"Welcome." "I am very happy to be here and a little excited, and a little anxious and a little..." "A little dread." "You've been doing Zen for 30 years, for 40 years?" "And you still get anxious?" "What's your problem?" "I'm a human being." "As are we all, so welcome to the club of human beings." "So this week, it's a wonderful opportunity for us all to be like a close community together." "Meditate together, chi gung together, cook together, clean together." "We will do all the things that take care of our life." "Not all the things, but many of the things that take care of our life we will do them with one another." "My teacher, Suzuki Roshi said:" ""When you're cooking, you're not just cooking." "You're not just working on food, you're also working on yourself." "You're working on other people."" "This is a little, small Buddhist robe." "My teacher just wrote on the back my Buddhist name:" "Longevity, Mountain, Peaceful Sea." "And my teacher did this circle." "This is a Zen circle." "In the middle, this is a cow." "It's eating patience grass." "Like a doctor's patient?" "No, no." "Like being..." "Patience." "Patience." "Being..." "So he knows me pretty well." "And that maybe I need more patience." "We'll see." "Why did they do this?" "Why do they make things like this?" "You know?" "I just..." "I go..." "You know, when I do it at home I just, you know, I take this and I cut this thing off of here." "And then we get the fork, we take this thing off of here." "Why do they do this to people?" "Can't you just put your thumb over the top when you want it to be less instead of, you know, having some fucking thing on here?" "You wanna be able to use the thing, but..." "And then it's so much work to get that thing off of there." "I would like you to study." "Study..." "On one hand, study cooking study yourself." "Study what is happiness what is joy." "What is it you really want in your life?" "It's easy to go through a whole life without really having what you want and chasing after many things." "Especially in our modern world." "It's so important to study:" "How do we actually have what we want..." "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight." "Okay." "So if you come down here, and move this one a little bit that way and this one over here, then they have a little more space here." "Okay, so water." "So to start with, we start with warm water." "The water needs to be about body temperature." "In Fahrenheit, over 130 degrees kills the yeast." "It's not much more than body temperature." "So if the water feels warm..." "You don't want it to feel very warm, or you can kill the yeast right at the start." "You don't wanna to do that." "Let's see how much this is." "That's a good amount." "So it's a little under a tablespoon." "So in your water..." "Make a bowl in the middle of the flour." "Have a measured amount of water, and olive oil, and salt, and yeast and put it in there, and mix it all up." "I guess maybe you can switch off and have somebody else you're working with." "The method for mixing now is to fold." "You take the spoon around the side here and then fold it over the top." "And the more flour you put in here it's gonna be easier to knead." "Put the dough out on the flour." "If you have a little flour in there, it will make it easier to clean the bowl." " Like this?" " No, well, it'll be okay." "Then, to knead..." "This is a little difficult to explain but if you have your wrist right here at the edge it's too far forward." "Most people start with their wrist here, right at the edge of the dough." "When you push, then what happens is it flattens out here." "It's easier, and better, and more effective if you fold it in half, and you start with your hand about halfway out along the palm, at the edge here." "What you're doing is the dough is gonna roll over, like this." "So if you start with your hand here, and then it starts to roll and then your heel of your hand comes in here, your fingers are light." "And then, the top part." "You can see, your handprint is where the top part seals to the bottom part here." "Turn it a quarter turn fold in half, and push." "Do you see how the dough stretches, right in here?" "Is it coming along?" "Sort of." "Do you wanna switch?" "But it's a funny feeling." "I have so much bread on my hands." "It's more on your hands than on the table." "This already starts coming away from the sides..." "You know, when I was ten-years-old my brother and I flew from California to Washington, D.C." "And we went to visit my aunt, my father's sister." "Her name was Alice." "And my aunt Alice made homemade bread." "And it was so good." "...you know, elastic, and soft..." "In my house, we always had whole-wheat bread in these packages." "Where it had been there for two weeks or something and it was all, kind of, dried out." "...use a generous amount..." "And kind of tasted like paper or cardboard." "And then there was the white bread, the puffy white bread." "And if you took off the crust, and then took the white part... ." "...." "You could make it into a marble." "And at ten-years-old, I thought:" ""What's happened?" "What's happened in our culture?"" ""Why are we eating like this?"" ""What went wrong?"" "And we're eating puffy stuff." "Puffy, chemically, not very tasty papery, cardboard-y bread."" "I didn't know what had gone wrong in our culture." "But we've lost a lot of culture with marketing and manufacturing." "We don't do things anymore because, supposedly, machines can do it better." "And supposedly it's all labor-saving." "We give away our capacity to do things with our hands and with our bodies." "That actually give us health and vitality." "To use our hands, to knead the bread to make things, to touch things, to smell things." "We give it away." "And then, how are we gonna feel alive?" "You take one from up here, and down to the middle, and you replace it." "Huh?" "It's what?" "We're gonna have to ask you