But it is an important component of Asian cooking and in his beloved momos, so I believe he does.  

Each bite would contain a bit of mystery and history; to paraphrase Lawrence Durrell when he spoke of olives—“a taste older than water.” And I would learn to make sepen—the fiery, blood-red hot sauce of Tibet, often used to accompany momos.  

While I begin preparations, I will check in with my emotions. At Zen Mountain Monastery, I asked Sankai, the head cook, whether he believed that his feelings were “revealed” in his food. “Absolutely,” he exclaimed. If he feels angry or agitated any time that he’s cooking, “he simply steps out of the kitchen until that mood passes.” 

At times I have been aware of my own emotions becoming infused into my cooking, unintentionally affecting the outcome of the food. Recently, a close friend, going through a terrible time in her marriage, made cupcakes that were inadvertently as salty as the sea, despite the fact that she has made them for us, buttery and sweet, for decades. Roiled by tears, her emotional state was unveiled. 

This idea is also expressed by the authors of Prince Wen Hui’s Cook, Bob Flaws and Honora Wolfe: “Like every other aspect of our phenomenal reality, food is affected by how we think about it. From this point of view one’s spiritual state directly affects the quality of the food which then affects one’s health for better or worse.” 

I would consider all of this as I prepare a meal for His Holiness. I was ready.

As my journey came to an end, I realized that the menu itself was not what was important. It was the numinous process of how to figure it out, and how to be fully awake to the experience.

So what would I cook if you asked me today? First, I would serve His Holiness three momos. Then, in the “miraculous utensil” I would pour a fragrant broth, the color of his robe, perfumed with saffron, lemongrass, holy basil, and earthy shiitakes. In it would be barely poached vegetables and the finest soba noodles imaginable. On top would shimmer bits of edible gold, to symbolize the golden Buddha. And for dessert? A sacred recipe of my own: Venetian Wine cake, flavored with lemon, rosemary, red wine, and olive oil, to be eaten with the hands, slowly and mindfully, until the very last crumb is gone. Once upon a time, this cake was made and sold by Greyston Bakery. Founded by the Zen teacher Roshi Bernie Glassman in Yonkers, the bakery is now known for its open hiring process offering transitional employment for people leaving correctional facilities. They are still the keepers of my secret recipe.

But, as the seasons change, and conditions change, and I change, I may yet opt for takuhatsu and beg for my ingredients. As a reminder of the interconnection of all life, I would share the honor with others, and spontaneously create a meal from what has been offered. In that way, I can return to a state of “not knowing”—which is where this all began.

The post 10,000 Dharmas in a Bowl appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When we break for lunch at my Saturday meditation retreats, I often tell people, “Please enjoy your food.” All morning I have been offering various instructions in sitting and walking meditation, and by lunchtime we have also had an hour of yoga with further directives, so I may leave it at that. I don’t want eating to be another chore, or yet another place to worry about whether or not you are doing it “right.” We do enough of that already, so I invite people to simply “please enjoy your food.”

On some occasions I might say a bit more, although I don’t want people trying too hard to “have fun.” I explain that enjoying your food is very important, because to enjoy something is how we connect to the world, to one another, to our inner being. When you enjoy your food, you will be happy and well-nourished by what you eat.

Sometimes I might also explain to people that by enjoying their food, they will naturally find themselves practicing meditation. They will be paying attention to what they are eating—noticing flavors and textures and nuances of taste—because to enjoy something you need to experience it. Also, they will have to stay present, because if they get carried away by greed, they will be thinking about the future possibility and miss what they are eating in the present. Entering into full enjoyment, they will be relaxing and opening their hearts to the food, not worrying about good and bad, right and wrong, or “how well am I doing in my meditation?”

Mostly I think it’s better to say as little as possible. Then “enjoying your food” may be the best meditation you do all day. It all takes care of itself without your having to try too hard. Following the path of pleasure is deep and profound, and richly rewarding. Sometimes people complain that it doesn’t work that way, and one needs discipline and austerity and restraint. That’s nonsense, implying that one’s inherent being lacks wisdom or any sense of beauty, and consequently needs to be kept in line and retrained, tamed, subdued. Give your body some credit.

Most problems which arise in the pursuit of pleasure are due to lack of devotion—one is not fully enough committed to pleasure. Which bite of chocolate cake is no longer pleasurable? Which swallow of wine is bringing one down instead of up? Sure, restraint is needed, but it comes after pleasure or along with pleasure, not before and in place of pleasure. “Please enjoy your food.”

When pleasure or enjoyment is forbidden, then one looks for stupor, for unconsciousness, which is the closest one can get to relief from the inane drive to discipline and restrain.

Years ago at a meditation retreat we had an eating meditation. Raisins were passed out. We were encouraged to help ourselves to a small handful, “But don’t eat them yet!” I sighed. I am not thrilled with this kind of exercise. How hokey can you get? I rather prefer to have these experiences on my own, instead of having them spoon-fed to me.

We were instructed to look at the raisins, to observe their appearance, to note their color and texture, “But don’t eat them yet!” I supposed it could be worse, like “Ready now, one, two, three. Open your heart to the raisins.” Next we were invited to “Smell the raisins,” and finally, after a suitable interval allowing time for the aromas to register, we were permitted to put the raisins in our mouths, “But don’t chew them yet!”

By now I was also aware of an urge to smash something, and further, when I looked into this, a sense of annoyance. “Leave me alone,” I complained (loudly to myself). “Let me eat, for goodness sake.” To have one’s act of eating abruptly arrested is upsetting and disturbing. Get something tasty in your mouth, and your teeth want to close on it. But WAIT! We were then instructed to simply feel the raisins in our mouth, their texture, their presence. We were obliged to note saliva flowing and the impulse to chew.

At last we were permitted to culminate the act of eating. The raisins could be chewed. More juices flowed. The sweet and the sticky were liberated from their packets, “But don’t swallow yet!” “Be aware of your swallowing. See if you can make your swallowing conscious.” Some people, I guess, just have a knack for knowing how to take all the fun out of things. This noting and observing, attending and awakening, by golly, doesn’t leave much opportunity for joyful abandonment, but I’ll always remember those raisins.

