This is not about anything that happened since my last post. I just wanted to share this piece I wrote a while ago about diet and Dharma and my experience in Mongolia.
Out
of the blue in the spring of 2012, I got an SOS from Mongolia. The Foundation
for the Preservation of the Mahayana (FPMT), an international Tibetan Buddhist
group affiliated with Lama Zopa Rinpoche, was seeking someone who knew the
kitchen as well as the Buddha’s Dharma, someone who could come asap to Ulan
Baator to teach vegetarian cooking and re-invigorate its Stupa Café. “Mongolian food habits are
very difficult to change,” the email said. “They basically eat meat (sheep
meat) three times a day, and dairy products, obviously. But in the capital city
they are willing to change and experiment… .”
The
urgency to revive the cafe was part of an urgency to restore Buddhism to
Mongolia as the country re-asserted itself after a brutal Stalinist
occupation. For 70 years, the
Russians had done their best to obliterate every trace of what had been the country’s
official religion, and in the rush to fill the vacuum created by their
departure, Buddhists were being ruthlessly challenged by a surprisingly huge
and well-financed invasion of Christian evangelicals and Mormons. They couldn’t
afford to overlook any opportunity, especially major public outreach like the
café.
From
Chingghis Khan airport, I was driven to the epicenter of the religious revival:
a four-story, brown brick building in the heart of downtown on a busy
thoroughfare whose impossibly long Mongolian name turned out to be Tourist
Street. It had been purchased a dozen years before, after his Holiness the
Dalai Lama tapped Lama Zopa Rinpoche and his FMPT organization to bring
Dharma back where it started in the 3rd Century BC during the reign
of Ashoka. This is to say at least 600 years before it found China, a
millennium before it spread into what we envision as Tibet. Although we don’t
think of it this way, when those famous paintings were made, the caves of Dung
Huang were Mongolian. Two of Padmasambhava’s 25 disciples were pure Mongol.
Chingghis Khan maintained a tight relationship with the Sakyas, and according
to historian Glenn Mullin, Chingghis’ grandson Kublai, unifier and ruler of
China, was so devout that Marco Polo failed to fulfill his real mission in the
East: to convert the tolerant Kublai to Catholicism and thereby subjugate him
to the Pope.
Kublai
Khan’s death in 1294 and the consequent rise of the Ming dynasty vastly reduced
Mongolia’s hegemony, but not its grip on Buddhism. In the 1570s, the family
heir Altan Khan, on a throne in what is now Inner Mongolia, declared the
national religion to be Buddhism, the Tibetan Gelug Mahayana version, and
brought to his court the most renowned Gelug lama in his kingdom. Appointing Je Tamchey Khyenpa, or “The Omniscient
Master”, spiritual ruler of the country,
the Khan used the monk’s original ordination name, Lama Sonam Gyatso or Sonam Gyatso, Lama, but switched the Tibetan Buddhist Gyatso, ocean, to the ordinary Mongolian
word for that, which gave him the title: Dalai
Lama.
As
the third heir of the Gelug teachings, Sonam Gyatso became the third Dalai
Lama. With power and money at his disposal, he built the now legendary Kumbum
Monastery at the birthplace of the Gelug sect’s venerated founder, Tsongkhapa, in
Kokonor, Amdo, Qinghai--now considered to be Tibet but then part of Mongolia.
(Kokonor and Qinghai are, according to Mullin, Mongolian words, and Amdo’s
inhabitants’ ethnicity remains heavily Mongolian.) To everyone’s surprise, his
successor, the fourth Dalai Lama, turned out to be a grandson of Altan Khan,
and the Mongol child was sent to the Kumbum to study. The fourteenth and
current Dalai Lama, a monk ordained Tenzin
Gyatso, was, as it happens, born in Amdo quite close to the Kumbum, which helps to explain why he is so determined to restore Tibetan Buddhism to the Khans' country.
The
newly chartered FPMT/Mongolia re-opened their building in 2002 as Ganden Do Ngag Shedrup Ling. Like much of Ulan Baator, it is
Soviet-era nondescript, yet absolutely impossible to miss or mistake. Behind
its iron bar fence, in the little paved plaza, where there could have been
three or four parked cars, there is a plump, gleaming white, 8 ft tall Tibetan
stupa. Mongolians have to pass and often circle this improbable landmark whenever
they come through the iron gate for yoga, children's Dharma, ESL, Buddhist
films, Gelug Lam Rim teachings, pujas or purchasing Dharma paraphernalia
imported from Nepal. Once they step up and enter the building, they encounter the
door to the café, whose windows overlook the stupa. Its refreshment was
supposed to attract passers-by to the center, enticing them to spend Tukrik, Mongolian currency, that could
help fund its free Dharma classes.
