THE CARNIVORES' MILLENNIA
My teacher’s monks seem to get endless laughs out of my self-chosen Bodhisattva name: Hayong Trukhen Lakpa. These three little words properly pieced together bring you as close as you can get in Tibetan to what we call dishpan hands, an expression I had translated in honor of all my time spent in the kitchen at meditation retreats. I am the devotee whose dharma duty between the opening chants and final dedication of merit often turns out to be cooking something up: meals for 140 students, dinners for many a guru, and days worth of nutrition for the 350 Himalayan kids in my teacher’s Kathmandu boarding school who eagerly shout “America machen!”, the cook from America, whenever I show up.
KP has taken me to the intersection of Buddhism and food where I’ve learned enough to write a few articles and to be writing a book about Himalayan cooking. It also got me to see at the nexus of Buddhism and food the fountain of endless surprise fed by the flow of endless misconception, for when it comes to understanding the dharma of dinner Westerners are all wet. The time I made 850 cookies for nine afternoon teas at a New England retreat for 80 appalled friends in whose Jewish/Christian minds piety means abstinence: the haunting spirituality of a fast, not for godssake a feast of tea with homemade cookies. I’ve shared the experience of Theravada Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein who finds students shocked to find her in the faculty room drinking coffee—coffee! —because Buddhists are supposed to be dead calm tea sippers. And I’d like to take this opportunity to mention my surprise when Ten Speed Press, so anxious for first rights to my Himalayan cookbook On High Ground, abruptly and rudely dropped it because they didn’t want to deal with a “cuisine of scarcity.” But the biggest shocker is always that Buddhists do eat meat.
Hitler may have been a vegetarian but Gautama Siddhartha, the Shakyamuni Buddha, was not. He reportedly died of food poisoning after eating rotten pork served by an unknowing host who intended only to be generous. This was a denouement that neatly illustrates his teachings on the topic of meat eating: do not yourself knowingly kill a creature merely for the pleasure of your own meal of it and do not waste or flaunt life by refusing whatever may be served to you-- which is to say beggars can’t be choosers. The Buddha did however choose to pig out on more than his fair share of that lethal pork in order to save others from the suffering he foresaw it was going to cause.
The Buddha never said: Thou shalt not eat meat because Dharma does not slap absolutes on human life. How can it when it teaches that everything is constantly changing according to causes and conditions: a moment comes together differently from the next or last moment and the truth of that moment no longer holds. It’s all relative, all that gray area called what to do? taxing your gray matter all the time because you have to keep thinking fast on your feet to be present for the circumstances of the current moment. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche says that in this whirlpool the only thing you can have complete control over is your intention span. Maybe this is why what the Buddha said was: First, do no harm.
Tophooey Westerners blindly stuck in the monolithic absolutism of monotheistic thinking like to grab onto the concept of the Sacred Cow as a pitch for strict vegetarianism. But it is strictly a practice of do no harm. The arrival of the Iron Age with its novel weapons of crass destruction had allowed the Brahmin class to so greedily indulge in the nonstop ritual sacrifice of cattle for gluttonous dinner parties that the rest of India seemed to be dazedly starving on the side. The sanctification of the cow was a way of saying the cow is worth way more alive than dead since it chews down the grasses to make a field, pulls the plow that produces legumes and vegetables, provides dung for both fertilizer and cooking heat, provides milk for protein, provides more cows and because of all these life saving qualities can be exchanged as money in bridal dowries. Net net, in India it is not cost efficient to eat steak; it is in fact an arrogant, deleterious waste of vital resources. The Sacred Cow re-established harmony in the interdependence of all beings.
Coffee or tea? Tofu or tuna? Spiritual beings ought to fast not feast. Western minds prefer things to be all one way or the other, right or wrong, so they are constantly torturing themselves in the hell of continual judgment seeking that ever elusive stamp of eternal approval. Just last month, the lovely, devoted dharma student who was to take over from me the honor of serving water to the teacher went into a tailspin of angst trying to nail down the precise way to do it: glass to the left or right, what moment to start, how high to hold the tray…? All I could say was: “I don't think there is a right or wrong way; I just do what feels workable at the moment and I haven’t been smitten by any Furies.”