When I led my own eating meditation, I decided to get real. Skip the raisins. Let’s meditate on just one potato chip. So I bought a bag of Ruffles. Then I thought we could go on to oranges—my concession to wholesomeness—and conclude with Hydrox cookies. I picked Hydrox because I had heard they were the kosher Oreos (no pig fat or beef fat, I guess). Also I had heard (or maybe just made it up) that there was a secret society that met surreptitiously in semi-darkness to eat Oreo cookies and drink milk with complete awareness, and I aspired to join.

Since I didn’t want to parcel out the instructions as they had been given to me, I laid out the whole deal at the start: Pay attention. Give your attention, allow your attention to come to the potato chip, and be as fully conscious as you can of the whole process of eating just one potato chip. Just one! So you better pay attention! Observe, smell, taste, feel, swallow.

When I announced our potato chip eating meditation, I was naturally greeted with various gripes, taunts, and complaints: “I can’t eat just one.” “That’s ridiculous.” “You’re going to leave us hanging with unsatisfied desire. How could you?” Nonetheless, I remained steadfast in my instruction and passed around a bowl of potato chips, urging each participant to take just one. When everyone was ready, we commenced. “Instead of words,” Rilke says in one of his sonnets, “discoveries flow out astonished to be free.” And so it was.

First the room was loud with crunching, then quiet with savoring and swallowing. When all was fed and done, I invited comments. Many people had been startled by their experience: “I thought I would have trouble eating just one, but it really wasn’t very tasty.” “There’s nothing to it.” “There’s an instant of salt and grease, and them some tasteless pulpy stuff in your mouth.” “I can see why you might have trouble eating just one, because you take another and another to try to find some satisfaction where there is no real satisfaction to be found.” “If I was busy watching TV, I would probably think these were great; but when I actually experience what’s in my mouth, it’s kind of distasteful.”

That potato chip was pretty surprising even to me, the “experienced meditator.” Now I walk past the walls of chips in the supermarket rather easily without awakening insidious longings and the resultant thought that I really ought to “deny” myself. I don’t feel deprived. There’s nothing there worth having. And this is not just book knowledge. I know that.

The oranges were fabulous, exquisite, satisfying, “Juicy . . . refreshing . . . sweet . . . succulent . . . rapturous.” About half the participants refused to finish the Hydrox cookie. One bite and newly awakened mouths simply bid the hands to set aside what remained: “This we know to be something we do not need, desire, want or wish for. Thanks anyway.”

♦

For more from Edward Espe Brown, read “Rhubarb,” followed by “A Letter to Myself,” from Inquiring Mind. 

Related Inquiring Mind articles on food and mindful eating:

The Nothingness of the Ground

Interview with Alice Waters: Think Globally, Taste Locally

Interview with Jean Kristeller: Know Your Hunger

On the Bodhisattva Path, I Stopped Off for a Burger

The post Please Enjoy Your Food appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At the saw-toothed edge of autumn, violent forest fires obscured the noonday sun at Green Gulch Farm. Ominous clouds of charcoal soot and thick, vermilion smoke darkened the Pacific Northwest, covering the last rows of butter lettuce with ghost-gray ash. 

Eight months ago the fields lay fallow at Green Gulch, the Soto Zen farm and practice center where my husband and I trained for 25 years before moving into our current home next door. It was early March then, the coastal headlands above the Gulch pale blue, blowing with wild lilac and late rain. California had just ordered the nation’s first shelter-in-place mandate in an attempt to staunch the rising tide of COVID-19 cases. One of the last formal ceremonies offered at Green Gulch before the sangha began sheltering in place was the annual seed-sowing ceremony, which opened this year’s agricultural season with a chant of dedication:

We offer the sowing and tending of these seeds to our great,
original teacher Shakyamuni Buddha
Whose real nature is in harmony with the mysterious process of
living and dying . . .
May we labor in love and awareness and with deep humility open to
the true nature of all being!

A few months later, the fields were arrayed in a tapestry of dark green kale, golden beets, red mustard, collards, rainbow chard, purplette onions, and multi-hued lettuce—all ready for harvest just as access to the Bay Area farmers markets closed down in May due to a surge in coronavirus cases.  

Our Zen farm quarantined and unable to go to market, we needed a new plan for our crops. So when the current Green Gulch residents entered into “no coming, no going” isolation, my farmer-husband, Peter, and I offered to mask up and load our vintage red Toyota farm truck with harvest bounty to share across the increasingly food-insecure Bay Area community. 

Our donation plan was simple. The farmers at Green Gulch would grow and harvest all the food and prepare it for distribution. Peter and I would go to the Gulch three or four times a week to load stacks of fresh produce and seedlings. We would deliver these offerings to a network of three former farm apprentices, dharma colleagues, and dedicated food activists who would distribute the food throughout the community in places where it was most needed.     

For almost fifty years of my Zen training, the linked practices of engaged dharma and deep ecology have been at the core of my practice. Deep ecology asks that we recognize the interdependent nature of all species in the living world without focusing on their potential usefulness to human beings. Grounded in meditation and enlivened by kinship with plants and the work of organic gardening, this practice in combination with engaged dharma is dynamic, nonlinear, and rooted in universal change. Because of this, when pandemic pandemonium pushed us to pivot this year, we were able, in our small, local way, to respond to rampant food insecurity.  

When I engage in this work, I look to the wisdom of my teachers. As my root teacher, the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh often said: “Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise what is the use of seeing?” Bhikkhu Bodhi, the activist scholar-monk who founded Buddhist Global Relief in 2008, holds that all beings must have access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food and medicine. Like Bhikkhu Bodhi, I have come to see making sure that people have the food and medicine they need to sustain a healthy life full of dignity and moral clarity is essential Buddhist practice.     

In the Anguttara Nikaya the Buddha taught “In giving food, one gives five things: life, beauty, happiness, strength, and mental clarity.” This insight informs 2nd-century scholarship attributed to Indian philosopher and monk Nagarjuna. He is one of the primary sources for the teaching on the three forms of far-reaching generosity, which include the generosity of material resources, of dharma teaching, and of non-fear. Thich Nhat Hanh regularly emphasized the importance of Nagarjuna’s fundamental teachings. Material support, a form of dana, is considered the root of all good dharmas. In its worldly form of food, medicine, shelter, and clothing, true material generosity never discriminates between giver, receiver, or gift. Thich Nhat Hanh underscored the intimacy of sharing goods and material resources directly, warm hand to warm hand. The original teachings remind us that to give with faith and respect, without harming any being and without any expectation of praise or reward, brings benefit without limit and generates an abiding wealth of spirit. 