When it
opened in 2005, the 16 table Stupa Café served tea with
pastries made by a Swiss volunteer, but after her departure, it
foundered as new managers tried to turn it into more of a restaurant, a
vegetarian restaurant. That was the problem. Mongolians seemed happy to have Buddhism
back—or so over 50% declared in surveys, but they weren’t happy about seemingly
new restrictions on their diet. Meat-eating is so embedded in the Mongolian
mind, before I arrived, at the FPMT/Mongolia soup kitchen eight kilometers away
in slums overrun by nomads who'd sold their herds to seek city riches, an angry
mob attacked the cooks, claiming the Buddhists were trying to kill them by not
putting meat in the soup. These beggars could afford to be choosers because the
Evangelicals down the street were quite willing to provide all the meat it took
to convert them.
Even
educated citizens like my 37-year-old friend Narmandakh, who'd lived long
enough in LA to become an American citizen named Amanda, panicked when she
tried to abstain for the Buddhist holy week of Saga Dawa. On days 2 and 4 she called to complain she felt so weak,
she was scared. Maybe she was going to die. Maybe she should eat some lamb?
Neither the six women aged 20 to 43 who worked in the café nor its manager, a man who'd studied in East Germany, wanted
to be vegetarian, even for a meal. They were entitled to all the kitchen food
they could consume, yet once a week, they pooled their very hard earned money
to fill one of its small freezers with lamb. Everyday around 2:30, the head
cook Tuya or Eveel or the dishwasher Tsetseglen would pull some out to make everyone
a meaty lunch. The highest compliment they could give a dish I taught them--the
way I knew they really liked, say, the mushroom barley soup--was to ask if they
could add their lamb to it.
Mongolians are proud to have survived thousands of
years on a treeless plain brutalized by six months of 40º below zero (that's
where Fahrenheit and Celsius intersect) as nomads who manage herds to supply all
the material, milk, meat and mobility they need. Because vegetables will not
grow in their frosty soil, and because nomads don’t farm, Mongolians long ago
cleverly mastered getting all the vitamins a human body needs from dairy
fermentation. In my Beginning Mongolian
booklet, the page on food shopping words illustrates four different kinds of
meat, milk, yogurt, butter, cooking oil, bread and flour--a perfect picture of
the Mongolian diet. But
since they were liberated from the Soviets in the early 1990s, the majority of
Mongolia’s three million inhabitants have migrated from a nomad’s ger to the
booming city, and this radical shift has begun to make the traditional fatty
diet worrisome to an increasingly sophisticated medical profession.
The migration has also
provoked a spate of investor-backed greenhouses and small plot farming in the
surround, for while Mongolians have been rediscovering themselves, the world
has been discovering copper and gold under their Gobi Desert, and corporate
suits fly like locusts into Ulan Baator to devour them. In the astounding
economic boom, Mongolians have been treated to all sorts of restaurants:
French, Bukharin, Malaysian, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Indian, even American
barbeque-- restaurants all hungry for a steady supply of scallions, spinach,
even tomatoes, to please their foreign customers with salad as garnish for huge
slabs of “grass fed” Mongolian beef and lamb. Then too, the Russians left a
legacy of cabbage and potatoes.
Nobody
was under an illusion Mongolia would become meatless soon. But the Buddhists at
Ganden Do Ngag Shedrup Ling knew His
Holiness the Dalai Lama had been experimenting with and encouraging vegetarian
meals to practice the Buddha’s first precept of no harm. Their aspiration was to
tap the brakes on all the slaughter the typical Mongolian diet required with a
strategy of offering an enjoyable meatless meal. Perhaps this would lead to a
second such meal and encourage a third that would make Mongolians want to try a
meatless meal at home. Every meat-free bite was a step along the path to the Buddhist
goal.
History
was encouraging. Dharma is maddeningly vague about meat-eating, yet it somehow reduces
consumption in every country that embraces it. Its insistence on awareness starts at the gut level with focus
on habitual patterns of personal behavior, and this makes eating habits fair
game. In fact, after years of brute asceticism led him not to enlightenment but
to death's door, the first absolute truth the Buddha recognized was: human
beings need to eat. For him the unresolved issues were: what and how? That’s
why a significant portion of the Vinaya,
his rules for monastic behavior, concern eating.
