And What About Three Bowls?

The actual Zen ritual of the oryoki meal, which uses three bowls, is something that I read about years ago in Natalie Goldberg’s A Long Quiet Highway.  Actually, her passage doesn’t even really explain it fully (for that, see the first post for this blog), but it just always stuck with me, even years before I ever thought much about food myself.

She wrote about cooking for her zendo during a difficult time.  Her roshi was dying of cancer, and participating in a ten-day dharma transmission ceremony to pass on his lineage to several monks.  In order to ensure his dharma heirs would be seen as legitimate by the Soto Zen headquarters in Japan, the ceremony was done with full formality despite his condition, and was attended by several guests from Japan.

She wrote:

Being a cook those ten days was demanding.  What did the Japanese eat?  Each meal had to have three bowls of different food...

One morning I got tired of the fancy foods we were cooking.  I was alone with no assistant for lunch prep.  I thought, these are monks.  I’ll make them something simple, a monk’s lunch.  I baked whole potatoes with the skins on for the first bowl, steamed broccoli for the second bowl, and put some butter and chopped parsley into the third bowl for the potato in the first bowl.  No fancy Japanese soy-ginger sauces or French cream sauces.  A potato.  Plunk in the bowl.  American. Midwestern.  I liked the aesthetic.

I don’t know exactly what it was about this passage that stayed with me.  Maybe the potatoes?  I do have Irish heritage.  Or maybe that most of my meals seem bowl-centric rather than plated?

I think, actually, though, it was the division into three.  Because when I cook, I’m usually trying to achieve three different aims: one, is to satisfy (hunger, appetite, comfort, etc.); the second is to be efficient (with my time, money, etc….I forgot another good trait I got from my parents, a bent towards engineering and looking for the best, most efficient way to accomplish any tasks); and the third is to be responsible (to my own body, and yes, even though I’m getting a little maxed out on how fashionable being uber-Green attitude is of late, to the environment, to the animals involved, etc.).

I definitely don’t always succeed.  Actually, I rarely succeed, that’s why I need this website.  I can usually do one but not the other two.  And it bothers me; after all, you have to eat, every day, you have to interact with food, it’s fundamental.  I don’t want to be thoughtless or careless, with my money or my body or resources.  But I am also a sensualist, I am motivated by what feels good, and so I also don’t want to become a humorless prig or an orthorectic or obnoxious foodie (uh, that is a link to a story ABOUT obnoxious foodie-ism, not TO an obnoxious foodie) about all of this either.  There's got to be a balance between it all.

So in addition to the logistical aim of the website mentioned yesterday, this is the, again, philosophical aim behind it.