Rooted in the soil of material generosity, good dharma teaching grows. The words “dharma” and “farm” share a common etymological root, dher, meaning to uphold and support. A good farm upholds and supports the vow to feed a hungry world. This generosity turns the wheel of dharma and opens the door to its grounded teachings.

Last of all, the generosity of material support and dharma teaching generates courage for consequential times. Fearlessness is expressed in the timeless gesture of the upheld naked palm indicating the absence of weapons and a readiness to meet all that arises. Trungpa Rinpoche confirms that with this kind of spiritual courage: “Even fear is frightened by the bodhisattva’s fearlessness.” 

Many school gardens across the Bay were fallow when our guerilla team of partners began planting them with close to 20,000 organically grown seedlings donated by Green Gulch. These plants were entrusted to a range of school gardens and public community plots around the Bay, from Marin City to San Pedro public school to Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in North Berkeley (where surplus plant material was later shared with the Oakland public school district) and to several community garden projects in San Francisco and beyond. Now, in late autumn, as some children are able to return to school, they are astounded by tangled vines of Armenian cucumbers and drifts of ripe Sungold tomatoes spilling across the pathways leading to their classrooms. Some of these same schools ran active food giveaway programs all summer long to distribute surplus produce from their Zen-fed gardens.

In Marin City just six miles south of Green Gulch, the local People’s Inter-Cities Fellowship Church received at least six crates a week from May to October of fresh vegetables to cook and share with hungry parishioners. The nearby Community Services District has planted their annual senior citizen’s garden chock-full of robust collards, curly mustard, and burgundy Romaine lettuce destined for a long winter harvest. 

During the height of the growing season Peter often made two trips a week, his truck loaded to capacity with produce, to donate to Berkeley Food Network. This community-centered food hub was established in 2016 to feed the City of Berkeley, where one in five residents are food insecure. Berkeley Food Network runs an onsite pantry and many mobile food pantries, pop-up grocery giveaway sites throughout the city, and hub kitchens where more than 1,000 meals per week are prepared and served by volunteer Bay Area chefs cooking recovered and donated food for hungry citizens. One of our closest colleagues this summer was The Cultural Conservancy, a beloved place-based, indigenous-led intertribal organization that Peter and I have been working with for almost a decade. From May through October we met with Maya Harjo, who is Quapaw, Shawnee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole and the young director of the Native Foodways project at The Cultural Conservancy, to transfer ten to twelve boxes of fresh Green Gulch produce into her truck.

At The Cultural Conservancy Maya and other young Native staff tend their traditional harvest fields of Seneca flint corn, Chimayo chile peppers, Lakota squash and Bear Paw beans. These medicine crops are supplemented with cool coastal relatives from Green Gulch: dinosaur kale, knobby fingerling potatoes, and huge bunches of savoy spinach. Every week boxes filled with this produce are distributed to feed families through the California Indian Museum, the American Indian Children’s Resource Center in Oakland, and the Sogorea Te Land Trust, a women-led urban indigenous organization that honors sacred sites and ancestral burial grounds throughout the California East Bay region.

It is past mid-autumn now, and the long California growing season has waned. Late light slants low, down to the root system of Candy Roaster winter squash ripening honey gold beneath the gaze of exhausted sunflowers. 

The US death toll from COVID-19 has topped 250,000, with more than 1.3 million deaths worldwide. The West Coast wildfires were a vivid representation of the devastation and they were far from symbolic. The ash and smoke of the California climate fires carry visible traces of countless plant and animal relatives vaporized in the blazes. The great nature of endless interdependence upholds the truths and continued aspirations of this arduous year, echoed in the meal chant from Upaya Zen Center:

Earth, air, water, fire and space
Combine to make this food
Numberless beings give their life and labor that we may eat.
May we be nourished that we may nourish life!

The post A Zen Harvest appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“We reflect on the effort that brought us this food / and consider how it comes to us.” 

So goes the pre-meal chant at San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), a version of which is recited at Zen centers all over the world. For Bay Area residents and foodies, Buddhist or not, perhaps nowhere is this contemplation easier to do than at Greens, SFZC’s all-vegetarian fine dining restaurant that has embodied the farm-to-table movement since the seventies. Now a Bay Area institution, Greens is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. 

“We’ve had the right concept for 40 years,” said executive chef Denise St. Onge. “There are so many things that this restaurant has gotten right.”

Among those things has been casting vegetables in the starring role of any Greens meal. 

“Greens celebrates the vegetables for themselves, not just as a side dish to fill up the plate,” said Linda Galijan, president of SFZC. The centerpieces of Greens’ current lunch menu, for instance, include a wild mushroom panini, a masala curry with tofu, and a broccoli pizza.

Almost all of Greens’ ingredients are sourced from local farms, including SFZC’s own farm, Green Gulch, just north of San Francisco. (Only specialty items like Parmesan are imported.) What’s cooked each week at the restaurant can vary based on Green Gulch’s harvest, which is dependent not only on seasonal variations but also on its all-volunteer community. What Green Gulch doesn’t have available, St. Onge fills through other suppliers, visiting three farmer’s markets per week and sometimes even going with her staff to Green Gulch to “get our hands dirty and help pick the vegetables out of the ground.”

Perhaps the only American Buddhist center with a critically acclaimed restaurant attached, the idea of Greens was first raised in 1975, when Richard Baker, the successor of founder Shunryu Suzuki, was abbot, and SFZC was developing many different businesses—an ambitious extension of the center’s mandate that was not without friction. (Baker resigned as abbot in 1984, after sexual relationships with several students came to light.) 

From the beginning, there was a vision for what Greens would be—a spot on the bay, with big windows overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge—before an actual site had been identified. And in 1979, Greens opened with floor-to-ceiling views of the San Francisco Marina. 

In the early days, Greens was staffed by SFZC students in residence. But as it became clear that late-night restaurant schedules and early-morning zazen call times were not conducive and the students pushed back against the low pay for their work, SFZC withdrew from running day-to-day operations and professionalized the business. Greens remains an important source of fiscal support for the center to this day.

Now, some Greens’ employees have a Zen practice while others do not, but staff training, under the guidance of general manager Min Kim, is grounded in Buddhist principles.

