The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [55]
Brown’s other instruction about mindful cooking is one he says is classic Zen: “When you wash the rice, wash the rice; when you stir the soup, stir the soup.” Give your attention to what you’re doing, rather than to the preoccupations and daydreams scampering through your mind. “This is what some people call reinhabiting your body—extending your consciousness into your feet and hands, finding the life and vitality in your body and activity, rather than going through motions so it’s a chore and drudgery.” With cooking, you can use your awareness to inhabit physical movements that may be new, he says—cutting, washing, examining, mixing, folding—until, with practice, there is an invigorating flow of energy in those physical experiences, a delight.
Such energy, focus, and wholehearted attention nourishes yourself and those you feed, Brown writes in the introduction to his new Complete Tassajara Cookbook: “Cooking is not just working on food, but working on yourself and other people.”
Dale and Melissa Kent, who met at Tassajara in 1997, were both attracted to the monastery partly because of the cookbooks; the way to their hearts, they said, was through their stomachs. “I found The Tassajara Bread Book in a used bookstore and wrote to the address on the back,” said Dale. A promising philosophy student, he confounded everyone in his life by finding work as a baker instead of going to graduate school. “I was following my breath while doing repetitive tasks, and feeling real peace,” he said. “The Tassajara Bread Book described what I had been doing and encouraged me to pay attention, to treat pots and pans and knives as friends. Its poetry and sweetness spoke to me.”
After two years at the monastery, Dale began to work in the kitchen. At Tassajara, monks work in silence, except for occasional functional speech (“What’s burning?”). From the various tenzos he cooked with, Dale says, he learned different lessons—how to taste food and pay attention to the details of a dish, when to salt, how to be generous and fearless, how to plan and move quickly, how to be playful, and to be patient. He also learned how energy, intention, and mood affect what you cook. “If someone was angry and making the bread, they would turn out these angry little loaves of bread.”
I wondered how cooking mindfully would be different outside the monastery, whether it would be more difficult to have a sense of spirituality in your own kitchen. Melissa, who was ino, or head of the meditation hall, told me that cooking is actually a reminder that the spiritual is always at hand. “When you cook mindfully, you’re honoring an everyday activity as sacred, and an opportunity for peace,” she said. “When people elevate time in the meditation hall above time doing the dishes, they’re missing the point. There’s nothing special about meditating in a monastery.”
Annie Somerville, who was tenzo at Tassajara and has been chef at Greens Restaurant for twenty-eight years, says her experience at the monastery grounded her for cooking in the rest of her life. “It’s the hidden storyline,” she says. “All those years of Zen practice were great life training for experiencing all the things that have come my way.” But her practice now is in the restaurant kitchen. “The reason I’m in the kitchen and not sitting in the zendo is that I like to run around,” she says. Cooking, she says, is fully engaging and sharpens her sensory attention—she can see when pasta is done, smell when the vegetables are roasted, and know the onions are ready because they’re translucent. That kind of attention can be freeing for home cooks, too, she says. “For a lot of people, cooking