again." "Alright, take the upper one, put it down to the middle." "Then you replace it." "It's easier if you just take one in each hand." "Then, the one from up above goes down, the one from down goes up." "This is just like chi gung." "The up one goes down, the down one comes up." "Okay, you don't have the salt on, it looks like." "This goes like this, this goes like that." "Exactly." "Now..." "And this goes to the top." "And this goes like this?" "Really?" "Because it looks..." "Nope." "Because you want it to go over the other." "That's right." "And then..." "Exactly!" "Exactly!" "This goes to the top now?" "This one goes like that." "You got it, Jeff." "This goes to the top, so you go like this." "This guy goes over here." "When I was ten-years-old, I thought:" ""I am going to learn how to make bread and I will teach people how to make bread."" "I went home from three weeks in Washington, D.C., and I asked my mom:" ""Can you teach me how to make bread?"" "And she said, "No." "Yeast makes me nervous."" "And then, when I was 21," "I got to Tassajara, and the cooks at Tassajara..." "It was the last season it was a resort, and the cooks there were making this fabulous bread." "And I said, "Would you teach me?" And they said, "You bet."" "And then I was the dishwasher and the baker and they didn't have to bake." "For me, it was like love." "For them, it was like work." "Just in case any of you are, like, psychic or advanced students of using your hands and your brains, and observation, and all that." "So far, I don't think anybody's got this, but..." "To me it's not complicated." "You take and you fold the dough in half and this time, it's away from you." "Okay?" "This is like what we just did, kneading, but it's from a different angle." "Then you put your hands vertical." "This is vertical, this is horizontal, right?" "Vertical, horizontal." "Vertical, horizontal." "Got that?" "So if you grab the dough this way, and then you turn it this way you've turned it a quarter turn." "Remember, we're turning the dough a quarter turn in between." "Okay." "So you take the sides here." "You grab it vertically, and turn it horizontal." "I decided that was precious." "We make these decisions sometimes." "Something is precious." "And I will find out how to do that." "I will teach others." "And then, sure enough, I found out how to make bread." "And then, a few years later, I wrote a book." "The Tassajara Bread Book." "And then it became, for a few years the so-called "Bible of Breadmaking."" "What do you think?" "Do you like that tofu clam?" "One of the most dramatic things that happens is offering food to the Buddha." "I used to find this, when I was the cook at Tassajara really annoying." "I've got things to do and you want me to put some food in these little doll dishes?" "So that somebody can put it on the altar?" "And the Buddha's not even gonna eat it." "The Buddha's not even gonna smell it." "What does the Buddha care, whether you put some food there or not?" "And, you know, about 20 years later..." "These things take a while sometimes." "But I thought, "Wow, what a great thing."" "You put the food in the dishes then you take it up and you put it on the altar." "And then you bow, and then you turn, and you walk away." "And the Buddha doesn't say anything." "He doesn't say, "Thank you nice meal, love the crepes."" "So, what you do is, you make your effort." "And you offer it, and then:" ""This is my offering."" "And you leave." "Ed Brown is one of our famous tenzos and we have a long lineage of them." "So sometimes I think about the tenzos, the people who have come before and I feel really priviledged, actually." "So there's a lineage of tenzos?" " That's what I'm calling it." " Sure." "Yeah, this is a tradition." "And I have to say..." "This is history, and there's a certain spirit, or at least encouragement we pass on, one to the next." "Well, we're cooking the food." "But in terms of practice, the food is cooking us." "I try to stay with the dough." "To pay attention to what the dough is telling me." "Which is kind of..." "It can be kind of dynamic in this environment." "You know, two days ago, we had 110 degree weather." "And now it's a little cooler today." "I think it's in the mid-90s." "And every dough responds differently." "That's probably the main thing." "And then, to try and remain somehow connected to the formal practice here at Tassajara." "The idea is that we're learning and we're offering but it's giving back in the way that it gives us feedback." "For me it's about developing attention and awareness and also the three minds in terms of the Tenzokyokun of big mind, joyful mind..." " Kind mind." " And kind mind." "Yeah." "We have three little circles on the altar, so we use those as a reminder." "And I hope..." "My wish, my intention..." "I feel like we're all developing that in some kind of a way as we're working with the food as our vehicle." "People ask, " How are you doing?" And I say, "I'm baking."" "It's what I'm doing, and it's how I'm doing." "Through and through." "Every morning, we chant the Tenzokyokun." "And today, we're gonna start at the beginning." "Tenzokyokun" "Pretty good." "One thing I'd like to say is that we work in functional silence." "Part of that is so that we can concentrate and be present in a way that we're not usually present." "It's not to be oppressive but just to keep working to show up." "How about..." "Would you read three things from our "No trace"?" "And then we'll..." ""Leaving no trace." Just..." ""While cooking a dish, taste frequently with bowl and spoon."" ""Take care of kitchen pots and tools as if they were your own eyes."" ""Practice constantly." "Cultivate harmony." "Be kind to each other."" "When you're cooking, you may have a few fiascos." "It's part of the deal." "It may be that our whole life is just a fiasco." "When I was the cook at Tassajara, there was a group of people, who were what they called "Zen