Unlike many workplaces in the cutthroat restaurant industry, “There’s a lot of love given from one person to the other, from the front of house to the back of the house. Everybody really respects each other here, and that’s a culture that’s been in place for a long time,” said St. Onge. Some servers and kitchen staff have been at Greens for “years and years,” said Galijan. “That kind of loyalty in restaurant staff is rare.” 

After Greens’ first head chef, Deborah Madison, Annie Somerville served as executive chef for over 30 years—from 1985 until the summer of 2018, when St. Onge took over. 

“My first goal is to preserve and sustain the restaurant, and then evolve it the way that it needs to evolve,” said St. Onge. That means staying true to the values of Chef Somerville, who eschewed fake meats or genetically modified vegetables. But St. Onge, who was raised in the Thai Theravada Buddhist tradition, is also bringing new flavors, inspired by her background, to the table—papaya salad, dumplings, and dishes featuring yuba, a soy milk byproduct often known as tofu skin that is popular in many parts of Asia.

And to celebrate 40 years of elevating the vegetarian dining experience, Greens has tasked six local guest chefs with creating a vegetarian meal after their own style, a special dinner format that began in July and will run through December.  

“It’s a good challenge for me!” said Pam Mazzola, December’s guest chef and a lead chef at the restaurant Prospect (and where St. Onge used to be sous chef). “How do I satisfy and give people a complete meal without the normal protein?” She’s still working on the answer, but for now, it entails cabbage stuffed with mushroom filling, baby parsnips in brown butter, and violin squash risotto with shaved truffles.

“The fact that [Greens] is relevant after 40 years is a really amazing thing,” she added. It’s not just the always-slim margins of the restaurant industry or the rising costs of San Francisco that Greens has defied—three days before St. Onge began her tenure in 2018, a fire shut down the restaurant for four months.

Perhaps what has helped sustain Greens is its embeddedness in the community. In the mid-nineties, when St. Onge’s mother was battling cancer, she adopted a vegetarian macrobiotic diet, and the family would come to Greens to eat lunch or to pick up food for the house.  

“The interesting thing,” said St. Onge, “is that my story is not really special. A lot of the guests who come in . . . have a similar relationship with this restaurant.”

“It’s not a place just to eat at,” Galijan said, “but to be nourished, renewed, and restored.”

♦

Further reading: If you enjoyed this article, you may want to check out Zen teacher and writer Gesshin Claire Greenwood’s essay on making the most of your leftovers, a guide to how paying attention to food can help your overall practice by Tibetan Buddhist nun Thubten Chodron, and this article on oryoki, the codified way of Zen eating.

The post Ever Greens: Innovative Zen Restaurant Celebrates 40 Years appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The New York Times recently reported that those who eat their biggest meal in the early hours have better success losing weight. Buried in the article was a comment which would catch the attention of anyone who has had close contact with Theravadin monastics, or, like me, has been one:

The lowest B.M.I.s were recorded in the fraction of people—about 8 percent of the total sample—who finished lunch by early afternoon and did not eat again until the next morning, fasting for 18 to 19 hours.

This is a similar eating practice followed by Theravadin monastics—bhikkhus and bhikkhunis—who follow the dietary rules of the Vinaya, the monastic code believed to have been written by the Buddha himself. According to the Vinaya, monastics can eat food only between dawn and noon.

Although this diet was intended to meet the specific needs of the Buddhist community in 5th-century India, some lay people have chosen to take on a version of the practice. There’s even a book advocating “the Buddha’s diet.”

The original logic of the monastic eating practice aimed to avoid causing aggravation to both monastics and laypeople, as explained in the Latukikopama Sutta (MN 66). The diet is neither intended as a health regimen, nor explicitly, as some have claimed, as an expression of a “middle way” between indulgence and asceticism. While it’s true that Buddhist monastic life was generally designed to be such a middle way, originally the Buddha allowed his monastics to go on alms round whenever they pleased. The Latukikopama Sutta explains that the Buddha forbade monastics from going on alms rounds after noon to avoid dangers that they might meet later in the day—stumbling into natural dangers in the dark, being propositioned for a tryst in the twilight hours, random hooligans—and to prevent inconveniencing or frightening lay people.

Considering that weight loss is only a significant issue in societies of satiety, the following of the bhikkhu diet as a health regimen is almost certainly an innovation of modern Western Buddhism. Some Theravadin lay people do follow the bhikkhu diet for a day every quarter moon as part of uposatha practice, where some monastic rules are followed “for the sake of cleansing the defilements of the mind” and making good karma, but not to slim their waistlines.

Since I’m an ex-monastic, you might think that I am against the use of the bhikkhu diet as a mere dieting tool—but you’d be wrong. I have used it that way myself from time to time, and recently, several weeks before I read the Times article, I had decided to take it on indefinitely.

The reason was simple: approaching  41 years of age, I found myself overweight and feeling the stressful, impermanent, and uncontrollable nature of my body. I needed to do something.

When I was a monk, the dietary rule turned out to be a profound practice for me. Learning how to tolerate hunger for hours a day became training for tolerating difficult emotions and physical pain. Restricting eating to the morning acts on your desire like focusing a camera lens: the way that the mind relates to the craving for pleasure and safety becomes clearer and easier to witness.  

To use a metaphor of Ajahn Chah, the great Thai Forest teacher, the eating rule is like a Thai lizard hunter. He finds the mound where the lizard lives and closes off all the holes but one, then he waits, watching that one hole. Sooner or later the lizard comes out where he can catch it. In the same way, when you stop foraging for food whenever you want and limit yourself to the morning only, you can see your minds behavior around food more clearly.

Related: Dogen Said Not to Waste a Single Grain of Rice. Here’s How.

As a layperson, following the bhikkhu diet is of course much more difficult. As a monk, I did not have to cook dinner for others while I myself was not eating or resist the urge to wake up my brain with a meal when I had to stay up late at night working. It was initially difficult as a layperson to adjust to the need to schedule a reasonable amount of healthy food before the noon cutoff. It was also hard to acclimatize myself to the season of hunger that began sometime in the late afternoon and continued until nighttime. After a week or two, however, the diet was feeling energizing. I was losing weight. There was an ironic, one might even say Epicurean, enjoyment in being able to eat freely in the morning, and also in not having to think about food after noon.