When
the Buddha made the cow sacred in India, the Brahmins held onto their hegemony
only by giving up steak for beans. The initial Chinese converts to his
India-based religion, coming from a culture described as eating anything that
flies but a kite and anything with four legs but a table, cleverly invented
tofu and exploited noodles. Chinese monks took their vegetarian ingredients
with their Dharma teaching to carnivorous Vietnam, Korea and Japan. In Japan,
cooking was turned into a meditation practice that yielded the exquisite Shojin Ryori and Kaiseki Ryori cooking Western restaurant critics rave about today.
Returning from zendos and ashrams with tofu, miso and lentils, Western flower
children arguably launched the lively and increasingly popular vegetarianism of
21st C America.
Tibetans
come closest to Mongolians in reliance on meat, and for centuries their
enormous monastery complexes included equally enormous abattoirs. Rinpoches
made excuses for eating meat, often insisting on its benefit: the human
consumer became responsible for purifying the karma of the animal consumed. But
when Tibetan monastics in exile were exposed as some of India and Nepal's
largest consumers of cow, an embarrassed Dalai Lama forbid beef at all Tibetan
monasteries. Shortly after, His Holiness Karmapa, noting India and Nepal had
plenty of nutritious alternatives unavailable in Tibet, issued a no-meat-at-all
fiat. Now the monks of the Kagyu sect dine daily on rice, vegetables and dhal. Pious
Tibetans in exile abstain from meat for the month of Saga Dawa.
The
key was to offer dishes that did not remind people they were not eating meat
(e.g. tofu burgers), yet dishes that nonetheless offered what meat did: strong
flavor, rich texture, and a feeling of fullness. The most vital criterion was
familiarity. Eating habits are so primal and deeply embedded, scientific
evidence—often from POWs, reveals people actually starve themselves to death to
avoid eating scary food. Instinct warns it could be poison. In all probability,
the weird Chinese seitan and soy-meat
the cafe was unimaginatively cooking had alienated its customers.
Mongolian
tradition offered the perfect solution. As herders, the nomads long ago became
masters of milking. Dairy products were familiar, tasty, protein rich, filling,
and abundant in the marketplace. Mongolians were avid consumers of yogurt, sour
cream, butter, creamy cheese and "urum", something sold frozen in fan-shaped
sheets that seemed to be heavy cream. In mid summer while their animals were
giving birth and nursing, they actually relied on dairy more than meat. Why not
support the remaining nomads, keep the money in Mongolia and serve dairy-based
dishes?
The
cafe staff immediately explained why not. Shortly after Mongolia became a free
country, a beautiful, charismatic Vietnamese woman known as Supreme Master
Ching Hai appeared. Claiming to be an emanation of Quan Yin, the great mother
goddess to East Asian Buddhists, she relentlessly proselytized about purity of
spirit and diet. When she moved on, she left behind an army of awestruck
disciples, a chain of vegan restaurants, and the deeply embedded fear that a
Buddhist who ate any animal product would be punished by the furies of hell. Too terrified of hellish karma to
serve dairy, the café staff dutifully –and listlessly--cooked up relentlessly vegan dishes like
"Goulash": cubes of soy-meat quickly stir-fried with onions and
canned tomato paste.
The Stupa
Café’s turnaround thus began not with a recipe but a Dharma teaching, the first
and foremost teaching that actually created
the Buddha and Buddhadharma. Prince
Siddartha was able to sit under the Bodhi tree and become Shakyamuni Buddha
only after he re-invigorated his starved, emaciated body by eating yogurt (or
arguably milky rice). Thus the Buddha was not vegan. In fact, he could not have
known what vegan means: the word and concept were coined in 1944 in England. The
Buddha lived, taught and died in 4th Century BC India, a country as dairy
dependent as Mongolia. So there was no historic precedent compelling a Buddhist
cafe in Ulan Baator to be vegan.
"But,"
manager Oyunbaatar wailed, “how do we explain to our customers who believed
that Vietnamese woman?”
The
answer became Lesson Two. The Vietnamese got Buddhism from southern China where
dairy is not prevalent because the Han Chinese-- genetic kin to the Vietnamese--
are lactose intolerant. Unable to
find or to digest the dairy foods of their Indian masters, the initial Chinese
Buddhist monks invented tofu to look and cook exactly like paneer and yogurt.
Shortly after, in the careful process of making noodles to eat with that tofu, mindful
monks observed the wheat starch--the seed's protein or glue, i,e, gluten--
rinse off, and tried kneading it like their noodle dough into "wheat-meat."
These became the little breads named seitan
in Japan, but known in China by the words "Buddha's food." Bringing Dharma back to Mongolia gave
the café manager a choice: do it the Chinese way and pay Beijing for the
ingredients, or operate a Mongolian café. An exuberant Oyanbaatar flashed his
dimpled smile, ran a hand through his slicked hair and took off as though he
got out of jail free. Two hours later he was back by the stupa, unloading kilos
of butter, yogurt and sour cream from the trunk of his dilapidated little white
sedan.