macrobiotic."" "People following the Zen macrobiotic diet like to eat a lot of brown rice." "You were supposed to chew each bite of brown rice 50 to a hundred times." "And they also liked all their vegetables cooked." "They didn't wanna eat raw vegetables." "And they didn't want anything sweet." "Because somehow, in this macrobiotic tradition they reversed yin and yang." "They used to say, about sugar, "Too yin." "It's too yin." "We can't."" "So then, one day, I thought, "Well, I'll put some raisins in the oatmeal." "People will like that."" "So then, all the macrobiotics came to the kitchen and said:" ""Why are you poisoning us?" "Don't you know that sugar is poison, and you shouldn't be eating it?" "It's way too yin, and people are gonna get way too excited." "It isn't good for them." "We shouldn't have this."" "Of course, the macrobiotics said that if you ate the way the diet told you to you would be calm and peaceful." "So apparently they were not getting the food on the diet because they were not calm and peaceful when they didn't get the food on their diet." "And, you know, for macrobiotics potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant..." "There may be some others, but these are, like, you know..." "You just don't eat them." "Yeah, then they said, "Well, why don't you eat these?"" "Then they'd say, "Deadly nightshade family!"" ""Deadly nightshade family!"" "I don't know, but people have been eating these things for centuries." "I think there's worse things in the world than eating potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplant." "We're gonna eat some today." "Daring." "How daring of us." "So move the knife back and forth." "Right here in the middle." "So some people like it, some people don't." "And what are you gonna do?" "So I thought, for many years I should learn how to manifest myself... ." "...." "And speak, talk, and cook in a way that everybody likes it." "Do you know how depressing that is?" "And how angry you can get when you're trying to do that?" "You know, "I tried so hard." "What do you mean, you don't like it?"" ""I work so hard and people just don't appreciate it."" "So when you aim to do something that everybody..." "And this isn't just everybody today, this is throughout history and space, and time." "You would wanna please them all." "So this is just, like..." "You can't do it." "This is the first noble truth the Buddha submits:" "Things are suffering." "And when you try to do something like this, it's not workable." "So then you will be unhappy." "You will suffer." "When I was first starting to cook I asked Suzuki Roshi if he had any advice for me." "He said, "When you wash the rice wash the rice." "When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots." "When you stir the soup, stir the soup."" "This sounds sort of simple and obvious but a lot of the time we go through the motions." "We're not seeing with our eyes, feeling with our hands." "We're thinking about all kinds of things and we have stuff on our mind." "So it's not so simple." "Do what you're doing." "Take care of the ingredients." "Take care of the activity." "Make it happen." "It's up to you." "No one can take your place." "Mom will not show up to handle this for you." "The cook is off today." "You know, above all, I like to have a sharp knife." "So I bring them with me." "Because, most places I go, they don't have sharp knives." "So I brought six of my knives." "I keep them in the little holder, like this." "And I keep two in here." "If you come into cooking class you have it in your back pocket." "And then you come in like, you know, Tampopo." "You come up..." "Have knives, will cook." "This cleaver is a wide-blade." "This acts as a chopper, slicer, mincer, dicer mashing that garlic, ginger, tenderizing, even this pestle..." "The blunt part, we use as a pestle to mash our spices, then we pick up." "So this knife also will go through bones." "We like to buy chickens whole because we use every part of it." "There's no other tool that can do what this can do." "Forget the Cuisinart." "All you need is a good cleaver." "They sharpen easily, they're very affordable." "And they come in different sizes, depending." "We can custom fit it to you and your needs." "If you're concerned about eating healthy and about your family, and about having good times and taking advantage of our wonderful vegetables and eating more vegetables and less meat, you will learn." "I like to use my left hand to guide the knife." "So if your left hand is anywhere near the knife you want everything out of the way, right?" "So you don't want to have your finger out like this or your thumb out like this, or anything." "Because the knife will find it." "It's just uncanny." "You think you're keeping your hands out of the way but your knife will find anything that's sticking out." "It's just what knives do." "Hold the celery on its side." "Cut diagonally." "Right?" "Okay, so there's one size and there's another size." "And then, you could also do them very long." "So there's a little roll in between, and you cut." "Then you're gonna roll it, so that the next cut is partly into the first cut." "Okay?" "Okay, so there's three different shapes that you can get from the rolling cut." "Zen master Tenkei said, "See with your eyes smell with your nose, taste with your tongue." "Nothing in the universe is hidden." "What else would you have me say?"" "Usually, of course, we want some secret about how to make things come out the way we want them to." "And they don't." "Just put the spinach in, please." "Just get the spinach in there and get it started cooking." "I don't care if all the butter's melted or not." "It'll melt." "In ten minutes, there will be bread out here." "You know, there's our thoughts, and our feelings, and things, people." "People don't do what you think they'll do." "Things don't behave the way you'd like." "You follow your breath." "Your breath isn't as calm or as