A sense of excitement began to grow about the diet. After feeling a little tired in the first week, I did as the monastics do: I began taking tonics in the late afternoon and evening (sugar, honey, and medicine are allowed according to all the different lineages). I would have tea and honey or a particular scandalous treat that is allowed for monastics courtesy of a loophole: dark chocolate. Due to the ingredients of pure dark chocolate being cocoa (a medicine) and sugar, monks in the Thai Forest tradition munch on the little dark squares at tea time. This might make us on the diet seem like dandies to you, but believe me—when dark chocolate is the only food stuff you are allowed, its flavor begins to turn ascetic pretty quickly.

That adjustment made, I began to settle into the diet comfortably, at least for the most part. I slipped occasionally due to a birthday party dinner or needing to work late at night. I decided to accept that there might be a “cheat day” once a week, a practice actually recommended in The Buddha’s Diet as good for your metabolism.

I also began to feel the mood that comes from settling into any difficult discipline, a mixture of increased self-confidence, self-respect, and a decrease in the kind of anxiety that results from not feeling able to rely on oneself. Other benefits included increased mental clarity and lightness in the latter half of the day, and better sleep at night.  

Clark Strand, another ex-monk who tried the bhikkhu diet and wrote about it in Tricycle, fell off the wagon after a few months and gave it up. The friend whose bhikkhu practice inspired Strand to stop eating after noon also happens to be my former abbot, Thanissaro Bhikkhu. After Strand began eating after noon again, Ajahn Thanissaro reportedly told Strand, “It’s supposed to be part of a whole lifestyle. You take the bhikkhu out of the bhikkhu diet and all you’ve got is this guy who won’t eat anything after twelve noon because it keeps his weight down. Hard to have much commitment to that!”

Time will tell how I fare, but I’m inclined to think that Ajahn Thanissaro was right. Neither the Times nor even a slim waistline is enough inspiration to keep on the bhikkhu diet. So although one might take up the bhikkhu diet out of a desire for health, longevity in its embrace will require seeing its personal spiritual benefits (and I think it’s clear that it would not be beneficial for everyone). It will also require having a little of the bhikkhu or bhikkhuni in you. But then isn’t that supposed to be true of every follower of the Buddha?

[This article was first published in 2017.]

The post I Tried the “Buddhist Monk” Diet—And It Worked appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

If learning to eat at the monastery was acclimating to the practice of consuming whatever was put in front of me, learning to cook at the monastery was a lesson in how to take care of ingredients. Dogen Zenji wrote, “Not to waste a single grain of rice is called the mind of the way.” This has a similar but slightly different meaning from “A monk’s mouth is like an oven.” The emphasis is on the cook rather than the eater. What Dogen is saying is that not wasting food—taking care of the material around you and preserving what you have—is the totality of Zen life. Zen is difficult, but it is not complicated. It is simply taking care of things.

At the monasteries where I trained, there was an explicit admonition to never throw away food. At Aichi Senmon Nisodo temple in Nagoya, Japan, meals were calculated down to the precise half-bowl of soup, and any leftovers were eaten at dinnertime, mixed into soup or savory rice porridge. We first figured out how many people were expected at the meal. With soup, for example, each person was allotted a bowl and a half; this assured that everyone had at least one serving and then that those who wanted seconds could have them. This is actually very basic common sense. It just involves foresight—for example, knowing how big the bowls are, how much food fits into one bowl, and how much vegetables shrink during cooking.

Related: Food for Enlightenment

The Japanese phrase mottainai is used to express displeasure about wasting. It can be translated as “Don’t waste!” and it’s used to describe instances of throwing away either tangible or intangible things. For example, when I told a young woman in Japan that I didn’t want to get married, she exclaimed, “You’re young! Mottainai!” Back in the United States, when I lament my declining Japanese skills, people often agree, “Mottainai!” And of course, in Japan, if the nuns and I ever considered throwing away some week- old tub of leftover soup, someone would inevitably utter “Mottainai!” And the soup would end up as part of our dinner or creatively incorporated into another dish.

Conserving and respecting food involves equal parts planning how much to cook and repurposing leftovers and old produce. I am not quite sure why I never questioned the reason for peeling carrots until I worked in a monastery kitchen. But really, what is the point of peeling carrots? Mottainai! They taste the same with or without the peel, and the peel contains extra nutrients.

MINDING OUR LEFTOVERS

It is fairly easy to preserve food and deal with leftovers in a Zen monastery, where there is an explicit value placed on not wasting. It is harder to do in a contemporary American household, which is not set up the same way. When I first moved in with Gensan, I tried to save as much as I could. I kept every last scrap of leftovers in the refrigerator and refused to throw away vegetables until they were rotten. If vegetables did go bad before I had a chance to cook them, I mourned their loss. I put old vegetables in soup. I conserved.

But after six months of comfortable domesticity, I found that the refrigerator was packed full of rotting leftovers, half-eaten or rarely used sauce, and obscure oil that I bought on a whim. I had slipped right back into the American way of grocery shopping when I was anxious, stressed, or upset. I stocked the pantry to feel I had a handle on my life, that I was competent as an adult, that I was taking care of my family. I used only a fraction of what I bought.

If you notice you have fallen into this habit, make a list of everything in your refrigerator. That’s right—get an actual piece of paper and write down each and every vegetable, plastic container, and sauce. It’s helpful to divide things into sections like leftovers, produce, and so on. For example, the current contents of my refrigerator are:

• Leftovers: takeout rice and vegetables with peanut sauce from a Thai restaurant
• Old produce: green onions, cilantro, cucumbers, baby bok choi, avocados (very brown), carrots, onions, garlic, limes, cherry tomatoes
• Other: salsa, mustard, peanut butter, sambal oelek, ketchup, tomato sauce, Sriracha, miso, tahini, soy sauce

When you look at these items as a list rather than as amorphous unwanted refrigerator contents, it becomes easy to figure out ways to use them. Stare at your list for a bit and allow the ingredients to dance in front of you; then look for natural resonances between foods and flavor profiles. For example, in the above list avocados and cherry tomatoes with some minced onion, garlic, and lime juice would make a nice guacamole-salsa dip (and I do have chips!). The tiny amount of leftover Thai food could be revamped with the addition of stir-fried onion, bok choi, and carrots in a spicy peanut sauce. If I combined peanut butter, soy sauce, chili oil, sesame oil, and sugar, I would get a delicious sauce (with a kick) that I could garnish with the aging cilantro and green onions.

