Table of Contents
No one has ever written about the preparation and servingof meals as an expression of the Buddhadharma, nor haveany teachers taught concerning these matters....Why must it be so?
DOGEN ZENJI
Boredom arises from the loss of meaning, which in turn comes in part froma failure of religio or connectedness with one another and with our past.This book is a modest plea for the realization that absolutely nothingis intrinsically boring, least of all the everyday, ordinary things.These, today, are after all what even we are preparedto admit we have in common.
MARGARET VISSER,Much Depends on Dinner
To the very venerable and incomparable
Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche
and to the children
at his Shree Mangal Dvip Boarding School
It was a common belief throughout much of the world... that food was more than mere nourishment. Its own qualities were closely linked to the physical and moral qualities of those who prepared or ingested it.
REAY TANNAHILL,Food in History
Preface: The Veggiyana
The Buddha acted on the insight that whatever truth a person may reach is reached best by a healthy body and mind.
JOHN DAIDO LOORI
ABOUT 775 YEARS AGO, the seminal Zen Buddhist teacher Dogen Zenji noted in one of his most important teachings, Instructions to the Monastery Cook, that taking diligent care in the kitchen enables all members of the community to fulfill their lives in the most stable way. Hunger, fatigue, and sickness, he said, are powerful distractions, and a cook who truly understands the meaning of a kitchen has the power to prevent them. This is still true.
Just after all the hoopla of the new millennium fizzled, I went to Nepal to study Dharma. While there, I visited the boarding school my teacher had established for lay children from high Himalayan villages, Tibetan refugee camps, and the squalid sprawl of Kathmandu. It was an overcrowded, vibrant hive out of which black-haired children poured as word spread that a yellow hair had come. I was quickly engulfed in a sea of smiles. But around those gleaming white grins were runny noses, and the hands reaching out to me revealed rashes and unhealed scratches. Then I noticed how scrawny all these kids were. I immediately wanted to feed them.
At the end of the next teaching, with more gumption than Id realized I had, I jumped up and shouted to the crowd of about a hundred people that I knew they were all going to go spend a dollar on a beer or a pot of Nepali chai at lunch. And I also knew they could live without it. So if they would give me that dollar instead, I would buy the kids at Rinpoches school a pantry full of food to help give them the gift of good healthwhich they quite literally couldnt live without. In ten minutes I had $120. Thats how the Veggiyana began.
The monks thought I had gone mad when I made them take me food shopping all over the valley, but that afternoon I stocked the storeroom with fifty-kilo sacks of nutritious beans, unadulterated cooking oil, jars of ghee, iodized salt, raisins, peanuts, cornmeal, and fifty kilos each of popping corn and granola. The following year when I returned, every one of the three hundred kids in that school remembered me.
I was so flattered I spent a very long day cooking them three big meals in a kitchen that had no electricity, no water, no flooring above the packed down earth, no tables, and no stoveonly a mudded pile of stone into which three men shoved or withdrew a tree trunk to send varying heights of fire up through a hole at the top. You must be very happy, three teenaged girls said, giggling, while they watched me through the doorway. Why? I asked, for by now it was me who had begun to think Id gone mad. Because, one started to say when another interrupted with more giggles, youre making us very happy!
Each of the next two years, during my three-week visit to study Dharma, I dragged two or three monks shopping with me. I joked that while others came to Kathmandu for the Buddha, I now came for what amounted to a hill of beans. Back in America, from time to time Id send a few hundred dollars to help the steward monks keep buying fresh fruits and high-quality dhal. The improvement in the children, their energy and their immunity, had started to become so obvious the stewards didnt dare backslide. They and their cohorts at the monastery actually began to complain I was ignoring themthe grown-upsand that, they whined ever so slightly, wasnt fair. So I bought them ten kilos of peanut butter, a pickup truckload of apples, and fifty kilos of popping corn.
I then set up a learning program in which every Saturdaythe only day the children had vacation from classesa dozen kids went into the kitchen and cooked lunch for the whole school. I wanted to teach the children to do what I did so they could spread the gospel of good food from their own experiencepersonal understanding being the time-honored way that Dharma has been propagated. And they certainly have done that. The Saturday cooking class is still going strong; in fact, it has become so prestigious and popular it has no shortage of volunteers, no shortage of monks and nuns who show up to eat, no shortage of school graduates who, from wherever in the world they are now studying, write to say how much it steadies them to know how to appreciate the food they find there.
Ten years after that spontaneous shopping spree, its not only the children whove bloomed. The magnificent new monastery in the ancient village of Namo Buddha, about an hours drive beyond Kathmandu, has a huge terraced vegetable garden and an orchard to supply its kitchen, which serves soybeans and fava beans so fewer monks visit the medical clinic with rashes, digestive disorders, and fatigue. The 250 nuns at the abbey in the Syambu section of Kathmandu who, two years ago, were fainting from malnutrition now tend their own vegetable garden, fruit tree collection, and bird sanctuary and have joined an environmental cleanup squad that not only collects trash in the famed Syambu stupa area but promotes composting and recycling in the residential neighborhood abutting it. The schoolchildren are composting, growing lettuces, learning the basics of vitamins and working with Jane Goodall in her international childrens environmental and animal protection program, Roots and Shoots. In the summer of 2010, Thrangu Rinpoche, the great benefactor of all this activity, consecrated the Thrangu Monastery Canada in Vancouver, where ninety fruit trees were planted out back and a community vegetable garden laid in on one side. All in all, the bright glow on the full faces of those in his care has become so noticeable that other teachers are asking for food help too. World-renowned sacred chanters Deva Premal and Miten, as well as Philadelphia flutist Marianne Sutin, have sent profits from CDs and concerts to help. A full-fledged charity has been set up so everyone can join in too. The whole story of how I deliberately learned Himalayan cooking, answered calls to make meals for traveling Tibetan gurus to keep their strength and spirit up, cooked for enough Dharma retreats to get the Tibetan name