smooth, or peaceful as you'd like it to be." "Things are annoying, they're agitating, they're frustrating." "Things just aren't doing quite what they might." "Suzuki Roshi said, "Let things come home to your heart."" "Do things come home or is there some way you protect, or hide, or defend yourself and things don't quite come to your heart?" "And then, it turns out, what's really so painful in our life is that we're separate from our heart." "It's not really the problem that things aren't doing what we want them to do." "The problem is, because they're not doing what we want them to we separate from our heart and we protect ourselves, and we distance ourselves." "And then, we have this ache inside." "Something like this." "An ache inside." "A longing." "So one strategy is a kind of disassociation." "Or separation, distancing from things, absence." "And the other basic strategy that people have come up with over the centuries, and to this day is:" "You take a rather domineering, forceful stance telling those other things and people to do what you damn well want them to." "And you use verbal abuse and coercion of any kind you are capable of you know, to whip those things into shape." "And you can use not just verbal abuse, but physical abuse." "And you try to get the object to do what you want it to." "Or you're gonna teach it a lesson." "And this is not just people this is also Western culture." "Suzuki Roshi said:" ""In your culture, you have the idea of controlling things." "And if you can't control them, and if those things those other people and countries don't do what you want them to destroy them."" "That'll teach them." "Won't it?" "It won't teach anyone in that country to never do that again, it won't teach other countries, and you will continue to have the problem." "But, you know, you have this idea:" "If you can't control it, then destroy it." "And I don't think of this on a kind of world-class level." "I'm such a low-level tyrant." "But there are times when, around my house, you know I put the sponge down on the side of the sink, and it falls into the sink." ""You are gonna stay on the side of the sink, or else."" ""I am going to make you stay on the side of the sink."" "And I put it on the side of the sink, and it falls in." ""I'm gonna make sure that you do what I want you to."" ""And I'm gonna force you."" "So you know, I have this kind of idea with sponges." "You know, I'd like to have a sponge and be able to clean up my board." "Over the years, you know, I've had my share of being angry." "And a lot of it's been in the kitchen." "It's..." "It's just..." "You can't..." "You can't..." "It's impenetrable, you can't..." "And then, that gets like- How do you do this?" "I mean, that..." "So then you have to find something, and then, "Where is it?" You know?" "Yeah, right." "There, see." "I got it open, finally." "I would wake up in the morning, and I'd be angry about having to get up." "Then I'd be angry about washing my face and going to the toilet." "Then I'd be angry about putting on my robes." "Then I'd be angry about going to meditation." "So it didn't matter." "You know, there's anger coming up." "That's old anger." "That's not about today." "It's just in our lives someplace." "Now, the story that they say in Zen is:" "You know, if have a little piece of shit on your nose you will smell it wherever you go." ""Oh, this stinks."" ""Oh, this stinks." "Cooking stinks." "Everything stinks."" "It's all bad." "So the expression in Zen is, "Wash your face."" "But what happens, when you're no longer holding anger back anger isn't just anger." "The energy that can go into anger is also energy that can go into your life." "So it's a kind of intensity." "And it's a kind of determination." "You can't have intensity, or determination, or creativity without the possibility of anger." "And so we don't have to, sort of..." "We don't necessarily say:" ""Well, I have to keep everything..." "Let me cut the carrots." "I'll be really careful with all of this and then we'll do this over here, and leave that right there." "And this will be so nice..."" "You know, we're endeavoring to have some energy." "And can we learn to use our bodies and smell things, and do things, and wash things and you use your hands, and you use your energy and you do stuff with it." "In Dogen's "Instructions to the Cook" he quotes an old Chinese master, who said:" ""Two thirds of your life has passed." "Without polishing even a spot of your source of sacredness." "Life devours you." "Your days are busy with this and that." "If you don't turn around at my words what can I do?"" "We're all living in this culture that wastes a tremendous amount of food." "Often, we just throw things away because it's too much trouble to worry about it." "And after all, it doesn't matter, because we have so much." "You know, we're so affluent." "Oh, yeah." "Every day, I'm hungry." "Right now, I'm hungry." "Sometimes I find food in the garbage." "Some people just threw it away." "And it's still good, so I eat that, too." "So that's how..." "People throw food away a lot, right?" "Yeah, it's good, you know, sometimes." "But if it's no good, you know, I won't eat it." "So..." "I eat a little bit, then I wait about 15 minutes." "If it starts getting me sick, I won't eat the rest." "That's what I do." "Thursday is leftovers day here at the Zen Center." "And so, after the leftovers are served for lunch and there's leftovers from the leftovers that becomes grist for our mill, as it were." "We get to use that, and..." "This is a teaching." "That is, this is the Dogen Zenji Temple, founded about the time of St. Francis by a monk named Dogen." "He was a tiger on not wasting any food, ever." "And so we do our best to use old, beat-up stuff." "We take to worst of it off, but we try not to throw anything out." "That's a teaching." "The Dogen Zenji teaching." "For him, the kitchen was kind of the heart of the temple." "We'll