The Buddha was a hard core realist who taught that life is not a one-way highway to heaven but a delicate balancing act here on Earth. The opening words of the Abhidharma, the scientific text on apparent truth are: “All beings exist on food.” Buddhism began with a meal. Bedraggled and near death from ascetic practices that led not to transcendence, Siddartha finally accepted an offering of food whereupon his body regained the strength that allowed him to pursue meditation and attain enlightenment. So his teaching is: Eat and be well. That’s why it’s hard to imagine him condoning continued Macrobiotic eating when it causes malnutrition or condemning the Dalai Lama for eating meat after his good faith effort to go cold turkey vegetarian caused him serious digestive damage.
Admittedly the perp walk between Eat and Do No Harm is tricky. That’s why the Buddha taught in the Sutras that food should not be an indulgence, an object of blood lust and wanton pleasure; it should be treated as mere necessity. You gotta do what you gotta do but you don’t gotta make a big deal over one ingredient or other, one restaurant or other, one sycophantic Food Section article. And he larded the Vinaya, the code of behavior, with table manners for, as Trungpa Rinpoche told his Western students: “A lot of things are based on the idea of eating food properly, which is how to behave as a basically decent person.”
Dharma clearly is not so much concerned with what you eat as how you eat. The kids at my teacher’s school in Nepal call themselves “veg” and “non-veg” at meal times then go about their day together, one group not holier than the other. The Tibetan people are among its most pious devotees but inhabit a frozen skyscraper landscape that has forced their bodies to evolve so totally dependent on livestock they cannot be “non-veg.” Yet they do not eat themselves up over it. My teacher who comes from Kham but now lives mostly between India and Nepal has finally adjusted his digestive system enough to be happily vegetarian for a stretch but when a hostess in New England asked him what he wanted her to make for dinner, he said without hesitating: “Steak!”
I happen to know he wouldn’t sit down and relish eating it all bloody rare or remotely pink hot off the grill or with bragging rights at The Palm. I have been trained to cook all signs of life out of meat served. I know to cut it into bite sized pieces so there is no “butchering at the table” with sharp weapons of aggression that could kill the person sitting next to him. I also know he said steak because Tibetans try to minimize harm (i.e. killing) by eating only from large animals. That way one death sustains many lives. I got this loud and clear when I took my Tibetan goddaughter Tashi to see a Maine lobster pound and she started screaming hysterically about a holocaust of beings, screaming even louder outside over the crab traps. I went home and got rid of the clams, mussels and those tiny Maine shrimp, six to a bite, while she fled to the supermarket where she bought a pound of beef out of which she made dumplings for six. I’m just glad I hadn’t been planning to serve individual Cornish hens or smoked trout.
I know too that every Saturday in Sarnath, India a carful of my teacher’s monks goes down and pours $100 worth of somebody else’s fresh caught fish back into the Ganges just as last October his devoted students poured $1200 worth of bait fish back into San Francisco’s bay. If you are going to consume life then you’re going to have to demonstrate that you do actually respect and want to protect it. That’s why Tibetans engage in Lenten-like refrain from eating not only meat but eggs on certain appointed holy days of the month and/or during the entire holy month of Saga Dawa, the fourth month of the Tibetan year and that month in which the Buddha is said to have been born. (Typically this coincides with Gemini.)
Most Buddhists also buy and set free creatures marked for consumption other than fish: water buffaloes, yaks, ducks, goats, sheep and pigs are often decorated with bright ornaments before being returned to the wild or offered to the pastures of a rural monastery. Tibetans have developed such an extraordinary sense of fair play that in the end, they give their bodies back to the wild to be eaten too. We’re probably not going to be having sky burial here any time soon but perhaps our latter day equivalent is giving our bodies to be harvested for life-saving organs.
The absolute in Dharma is not a set of commands. It is your mindfulness, your awareness of what exactly you are doing, and some things are better than others as a support for that. I happen to be a meditator who dislikes tofu, a sometime carnivore who tries very hard to honor the animal who gave its life for me— whatever the circumstances -- by paying careful attention to the way I prepare, cook and present it rather than mindlessly slopping it out. I clean my plate, scrape the pot, don’t waste one drop in this exchange of its life for mine (the dog downstairs loves my largesse). When asked how to cope with being a carnivore and a Buddhist, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, the traveling yogi considered the modern day emanation of the great Milarepa, told us: you make a karmic connection to any animal you consume and thus assume a debt that can be paid only by living so virtuously that one and all gain merit for rebirth in the paradise of no-suffering. Frankly, this is not an awareness, aspiration or motivation Hayong Trukhen Lakpa ever gets jumpstarted or sustained by string beans.
