A thousand years from now, if only one of Dōgen Zenji’s works survives, I hope it will be his Tenzo Kyōkun (“Instructions To The Cook”). In a Zen monastery, or on a retreat, the tenzo is the person responsible for preparing meals for the community. Dōgen wrote Tenzo Kyōkun as a detailed set of instructions for the tenzo “covering a period of one complete day.” And the essay covers everything from fetching and handling ingredients, to planning meals, to cooking with careful attention (remember, “[t]ake special care, lest a mouse accidentally falls into” the rice pot). More than anything, the essay is about the spirit needed to carry out this important work.
If Tenzo Kyōkun were just a set of instructions about cooking and our relationship to food, it would be valuable enough. But the essay is revered because of its central metaphor: the tenzo is you, and the tenzo’s work is how you live your life. The ingredients you receive are your circumstances and the moments of your life, and what you do with them is what your life is and will be.
Not something to be left to chance, and not so easy! In fact, Dōgen says that you really need Way-Seeking Mind (dōshin) to do the job–the sincere resolve to awaken for the benefit of all beings. “If a [person] entrusted with this work lacks such a spirit,” Dōgen warns, “then [they] will only endure unnecessary hardships and suffering.” If you saw this listing posted on a recruiting website, you might not bother to apply. But here you are. You’ve already been hired. Sorry!
So then what does Way-Seeking Mind look like in practice? Here, as I understand it now, are the take-home messages:
- Handle each of your ingredients as carefully as if they were your own eyes.
- Don’t leave your life to others but “carry out this work with your own hands.”
- Give your full attention to whatever it is you are doing, moment by moment.
- Never “grumble about the quality of the ingredients,” but “cultivate a temper which sees and respects them fully for what they are.”
- Maintain an attitude of joy, kindness, and magnanimity in every moment, without exception (Joyful Mind, Parental Mind, Big Mind).
- Make a sincere effort. “The true bond established between ourselves and the Buddha is born of the smallest offering made with sincerity rather than of some grandiose donation made without it.”
I think this last point deserves special emphasis, especially in a year like 2020. For Dōgen, a sincere effort isn’t a perfect one, or even a particularly impressive one on the surface. A sincere effort is just a whole-hearted one, made without pretense. Can we actually practice like that? It may be hard to believe during these times, but Dōgen assures us that if we put forward sincere effort and attend to our lives closely, “a meal containing the six flavors and the three qualities will come together naturally.”
Dōgen also points out that just taking his written instructions to heart isn’t quite enough. In fact, the real heart of the essay are some now famous stories about humble tenzos in China schooling a young and arrogant Dogen about practice. The tenzos’ words and examples touched Dōgen deeply and had a profound impact on the course of the Soto Zen tradition. So maybe above all, Dogen’s key instruction is that we should “listen closely to what those who have done this work have to tell us regarding the details.”
We should listen closely to Edward Espe Brown, a Soto Zen priest ordained by Shunryu Suzuki, a former tenzo at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, an accomplished chef, and the author of many best-selling cookbooks (including the acclaimed Tassajara Bread Book). Doris Dörrie’s How To Cook Your Life does just that.
The documentary follows Brown as he teaches cooking classes and gives dharma talks in Austria and at Tassajara. The documentary is both an exploration of our relationship to food and the dharma seen through the lens of food and cooking. Brown offers light-hearted and moving teachings about a great many things, like the hopeless pursuit of perfect biscuits (“compared to what?”), getting too attached to fad diets (recalling that the macrobiotic devotees at Tassajara were not so calm and peaceful), and appreciating food and work in an affluent society. Dörrie also treats us to scenes of life at Tassajara and explorations of food culture in the United States.
Riding alongside Brown’s dharma talks, Dörrie’s thoughtful shot selection and editing invites us to practice in real-time. She uses stark images of raw food shining like jewels, and scenes like one with a teenage boy burdened with the memory of the first time he killed a chicken, all with great effect. She also juxtaposes American restaurant excess with a quirky dumpster diver searching for figs in a neighborhood tree (is that so strange?).
But I found the most artful audiovisual teaching to be Dörrie’s use of the birds at Tassajara. Tassajara is haunted by the Steller’s Jay, a cousin of the blue jay with a loud, awful screech. Dörrie weaves that screech into many segments, maybe just to irk you and get you to reflect on how we deal with annoying things. She deftly splices these calls over recordings of Shunryū Suzuki Roshi lecturing about these birds, where he says with perfect serenity that “when you are not disturbed by the blue jay, the blue jay will come right into your heart, and you will be a blue jay. . . . Bird is here, in my mind already”– SCREECH! What do you think?
Dörrie’s teachings complement and amplify Brown’s. A driving theme of the documentary is the felt need to control things and retreat from the world to protect ourselves from things we don’t like. On this score, I was moved by the way Brown shows us his sincere heart. Throughout the film, Brown is open with his imperfections, and he shares with us his lifelong struggle with impatience and anger. In the opening scenes, Brown shows us the back of his rakusu, on which Suzuki Roshi painted a cow “eating patience grass.” We later watch as he boils over with frustration at food packaging or students not paying attention. As Brown teaches, “sincerity is the quality where your imperfections show.”
In the closing scenes, Brown reflects tearfully on the battered but cheerful little teapots in the Tassajara kitchen of his youth. “In the course of life you get banged up and you get tarnished,” he says. But he is moved by the teapots’ example–their readiness to continue their work for the benefit of others–because “there’s some quality about them that continues even though they’re banged up, tarnished, stained, bruised.” And he thinks, “[i]f you can do it, I can do it too.” That scene will stick with me for some time.
Dörrie and Brown have made a fine vessel for the teachings of the Tenzo Kyōkun. For some invaluable details on how to practice Dōgen’s teachings in the modern world, I highly recommend How To Cook Your Life.
* Quotations fromTenzo Kyōkun are drawn from Eihei Dōgen and Kōshō Uchiyama, How To Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment, translated by Thomas Wright (2013).