go..." "Rolph Park, we call it "Cocaine Lane."" "Down the block and around the corner is St. Francis Church." "They serve..." " St. Anthony's?" " St. Anthony's." "They serve maybe a thousand street people a day every day, year-round." "The people we're gonna go to they've gotta stand up to get there." "Sometimes, it's not so easy..." "Sometimes, it's not so easy to stand up." "Sometimes, they can't reach for the food because they're trying to get the needle in or out." "That's kind of the extreme." "We're so affluent." "So it's hard to take very seriously, for instance... ." "...." "Zen master Dogen, who we study so much, says:" ""Don't waste even a single grain of rice." "Treat the food as though it was your eyesight." "Treat food as though it was that precious." "As though it was your eyes." "Handle it carefully and sincerely." "Don't waste even a single grain."" "I went into the walk-in and here's some radishes, so..." "We're gonna put these on top of our pizza with maybe the grated ginger the minced ginger, and the oh, maybe the pickled onions." "And then we've got some tomato." "So it's free." "So-called." "You know, they put a label on here, "Free." Free canned tomatoes." "This is sort of like going to the dumpster." "The Tassajara version of Creative Catering Company." "Going to the dumpster, and you see what you can get." "Because if we don't use it it doesn't mean that anybody else will." "I haven't bought groceries in about two years." "With one small exception:" "Dr. Bob's Ice Cream, which is about eight bucks a pint." "It's unbelievably good." "And you do not find that in dumpsters." "I call it, "The Backdoor Catering Company."" "The back door of every grocery store has a big, yellow box with a slanted side, open top and all the great vegetables, and bread, and eggs are sitting there." "Some of them are broken, but a lot of it isn't." "And it's being thrown away because the little date says:" ""Do not sell beyond this date."" "But once you find out how easy it is to do why pay $500 a month for food that's very good and free?" "It's always a surprise, what's gonna be in there." "I have to get creative with my recipes." "And I make a lot of jam, and put a lot of food up." "It's actually kind of nice." "I do get a lot, psychically from, basically, reducing the waste to a tiny degree." "Walnut tree." "These are some of the best apples." "But we asked permission to pick, and they said, "No."" "But they're the only people on the street that voted for Bush so I'm thinking there might be a connection between willingness to share, and politics." "Nice figs." "Not a lot of them yet." "Oh, there's a bunch." "You wanna see?" "See, up there?" "If I had a stick..." "Oh, you've got a stick!" "Could you just put that in the tree and bring down the figs?" "Yeah, bring it down." "Okay, more, more, more." "As a society, you know, an apple is just an apple a carrot is just a carrot." "They're all the same." "They're interchangeable." "It doesn't matter where they come from." "Ta-da!" "Food has become a commodity, in other words." "It's no longer, you know, precious." "It's no longer like eyesight." "It has no individuality." "It has no, you know, distinct essence or spiritual capacity." "It's matter." "It's stuff." "It's just a fuel for the human machine." "This is the culture we live in." "And it doesn't value or find stuff, things, precious." "Because things are also spirit." "Things are also our labor and our good hearts in our concern and care for one another in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears in our effort, in the work of migrant workers." "And of course, we're using more calories of oil now to produce a calorie of food." "So why we have so much is because we have oil." "And then we burn it." "We use the oil to make food." "And then, sometimes, we process the food." "By using even more oil." "That's how you get Cheerios or potato chips, or Pop-Tarts." "Because it's all oil." "And we can still, as a culture people can make fortunes burning oil to provide manufactured product called food." "I was in a farm at school and I killed chickens for eating." "You killed the chickens?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "So I decided..." "I didn't like the killing that much so I decided I wouldn't eat something that I couldn't kill." "I guess it probably doesn't matter that much, though as long as you understand the relevance of life ending by force, I guess." "How did you kill the chickens?" "Were you taught how to?" "Yeah." "First, you take the chicken by its legs." "Then you strap it onto this log." "Then you take a hatchet and you try to get its neck, as much as you can." "And you try to sever its head." "If you don't do it on the first try, which I didn't then you do it a couple more times, until it stops moving as much." "But it'll still move, and it'll still have little spasms, running around." "And then you tie it to this wire and the blood drains into a bucket." "The worst part was actually skinning the chicken." "Like, taking out its organs." "So yeah, we also keep baby lettuce underneath the Reemay." "So do you use any fertilizer?" "We just use compost and this stuff called "Turkey Feather."" "It's basically turkey meal." "It's, like, a by-product of the large-scale slaughter of animals." "So this is not vegetarian salad, then." "Well, it's vegetarian, yeah, because..." ""Vegetarian" just means that the product itself is not an animal product." "But when I look closely at the salad, I can see a turkey in it?" "Oh, for sure, yeah." "Because everything's connected." "So of course there's turkey in the arugula." "And it's basically a liquid fertilizer." "The container says its derived from blood meal and feather meal." "I'm not a purist." "I think everything we do is tainted." "So I don't have trouble with this." "I kind of fell into organic farming." "I was taking a course in school on Buddhism and I wanted to visit