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
KP has taken me to the intersection of Buddhism and food where I’ve learned enough to write a few articles and to be writing a book about Himalayan cooking. It also got me to see at the nexus of Buddhism and food the fountain of endless surprise fed by the flow of endless misconception, for when it comes to understanding the dharma of dinner Westerners are all wet. The time I made 850 cookies for nine afternoon teas at a New England retreat for 80 appalled friends in whose Jewish/Christian minds piety means abstinence: the haunting spirituality of a fast, not for godssake a feast of tea with homemade cookies. I’ve shared the experience of Theravada Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein who finds students shocked to find her in the faculty room drinking coffee—coffee! —because Buddhists are supposed to be dead calm tea sippers. And I’d like to take this opportunity to mention my surprise when Ten Speed Press, so anxious for first rights to my Himalayan cookbook On High Ground, abruptly and rudely dropped it because they didn’t want to deal with a “cuisine of scarcity.” But the biggest shocker is always that Buddhists do eat meat.
Hitler may have been a vegetarian but Gautama Siddhartha, the Shakyamuni Buddha, was not. He reportedly died of food poisoning after eating rotten pork served by an unknowing host who intended only to be generous. This was a denouement that neatly illustrates his teachings on the topic of meat eating: do not yourself knowingly kill a creature merely for the pleasure of your own meal of it and do not waste or flaunt life by refusing whatever may be served to you-- which is to say beggars can’t be choosers. The Buddha did however choose to pig out on more than his fair share of that lethal pork in order to save others from the suffering he foresaw it was going to cause.
The Buddha never said: Thou shalt not eat meat because Dharma does not slap absolutes on human life. How can it when it teaches that everything is constantly changing according to causes and conditions: a moment comes together differently from the next or last moment and the truth of that moment no longer holds. It’s all relative, all that gray area called what to do? taxing your gray matter all the time because you have to keep thinking fast on your feet to be present for the circumstances of the current moment. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche says that in this whirlpool the only thing you can have complete control over is your intention span. Maybe this is why what the Buddha said was: First, do no harm.
Tophooey Westerners blindly stuck in the monolithic absolutism of monotheistic thinking like to grab onto the concept of the Sacred Cow as a pitch for strict vegetarianism. But it is strictly a practice of do no harm. The arrival of the Iron Age with its novel weapons of crass destruction had allowed the Brahmin class to so greedily indulge in the nonstop ritual sacrifice of cattle for gluttonous dinner parties that the rest of India seemed to be dazedly starving on the side. The sanctification of the cow was a way of saying the cow is worth way more alive than dead since it chews down the grasses to make a field, pulls the plow that produces legumes and vegetables, provides dung for both fertilizer and cooking heat, provides milk for protein, provides more cows and because of all these life saving qualities can be exchanged as money in bridal dowries. Net net, in India it is not cost efficient to eat steak; it is in fact an arrogant, deleterious waste of vital resources. The Sacred Cow re-established harmony in the interdependence of all beings.
Coffee or tea? Tofu or tuna? Spiritual beings ought to fast not feast. Western minds prefer things to be all one way or the other, right or wrong, so they are constantly torturing themselves in the hell of continual judgment seeking that ever elusive stamp of eternal approval. Just last month, the lovely, devoted dharma student who was to take over from me the honor of serving water to the teacher went into a tailspin of angst trying to nail down the precise way to do it: glass to the left or right, what moment to start, how high to hold the tray…? All I could say was: “I don't think there is a right or wrong way; I just do what feels workable at the moment and I haven’t been smitten by any Furies.”
The Buddha was a hard core realist who taught that life is not a one-way highway to heaven but a delicate balancing act here on Earth. The opening words of the Abhidharma, the scientific text on apparent truth are: “All beings exist on food.” Buddhism began with a meal. Bedraggled and near death from ascetic practices that led not to transcendence, Siddartha finally accepted an offering of food whereupon his body regained the strength that allowed him to pursue meditation and attain enlightenment. So his teaching is: Eat and be well. That’s why it’s hard to imagine him condoning continued Macrobiotic eating when it causes malnutrition or condemning the Dalai Lama for eating meat after his good faith effort to go cold turkey vegetarian caused him serious digestive damage.
