Meatless in Mongolia

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 3^rd 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 21^st 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 4^th 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!"
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