My fear
that I would spend my days choking on fumes of resentment quickly evaporated.
With the two old fridges full of the yogurt they knew, a semi circle of urum in the freezer and blocks of the
butter they loved on the stainless worktable, the women in the kitchen took to
chopping and stirring with a surprisingly joyous energy. Instead of preparing
food they didn’t understand and couldn’t stand, their work was to dispatch familiar
ingredients in new combinations, essentially conquering foreign food to make it
Mongolian. The first afternoon, the youngest staff member, the hot-blooded
20-year-old Otgo, raced through her potato peeling chores to watch me make a
batch of butter and cream scones. The next morning, when I started again so the
head cook, Eveel, could write the exact procedure in her new notebook, Otgo
threw a half-peeled potato on the stainless table, and raced over to my
counter, saying in her broken English: “I do.” And she did, almost perfectly.
This tour de force and the ebullience of the staff reminded me of
a historian’s claim that the true quest of Chingghis Khan, the greatest
conqueror, was to bring his seemingly primitive people up to speed with known
skills and goods they didn’t have. This motivation was the secret of his
unparalleled success in capturing and consolidating the world.
As we
began to focus on testing new daily specials, Tuya, the tall, big boned back-up
cook, would in shy silence follow my requests to chop an onion, mince some
garlic. Then she’d phlegmatically saunter over to the stove, curious about what
I was doing with them, and when the moment seemed right, I handed her the
stirring spoon for a taste. It took a few seconds before she would widen her
eyes, burst into a smile, nod very enthusiastically and run for her notebook--
or just stand there puzzled. If she or the others didn’t like a dish-- frittata
turned out to be one, we never mentioned it again. A dish that dazzled the
staff--the potato gratin, eggplant parmesan or sour cream apple pie—was made
anew by them and sent to the front. If it sold out, the women would hug each
other, jump up and down, cheer, and run around like fools.
Once we
started to offer free tastes, people started to show up more regularly. Since
there was no longer a menu, daily specials were posted in two languages
(Mongolian and English) on a new whiteboard: Tibetan thukpa soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, noodle pudding. The
surprise, the tastiness or maybe just their spunky appetite for experimentation
brought Mongolians back. Earnest, khaki-clad backpackers drawn to the stupa
took such delight in finding familiar items on the whiteboard, they ordered two
or three dishes at a time: minestrone, Turkish pumpkin pancakes, and Italian arancini (deep-fried and cheese rice
balls). Buzz reached the neighborhood expats who’d abandoned the café en masse,
complaining they couldn’t even eat the spaghetti. Now that it was properly
cooked in a large pot of salted water, they slurped it up with coriander pesto
or brown butter and pine nuts. By week four, register receipts were doubling. Nandia,
who worked the front because she had the only command of English, couldn’t keep
up relaying all the compliments, telling us only when customers asked to meet
the cooks.
The
appreciation and excitement coming from the front buoyed the women in the
kitchen. Sometimes they stayed long beyond their shift, sometimes Tuya came an
hour early to check on what was happening. Twice I saw Eveel flipping through
my recipe file even though she could barely read the English. My last day,
after we re-created all the successes to be sure we’d nailed them, these heirs of Chingghis Khan took
on learning to make broccoli mushroom quiche, cream of leek soup, blackberry clafouti, peanut butter cookies and a
grand finale of double layer carrot cake with creamed cheese frosting, which
sold out in an hour.
The Stupa Cafe was now a very different enterprise. It was profitable, helping to sustain the center. Otgo was promoted to full time pastry chef with the dishwasher
Tsetseglen as backup. Eveel asked if she could keep my recipe book, even though
she couldn’t read it—yet. Nandia and Tuya got small raises. Manager Oyunbaatar got too overwhelmed to say anything. He simply refused to go home to sleep
after our last day because someone had to take me back to Chingghis Khan
airport at 3:15 AM, and he didn’t want the guard on duty to do it as routine. When
he put my suitcases on the shadowy terminal sidewalk, his eyes were filling with
tears. "It was my dream," he choked, "that this cafe would bring
the world to Mongolia and Mongolia back into the world again. Now it's actually
happening.”
About
two months after I departed, I got a surprise email from Ulan Baator. Thank you, it said. The café continued to be a huge success. With great relief and tasty food to nourish their stomachs, the Buddhists at Ganden
Do Ngag Shedrup Ling were feeling re-energized and optimistic
about restoring Buddhism to Mongolia.
~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
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