Admittedly the perp walk between Eat and Do No Harm is tricky. That’s why the Buddha taught in the Sutras that food should not be an indulgence, an object of blood lust and wanton pleasure; it should be treated as mere necessity. You gotta do what you gotta do but you don’t gotta make a big deal over one ingredient or other, one restaurant or other, one sycophantic Food Section article. And he larded the Vinaya, the code of behavior, with table manners for, as Trungpa Rinpoche told his Western students: “A lot of things are based on the idea of eating food properly, which is how to behave as a basically decent person.”
Dharma clearly is not so much concerned with what you eat as how you eat. The kids at my teacher’s school in Nepal call themselves “veg” and “non-veg” at meal times then go about their day together, one group not holier than the other. The Tibetan people are among its most pious devotees but inhabit a frozen skyscraper landscape that has forced their bodies to evolve so totally dependent on livestock they cannot be “non-veg.” Yet they do not eat themselves up over it. My teacher who comes from Kham but now lives mostly between India and Nepal has finally adjusted his digestive system enough to be happily vegetarian for a stretch but when a hostess in New England asked him what he wanted her to make for dinner, he said without hesitating: “Steak!”
I happen to know he wouldn’t sit down and relish eating it all bloody rare or remotely pink hot off the grill or with bragging rights at The Palm. I have been trained to cook all signs of life out of meat served. I know to cut it into bite sized pieces so there is no “butchering at the table” with sharp weapons of aggression that could kill the person sitting next to him. I also know he said steak because Tibetans try to minimize harm (i.e. killing) by eating only from large animals. That way one death sustains many lives. I got this loud and clear when I took my Tibetan goddaughter Tashi to see a Maine lobster pound and she started screaming hysterically about a holocaust of beings, screaming even louder outside over the crab traps. I went home and got rid of the clams, mussels and those tiny Maine shrimp, six to a bite, while she fled to the supermarket where she bought a pound of beef out of which she made dumplings for six. I’m just glad I hadn’t been planning to serve individual Cornish hens or smoked trout.
I know too that every Saturday in Sarnath, India a carful of my teacher’s monks goes down and pours $100 worth of somebody else’s fresh caught fish back into the Ganges just as last October his devoted students poured $1200 worth of bait fish back into San Francisco’s bay. If you are going to consume life then you’re going to have to demonstrate that you do actually respect and want to protect it. That’s why Tibetans engage in Lenten-like refrain from eating not only meat but eggs on certain appointed holy days of the month and/or during the entire holy month of Saga Dawa, the fourth month of the Tibetan year and that month in which the Buddha is said to have been born. (Typically this coincides with Gemini.)
Most Buddhists also buy and set free creatures marked for consumption other than fish: water buffaloes, yaks, ducks, goats, sheep and pigs are often decorated with bright ornaments before being returned to the wild or offered to the pastures of a rural monastery. Tibetans have developed such an extraordinary sense of fair play that in the end, they give their bodies back to the wild to be eaten too. We’re probably not going to be having sky burial here any time soon but perhaps our latter day equivalent is giving our bodies to be harvested for life-saving organs.
The absolute in Dharma is not a set of commands. It is your mindfulness, your awareness of what exactly you are doing, and some things are better than others as a support for that. I happen to be a meditator who dislikes tofu, a sometime carnivore who tries very hard to honor the animal who gave its life for me— whatever the circumstances -- by paying careful attention to the way I prepare, cook and present it rather than mindlessly slopping it out. I clean my plate, scrape the pot, don’t waste one drop in this exchange of its life for mine (the dog downstairs loves my largesse). When asked how to cope with being a carnivore and a Buddhist, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, the traveling yogi considered the modern day emanation of the great Milarepa, told us: you make a karmic connection to any animal you consume and thus assume a debt that can be paid only by living so virtuously that one and all gain merit for rebirth in the paradise of no-suffering. Frankly, this is not an awareness, aspiration or motivation Hayong Trukhen Lakpa ever gets jumpstarted or sustained by string beans.
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
posted by Sandy Garson @ 1:37 PM
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