spiritual communities, intentional communities." "And the cheapest way to do that was to be a volunteer farmer." "There's certain vegetables I prefer growing." "I really like kale, and chard and beets." "They're the vegetables that grow here." "I think, kale and chard because to harvest them, you don't kill the plant." "You just take a few leaves, and then a week, or four days later you come back and take more leaves, and four days later and you can just allow the plant to keep living," "and keep receiving nourishment from it." "And you can start with your own mind, your own body, with meditation." "But also with cooking, or gardening, or any number of things where you instead of just telling the object what to do, you say, "How can I help you?"" "How can I help you be what you might become if I was to assist you?" "How can I help the earth, the ground, be ground and be vital soil?" "How can I do that?"" "Rather than, "You're gonna grow this stuff." "And I'm gonna give you some nitrogen and whatever." "And you're gonna make this corn grow." "Because I'm gonna fertilize you, and..."" "So to treat things as though they're just susceptible or can be manipulated, is a kind of limited view." "Rather than, "How do I help something fulfill itself?"" "If any of us who are interested, any of you who are interested you know, in actually taking care of food actually, you know, cooking food enjoying food enjoying food in the company of family and friends getting together with others, nourishing yourself nourishing others..." "Where does it come from, you know?" "And it doesn't come out of a package." "You know, that's convenient." "But actually nourishing yourself and other people doesn't, finally, come out of a package." "It comes out of your heart." "It comes out of your connecting with food connecting with others." "Is food precious?" "Is food worth caring about?" "Are you precious?" "Are you worth caring about?" "And if you can take care of food as though it was your eyesight." "You can take care of yourself." "You can nourish yourself." "You take care of the food, you take care of yourself." "You nourish yourself you nourish other people." "By actually finding something that's precious." "And honoring it, and respecting it and taking care of it." "You can start with the food, you can start with a person." "If you start with a person, you might wanna offer them some food." "And then you might care about yourself enough to, you know, cook." "That brings your hands nourishment, because your hands get to be hands." "They get to actually do something, rather than sitting around all day." "While you're entertaining yourself with your iPod." "And your, you know, Internet, and surfing the Internet." "And all the other things that we do." "You know, our hands don't get to do much anymore." "All those acupuncture points on your hands that you could be cooking and doing something with." "And stimulating your hands." "And your hands get to be happy, your body starts to be happy." "Oh, no, we wouldn't wanna bother." "That's too much work." "So Dogen says, "Make a sincere effort."" "And "sincere effort" means, the blemishes show." "You just make your best effort." "It's not perfect." "It's not like there's not faults or mistakes, or things wrong." "It's not like you're working on a masterpiece." "You don't have to produce a masterpiece." "You just take care of something make a sincere, honest effort and see how it comes out." "And, you know, you have something to eat." "I'm actually a nurse, who works with patients who have diabetes." "So food is central to what happens with my patients." "I believe that food is probably..." "Serving food, and caring for people with food is probably one of the most holy things that you can do." "So it's..." "For me, and I know for many others it is more than just sustenance." "It's more than putting food in your body to give it energy to move." "It's about comfort." "It's about finding peace." "It's about bringing recollections of our childhood back to us." "The things that made us feel safe when we are unsafe as adults." "I think that food stands for many of those things for us as we get older." "I think that, in those days tomato was a rarity." "Tomatoes are seasonal vegetables." "So back then, you could only get it during the summertime." "And eggs were also rare." "So those ingredients were rare." "And I remember, well, a number of things about that dish." "First, was the color." "You had the red tomatoes and then you had the eggs, set off in the yellow." "And when you cooked them some of the juice would flow out." "And sort of color between." "So it's very colorful." "And the way my dad made it..." "So you had the little bit of sour taste from the tomato and also you have the egg flavor." "So the flavor is also very distinct." "You are what you eat." "I truly believe that." "If you eat too many hamburgers, you're like me." "What?" "Well, I become a hamburger some days." "So there's a kind of bedraggled leaf." "It's kind of broken up, but it's not, you know, turning brown." "It's not, you know..." "It may be kind of mangled, but it's not bruised or moldy, slimy." "So I think we'll just go ahead and eat it." "When Suzuki Roshi was, I forget, nine, or ten, or eleven, he asked his father if he could go and study with another Zen teacher." "His father was a Zen teacher." "And so he went to study with this Zen teacher." "And there were several boys who were studying with the teacher." "And in the springtime, they used to make pickles." "One year, apparently, they made these." "And one of the things you make these with is that long, white radish." "You know, the daikon?" "One year, some of the pickles didn't exactly get pickled." "I've been around some of these pickles." "They have a kind of barnyard aroma." "Not at all pleasant." "Suzuki Roshi's teacher served them anyway." "Well, you can imagine, 11, 12, 13-year-old boys they just weren't going