This is a chance to be creative, to utilize and make the most of the material at hand. Then when you go grocery shopping the next time, write down what you put into the refrigerator and on what date. Cross out food that gets eaten or discarded, so you always know what you have. Using this method, you can keep your refrigerator a lot more civil, and you can train yourself to take care of produce and old food.

Eat what is put in front of you and take care of leftovers. Consume the circumstances of your life, whatever they are, and turn them into fuel. Take care of your community, your house, your family, and your pantry.

WHAT WE WASTE

American culture is not set up in a manner that values preservation. In fact, the message our culture sends us says the opposite—that we should always purchase the new thing, the coolest or freshest thing. We are told that if our refrigerator and pantry are not completely stocked to the brim, we are not successful, we are not providing for our family. The problem with this is not accumulation in and of itself, but that we are not taught how to take care of and value the things we already have.

The same is true with people. People are only worthy of our time and attention if they have value to us personally, if they conform to social norms, if they are easy, pleasant, and attractive. We divide people into categories like “successful,” “failures,” “contributors,” “leeches,” “motivated,” “useless,” “lazy.” Then we allow these words to become the totality of a human being.

We are afraid of difference and weakness. We are afraid of poor people because of the labels we create, and then we become ashamed of our hate and fear. Instead of examining our shame and fear, we keep society’s outcasts at a distance. We treat them like trash and throw them away. We make laws saying they cannot sleep in tents. We make laws saying they cannot sleep on benches. We say they did this to themselves, that they “chose” this life, when nothing could be farther from the truth. (No woman wants to sleep on concrete; it is very painful, not to mention unsafe.) We say they are someone else’s problem. We forget they are human beings just like us.

Bernie Glassman, the Zen teacher famous for his work with the homeless, explained that when we care for the outcasts in society, we are caring for the parts of ourselves that we have rejected, the parts of ourselves we hate or feel shame about. It took me many months before I realized that this is what I was trying to do in my work with addicted clients. Working with people who relapsed over and over, I saw how easily I was frustrated by my clients, how quickly I moved to judgment and then to an impulse to discard them, to punish them by withdrawing kindness and compassion.

Abbess Aoyama Roshi would often say, “How you spend your time is how you live your life.” Spiritual practice shows us that the way we relate to small things—washing dishes, cooking, waiting, cleaning—is indicative of how we relate to everything else. The training in Zen practice is learning how to take care of even the smallest, most mundane task, because the task in front of you is the totality of the universe. So eventually I began to see that the way I was relating to addicted people was how I related to myself. I saw that when I was tired, sad, or struggling, when I didn’t receive labels like “successful,” “beautiful,” “rich,” and “competent,” I hated myself. I felt like trash.

I want to have compassion for the parts of myself I hate—my anger and selfishness, my lust, my introversion, my seriousness. I want to have compassion for these because they are everything that makes me me. But it is hard. We are taught to hate difficult things, difficult emotions, anything that does not contribute to a well-functioning individual. Part of me knows that, in order to have compassion for the world around me, I will have to radically transform how I take care of myself.

Ten years ago, when I was in India on a Buddhist study-abroad program, I had the opportunity to meet the Ogyen Trinley Dorje, one of the two claimants to the title of 17th Karmapa, a reincarnating authority figure in Tibetan Buddhism and head of one of the largest denominations. At the time, he was only about 20 years old—the same age I was. The study-abroad group and I gathered in the Karmapa’s ornate meeting chamber. To my surprise, rather than acting compassionate and expansive, the Karmapa seemed grumpy, restless, and uncomfortable.

A question-and-answer session ensued. Someone from our group asked, “How can I be a good Buddhist?”

The Karmapa scowled. “Don’t try to be a good Buddhist. Go home to your country and be a good citizen, a good family member, a good neighbor. Work on doing good in your community. Don’t worry about Buddhism.”

At the time, I thought he was just being cynical. I thought this was a cop-out answer from a young monk who resented the position he was born into. I now understand what he meant.

What will you do with the hours in your day? How will you treat your heart and the people around you? How will you care for your house and the houses around you? These are questions that our lives continually pose for us, no matter where we are, no matter how fucked-up or enlightened we are. In the East or the West, they are wonderful questions to engage. The best place to find the answers is right where you are, right now.

Zen is famous for its enigmatic riddles and jokes. An empty cup is better than a full cup, because you can fill it with anything. Failure is the mother of success. Mind and body are not one, not two. These may seem confusing at first, but they are descriptions of reality. This isn’t Zen; this is how things are. Nothing cast away is truly trash. What is unlovable deserves love and belonging. Leftovers and old vegetables are new dinner. You must embrace paradox to transform yourself and your life, to create possibility from nothingness. End means beginning.

RECIPE: GOLDEN CURRY

Golden curry is a meal so easy to whip up it does not really warrant its own recipe. It’s one of the few meals I trust my husband, Gensan Thomson, to prepare without my looking over his shoulder the whole time, offering neurotic suggestions. It’s a not-so-spicy Japanese take on Indian curry, most commonly made by using packets of roux that dissolves easily in hot water and thickens into a curry sauce. I mention it here because curry is one of the best ways to get rid of leftovers. Anything can go into curry—old noodles, vegetables, and even lettuce. It’s best not to add anything that already has a distinctive flavor, such as potato salad or vinegar-flavored dishes.

Serves 3

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• ½ large onion, diced medium
• 2 large potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-size pieces
• 2 carrots, cut into bite-size pieces
• Water
• 1 cup leftovers you feel bad about wasting, such as plain tofu, tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, etc.
• 4 squares (1 x 1 inch each) curry roux

Heat the oil in a deep frying pan, pot, or wok and add the onions. Stir-fry on medium for 2 minutes, until the onions begin to soften. Add the carrots and potatoes and continue to stir-fry for another 3 to 5 minutes, until the vegetables are beginning to soften but have not yet browned.

Add water to the pan until it is 1 inch above the vegetables. Bring to a boil and cook until the potatoes are completely soft, another 10 to 15 minutes. If your leftovers are raw, add them so they get their requisite cooking time and are done when the potatoes are fully cooked. For example, if you are adding green beans, add them about 2 minutes before the potatoes will be done. If your leftovers are already cooked, you can add them at the very end.