to eat these." "I mean..." "This isn't..." "How much intelligence do you need, not to eat this stuff?" "So day after day, his teacher was serving them, they weren't eating them." "Finally, this young boy, Suzuki Roshi decided he would take care of things." "So he took the pickles one night, after dark, in the middle of the night." "He took all the pickles to the far end of the grounds dug a hole, put them in, and buried them." "And then, you know, went to sleep." "I think this is a fairly common thing to do with things that are distasteful." "You dig a hole, and bury it." "It's called, "repression." Or, "suppression."" "Sometimes, the place you bury it is somewhere inside yourself." "Otherwise, you can attempt to bury it in somebody else but usually that doesn't work very well." "They don't like the idea." "So the next day, the pickles were back." "His teacher didn't say anything about whether or not he knew who had buried them." "But they were back." "And he said to the boys:" ""Before you get anything else to eat, you have to eat these pickles." "These are very bad-tasting pickles."" "So Suzuki Roshi said it was the first time in his life." "He had the experience of what in Zen is known as:" ""Not thinking."" "It's not just about pickles." "Sometimes, there are things that happen in our lives that are extremely distasteful." "What are you going to do?" "And there's no way to avoid it." "People become sick." "Children become sick and die." "Our partners, our parents get Alzheimer's." "There are some things that happen in our lives that really are extremely distasteful." "Life is pickles." "Things happen, and there's nothing to do but to chew and swallow." "And to take one step after another and go forward." "And keep working at taking care of somebody who's not well." "Being with yourself, who needs some encouragement and support." "In this walking, you're studying to see if you can just be aware, without judging." "This particular form of mindfulness practice is to make three mental notes to yourself." "Soft, mental notes to yourself." "So the notes to yourself are:" "As you lift your foot, you note, "lift."" "As you step, move your foot forward, you note, "step."" "As you place your foot and shift your weight, you note, "place."" "Lift." "Step." "Place." "Sometimes, people, when they walk, become very frustrated, because they're not getting anyplace." "And they think, "This isn't working."" "The other big category is thinking." ""This isn't working." "I don't like this." "Why are those cameras here?" "This is stupid." "This is too hard for me." "I don't like this."" "So whatever you're thinking, then you note, "thinking."" "Sometimes, at that point, your thinking will say:" ""No, I really mean it." "I want you to take me seriously."" "Then you note, "thinking."" "And then you come back to, " Lift, step, place."" "So the simplest version of this walking is that you go out you can have your hands wherever they're comfortable and it's just that you can enjoy the day." "You can enjoy the sensations of walking:" "The fresh air, the sky the light, the trees, the breeze and so forth." "Dogen, also in the Tenzokyokun talks about three minds." "That he says are important for the cook." "And the three minds are:" "Joyful mind, kind mind, and big mind." "Are you ready?" "When the cook is joyful then everybody relaxes." "When the cook is anxious, then people will get anxious." "Okay, what's the business with the salt?" "We can't figure out whether we added salt or not?" "No, how much." "It's a teaspoon, or so." "And if you just mix and stir, and don't pay any attention to my instructions..." "So anyway, do what you do and I will look the other way." "And the food will taste better when the cook is joyful." "Kind mind is often described as the mind of a grandparent for the grandchildren." "The sense of the older parent or grandparent taking care of and watching over something younger." "When you practice meditation, big mind is always there always on your side." "When you sit sit in this great space." "Sit in this vast big space." "I wanna tell you one more poem." "There's a certain section of the poem that became important for me because my birth mother died when I was quite young." "I was three-years-old." "And in the last letter she wrote, was this poem." "It was written in this letter a week before she died." "It's a poem called, "The Little Duck."" "Now we're ready to look At something pretty special." "It's a duck." "Riding on the waves." "A hundred feet beyond the surf," "It can rest while the Atlantic heaves," "Because it rests in the Atlantic." "Probably, it doesn't know How large the ocean is." "And neither do you." "But what does it do, I ask you?" "It sits down in it." "It rests in the immediate," "As though it were infinity." "That's religion." "And the little duck has it." "You don't have ease because everything is taken care of." "You take care of things." "You learn how to take care of things with some ease." "You learn to rest in the heaving of the Atlantic." "You rest in the immediate as though it were infinity." "My mom was getting ready to die." "It turns out, you know that we'll pay a lot of money not to cook." "Not to actually confront." "Ah!" "A potato!" "What am I gonna do with this?" "How do you cook it?" "And of course, if we're not careful, we're gonna try to turn it into, like..." ""I can't make it taste like those McDonald's French fries no matter what I do."" "Because now our whole sense of taste is skewed." "When I started making biscuits at Tassajara back in the 60s, they never came out right." "I tried more butter, less butter, Crisco, different kinds of fats." "Eggs, with eggs, without eggs, with water, with milk." "I tried a lot of things and after four or five tries at biscuits and they're not coming out right still, I thought:" ""Right compared to what?"" "I realized that, when I grew up..." "In my family, we made Pillsbury biscuits." "With Pillsbury, you took the can, hit it on the corner of the counter." "Twisted it open, took out the biscuits put them on the pan, baked them." "I thought, "You know maybe I ought to just taste the biscuits of today." "See what they're like."" "So I made biscuits again and I tried one of my biscuits, and it was..." "It was so good." "It was buttery, and flaky." "And it kind of melted in your mouth." "And it was wheaty." "It actually had whole-wheat flour in it." "So it tasted like wheat." "Like the earth." "Like the sun." "Like the air." "Like water." "You know, there's poetry again." "There's the possibility of connection with life itself." "And it's not just biscuits, of course." "It's our lives." "We start trying to make our lives look like Cosmopolitan Magazine, or something." "I don't know." "The sitcoms on television." "Who are those people?" "Why would you wanna be like them?" "And you're supposed to have the smile, and have the right clothes." "And then finally, you could, like..." "You could fit in, or something." "Are we going to have some standard to measure up to?" "Or can we..." "Can we be the biscuit of today?" "And, you know everything must have some virtue for itself." "And it is very strange that everything has..." "No things are same, you know?" "One is different from other." "There's nothing to compare, you know, with you." "Sincerity is the quality where your imperfections show." "You know, because the "sin" in "sincere" is "without" and then the "cere" is "wax." Without wax." "You could just put some wax on here you know, like you put Bondo on your car." "And it covers up the dents." "So this a sincere teapot because it's not covering up its blemishes and imperfections." "The blemishes and imperfections are right there." "The lines in your face are actually part of your sincerity." "Something that doesn't have lines, and doesn't age you know, like plastic..." "Plastic is not sincere." "It doesn't age." "It doesn't get lines." "It just gets kind of yellowed." "The killer plastic becomes a little more opaque." "But it doesn't get lined the way that ceramic things become lined and little cracks develop." "So when something ages well actually, we appreciate the lines." "We appreciate how something looks." "And we see something real." "We're seeing what's real." "We're seeing something as it is." "And it's tempting, of course with food and with our own lives to want to be perfect." "And to appear above reproach above criticism, beyond any kind of questioning." "In the course of life, you get banged up." "You get tarnished." "So in a way it's partly noticing that in teapots that there's some quality about them that continues even though they're banged up, and tarnished, and stained, and bruised and people are not necessarily treating them very respectfully, carefully." "Just as we aren't always treating one another or are being treated respectfully and kindly, and carefully." "And certainly, over the years I haven't always been patient with people." "Because I get in a hurry." "I try to do more than is doable." "So we were cooking, in this very small space, for a hundred people." "It was a very small space to work in, and in the summer, like they do now we were working sometimes outside." "So..." "Somehow, the thing that used to capture my attention in the kitchen, of all those things that were there was these teapots sitting on the shelf..." "They had their place on the shelf." "And those teapots, especially, as I say they were rounder than these teapots." "And there was something about them that was just plump." "And round, and ample, and bright." "And cheery." "The shape of them." "Even though they were banged-up." "And they..." "They seemed so willing to carry tea and water." "And provide and serve the people who were using them." "And so I would look at those teapots." "And I would think, "If you can do it I can do it, too."" "And it's so challenging for any of us, in our lives because life..." "Life does this to people and things." "So you have your own value." "And that value, you know it is not..." "It is not a comparative value or exchange value." "It is set by something more than that." "One day, during a tea break, a student standing next to Suzuki Roshi asked him:" ""So, what do you think of all of us crazy Zen students?"" "Roshi said, "I think you're all enlightened, until you open your mouths."" "The Tassajara Recipe Book newly revised and updated with 35 new recipes autobiographical tidbits, page 219." "One time, Suzuki Roshi did lectures on the Lotus Sutra." "He opened up the book and said, "The Lotus Sutra published by Houghton Mifflin."" "And he read everything." ""In 1967, I became the head cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery."" "Oh, let me start over." "Because it's not a monastery, really." "You know, it's a center." ""In 1967, I became head cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center." "I wanted to be famous, loved venerated." "People mostly liked the food but their liking didn't seem to carry over to me." "They said that I was arrogant bossy, short-tempered, and know-it-all." "It took some convincing but I finally had to admit I needed to work on myself." "I needed to work on how I worked and on how I lived." "Over the years, when I've asked other cooks at Zen Center:" "'What's the most difficult part about cooking?" "' ...they almost invariably answer,'The people." "Having to work with others." "Having to work with yourself." "The food takes care of itself.' "" "So I wish you well with your lives, and finding your way with all of this." "In our strange and marvelous world." "May our intention equally penetrate" "To every being and place" "With the true merit of Buddha's way" "Beings are numberless" "I vow to save them" "Delusions are inexhaustible" "I vow to end them" "Dharma gates are boundless" "I vow to enter them" "Buddha's way is unsurpassable" "I vow to become it"