Add the roux squares to the boiling water in the pan. Stir, breaking up the roux, until it is completely dissolved (you can also dice or slice the roux before adding it to make sure it doesn’t clump). Continue stirring until the sauce thickens. The consistency should be like yogurt—thick enough that it is clearly not liquid, but soft and gelatinous. If the curry sauce isn’t thickening, add more roux, one piece at a time, waiting a minute between each piece and stirring constantly, until it reaches the desired consistency.

♦

Excerpted from the book Just Enough. Copyright ©2019 by Gesshin Claire Greenwood. Printed with permission from New World Library. 

The post Dogen Said Not to Waste a Single Grain of Rice. Here’s How. appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

On February 5, Tibetans celebrate Losar, the lunar new year, ushering in the year of the pig. As is customary for such events, ceremonies meant to cleanse the upcoming year of negativities are accompanied by extravagant feasts for large crowds, featuring delicious Tibetan staples like momo (dumplings) and thenthuk (hand-pulled noodles) that have come to be devoured worldwide, including in the West, where my own family lives.

The global rise of Tibetan cuisine, like that of Tibetan Buddhism, began with the fall of Tibet. Following China’s invasion of the Himalayan kingdom, scores of Tibetan refugees fled into Nepal and India in the 1950s and ’60s, bringing nothing but their resilience and recipes.

One beloved representative of Tibetan cuisine—the momo—debuted in the United States in 1982, when Phintso and Pema Thonden, refugee diplomats dispatched by the Tibetan government-in-exile, opened Tibet Kitchen in Manhattan’s Curry Hill district, not far from the United Nations. By day, Mr. Thonden was the Dalai Lama’s political ambassador, toiling at his desk in the Office of Tibet. By night, the Thondens were introducing UN diplomats and ordinary New Yorkers to Tibetan dishes.

Tibetans trickled into America in those years, some seeking to import the dharma and others hoping to export political assistance. A decade later, Congress included special legislation for “displaced Tibetans” in the Immigration Act of 1990, turning the trickle into a wave. One thousand Tibetans were selected through a lottery to resettle in America. (Luckily, my mother was one of the winners; unluckily, she was resettled in Minnesota, a state whose notorious winters make the Himalayas seem like the Bahamas).

These Tibetan “pilgrims,” who had traveled an even more distant and tortuous route than the original Mayflower passengers in search of refuge from persecution, are responsible for proliferating Tibetan culinary delights throughout the land—from Boston to Berkeley, Madison to Minneapolis, Seattle to San Francisco. Today, New York City alone boasts some 40 Tibetan eateries, most of them clustered in Jackson Heights, Queens, where cafés and food trucks animate the sleepless streets. Here, I introduce you to some of my favorite Tibetan foods, served during new year festivities and beloved all year. Happy Losar!  

Momo (Handcrafted meat or veggie dumpling)

Few things can warm the soul on a cold night in early spring like a plate of steaming momos. There was a time when momos were a rare fare for an ordinary Tibetan family. Ingredients were precious and scarce, and recipes labor-intensive: one person to mince the meat, a second to mix the ingredients, a third to knead the dough—and that’s only half way there. You’d then flatten a small piece of the dough, place some filling at the center, and gently persuade the edges into unity, as if building consensus among the ingredients. Finally, the momos would go in the steamer for 12 to 16 minutes, depending on the type of filling and thickness of skin. Whew! The collective nature of its production, though, unfailingly transformed the mundane labor into an elaborate ritual of social bonding. Adults did the heavy lifting in the momo-making enterprise, while children were welcomed as observers, and, eventually, apprentices.

Tibetans, Mongolians, and Bhutanese insist upon the robust beef momos, while Indians and Nepalese settle for chicken momos in deference to religious considerations. Momos drowned in a sea of red and yellow sauce adds a Kathmandu twist—one of several adaptations the momo has undergone in its long and fabled history. Vegetarians sometimes feel marginalized in Tibetan restaurants, but at Little Tibet in Jackson Heights, you can enjoy the delicious (and healthy) kyutsel momo, made simply with chives, olive oil, and flour.

Several communities claim this dish, and Tibetans and Nepalese occasionally get into heated debates over which side of the Himalayas this jealously loved dumpling originated from. According to the historian Jamyang Norbu, the momo may go back to 13th-century Persia and Khorasan, whose resident Mongol khans (managers of the largest land empire in history) leaked it to the Tibetans.

(A word of caution: if you devour too many momos in one sitting, you may get what is known as the momo burp, which sounds a lot more innocent than it smells.)

Thenthuk (Hand-pulled noodles)

Thenthuk, hand-pulled soup noodles, emerged as the perfect comfort food in the windswept frontier towns along the Sino-Tibetan tea route. Originally from Amdo—the region of northeastern Tibet that is home to the Dalai Lama, the savant Gendun Chophel, and the scholar Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism—thenthuk can be anointed “the food of the poet-scholar” in my opinion, not least because it is fast and easy to cook.

Then- means “to pull,” and –thuk means “noodles.” It’s not a super creative name, but the Amdos reserved their creativity for poetry. They didn’t squander it on trivial enterprises like naming dishes. 

You can find comfort in a hot bowl of thenthuk at any Tibetan establishment, and both vegetarian and non-veg variations are sensational. Some restaurants also serve mothuk, which is—you guessed it!—momos swimming in thenthuk broth. Chef Jigme of the restaurant Böd: Himalaya conjures up a fried version of thenthuk, which is divine, especially when consumed hot off the wok.

Drokgyu (Nomad meat sausage)

The drokgyu is a Paleolithic-style sausage popular among the nomads of Tibet, whose Denisovan ancestors populated the plateau some 40,000 years ago.

The dish recently arrived in New York thanks to Chef Jigme, who grew up as a nomad in Labrang, the site of one of the greatest monasteries in eastern Tibet and also a hotbed of Tibetan resistance. Like many others of his generation, he escaped to exile in Dharamsala, India, where he ran a wildly popular restaurant for ten years before moving to New York.

This king of all sausages is stuffed with beef, blood, Sichuan pepper, onions, and salt. “It is a sine qua non of every nomad family on Losar,” says Rinchen, a former nomad who eats here every day.

Pork Chili / Paneer Chili

Pork chili is immensely popular, especially among those of Nepalese, Sherpa, and Bhutanese heritage. It is made with slices of double-fried pork belly, green chili, black bean sauce, sweet flour sauce, bell peppers, and Sichuan peppers. The tingmo, a steamed plain dumpling, usually flies as the carb wingman to this all fat-and-protein adventure.

The vegetarian avatar of this fare is the paneer chili, known as chura khatsa in Tibetan and Bhutanese. Paneer is Hindi (and originally Persian) for the un-aged farm cheese used pervasively in India and used extensively in modern Tibetan and Himalayan cuisine.

After your meal, I recommend a cup of chai. This spiced Indian milk tea turns out to be the perfect antidote to—or refuge from—the infamous momo burp you’re about to have.

The post Celebrating the Tibetan New Year with Momos and More appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At first glance, the average eater might not think that they have a lot in common with the Tibetan Buddhist monastics who live at Sravasti Abbey in rural Washington State. All the food served at the monastery is donated, onions and garlic are off-limits (as is raiding the refrigerator), and mealtime is spent contemplating the role that food plays in nourishing the monks and nuns’ bodies, which in turn helps them to continue teaching the dharma.

According to Sravasti abbess and founder Thubten Chodron, however, many of the monastery’s practices can actually be adapted to suit families, couples, and individuals who want to use mealtime as an opportunity to be present, connect with one another, and reflect on generosity and kindness. She puts this belief to the test in her new book, The Compassionate Kitchen (available from Shambhala Publications on December 12), which offers advice based on the monastery’s eating practices.

“Although some of this may seem extreme (You don’t buy food?! Won’t you starve?!) or downright impossible (How can I eat in silence when I’m feeding a toddler and my infant starts to wail?), keep an open, playful mind and see what fits you and your situation, and what you could adapt so that it works for you,” Thubten Chodron writes in the opening pages.

You won’t find many Buddha diet tips in The Compassionate Kitchen, though a trimmer waistline may be a healthy and welcome byproduct of eating with more care. Instead, the book uses nourishment as a cue to check in with our spiritual values. Here are five ways Thubten Chodron has found that eating can help your Buddhist practice:

1. Actually taste the food you’re eating.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but while we spend a good amount of time thinking and talking about what we eat, many of us don’t slow down enough to actually appreciate the food when it arrives. Ven. Chodron illustrates this in a story from her own family: While growing up, she writes, everyone in her family (except her) relished in carefully choosing where to order takeout , discussing at length who was in the mood for what. But unless something was wrong with the food, her family rarely commented on how it actually tasted, and instead turned their attention to what one might order for dessert.

At Sravasti Abbey, breakfast and lunch are eaten in silence so that the monks and nuns can do a visualization practice. For example, they might honor the Buddha by imagining that their food is not ordinary food but precious nectar, representing wisdom. They visualize offering this nectar to him as beams of light flow from his body into theirs, bringing calm and bliss. Or they might call to mind the five contemplations—on food, practice, mind, aim of buddhahood, and the causes and conditions that led to receiving the food. These practices can help lead us away from attachment, craving, and dissatisfaction, and toward gratitude for the food and the many beings that made our meal possible. Feeling this gratitude starts with feeling the food on our tongues.

2. Set an intention at the grocery store.

Since all the abbey’s food is donated, local volunteers are the ones shopping for the monastery. Upon delivery, the monastics and lay volunteers chant to dedicate the food to their dharma practice and reflect on the spirit of generosity.  

“This is very different from someone bringing food and tossing it on the counter, saying, ‘Here you go,’” writes Chodron.

But for those of us who purchase our food, Chodron has also written a verse meant for volunteers when shopping for the monastic community. It reads, in part, “I will have a calm heart and mind while mindfully selecting appropriate items to offer and will have a deep sense of satisfaction knowing that the sangha appreciates this offering.” Supporters have reported back that the reflection has helped them be present while shopping and remain aware of how their selections and purchases serve the community.

Next time you’re in a packed pre-holiday checkout line (or if the supermarket is out of your preferred stuffing brand—again), calling this verse to mind might not be a bad idea.

3. Check your greedy mind at the door.

At mealtime, Sravasti residents take their alms bowl through the line of food, and monastics are served in order by ordination. The Vinaya, or monastic code, prohibits one from taking a peek to see how much food your neighbor helped him or herself to. (What others eat is none of our business, according to Chodron, although what we eat is.) The purpose of eating, Chodron writes, is to nourish your body, not to indulge your cravings by overeating or consuming excessive oil, sugar, or fat.

That being said, the greedy mind is powerful, and often has a lot of complaints. The next time you think a meal has too much salt—or not enough—or otherwise disagrees with your taste buds, Chodron advises that you try “accepting what is offered and be content with that.” So if you can’t eat chocolate cake because of an allergy, you will not only survive without dessert but also gain an opportunity to practice contentment and gratitude.

4. Consider going veg (but don’t let it get to your head).

Many on the Buddhist path decide to become vegetarians to protect the lives of animals and the planet—two motivations that Chodron condones. A good place to start, Chodron says, is becoming a part-time vegetarian (you’ll be in good company, as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama eats some meat for health reasons). If one must (or chooses to) eat meat, the Dalai Lama recommends eating larger animals to minimize the loss of numerous lives for one meal, and to appreciate the animal’s sacrifice.

Though everyone who lives at and visits Sravasti Abbey eats vegetarian meals, Chodron doesn’t think “harping about it to others” is a harmonious solution, and that people must decide to become vegetarians or vegan on their own. Boasting about eating only organic food can also add an element of pride (and economic superiority), even if your intentions are good.

5. It’s OK to be attached to a mango (or chocolate bar).

Even though you might feel powerless in the presence of your favorite treats, Chodron explains throughout her book that food is not the strongest craving (money, reputation, and romantic relationships are far stronger).  

“It’s much more productive to focus on applying antidotes to afflictions that motivate highly destructive actions than to fret when attachment arises to a piece of cheese or chocolate,” she writes. This doesn’t give us a free pass to indulge in everything that makes our mouths water, but we might choose to prioritize “the afflictions that cause the most harm in our lives, and slowly, gently work on attachment to food.”  

Still, Chodron says that those who are new to the dharma often recognize and become upset over their attachment to food. A good reminder is the Buddha himself. He prohibited ascetic practices because he saw that the mind was affected when the body is not nourished. It was only after he was kinder to his body that the Buddha attained enlightenment.

Watch Venerable Thubten Chodron’s dharma talk, Recognizing and Transforming Jealousy and Envy, here.

The post Giving Thanks from Your Gut appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.