Eat your philosophy
Feb. 24th, 2008 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAbout ten of us -- Japanese, Germans, one Scot, one Hong Kong-ite -- gathered at Jan Lindenberg's place last night to eat the food we'd all brought and watch a projection of How To Cook Your Life, an evangelical cooking documentary by Doris Dörrie featuring the Californian Buddhist chef, Zen Master Edward Espe Brown. Here's the trailer:
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Now, I cook very little, but I think cooking is one of the cool things, the life-affirming things. I cluster it with walking and gardening in a bouquet of skills it would be worth dedicating more time to (instead of, for instance, the bloody internet). While I found Brown -- author of "Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings" and "The Tassajara Bread Book" -- likable and sane in the movie, I have to say that attacking the mainstream American food industry is like shooting fish in a barrel (not that Buddhists would ever do anything so cruel). American food (which of course means the relationship of the American body to the American soul) is a system so self-evidently broken it could be criticized from a hundred different angles, with or without the ideological help of a hundred different imported, Californicated cults.
My comment when the movie ended was basically "Interesting, but I don't want to learn Buddhism from an American... unless it's John Cage!" Here's a clip of Brown's master, Suzuki Roshi, imparting wisdom:
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Even that -- and I appreciate what he's saying about the bird being one with us, and so on -- strikes me as a discourse full of slightly wobbly assertions. When things (Japanese philosophies, for instance) get boiled down and spelled out in a foreign language, a lot gets lost, especially when the philosophies have cultural work to do in the new soil, and in the new air (by which I mean the mediascape, the ideological battle with Kraft and McDonalds). You begin to wonder if anything remains of the original feeling and thinking.
I spent the afternoon yesterday writing a column for Frieze.com about how superstition, far from being banished in the consumer era, persists in all sorts of assertions -- dispensed by marketing gurus, fashion experts, economic advisors, political commentators -- about the true meaning of this, that and the other. These assertions depend, for their acceptance, on the charisma of the person retailing them. It was hard, after writing that, not to feel that Brown was simply another American patter-merchant selling an admirably organic brand of snake oil.
Ultimately, How To Cook Your Life is a dialectical response to the low quality, industrialised food industry in the US, with its cornoil, transfats and gasoline, its waste, its eco-unfriendly logistics, its immigrant labour and machine processing. Japanese Buddhism is called on to exemplify the "alternative" to this system, becoming an "other" which has essentially lost its particularity somewhere midway across the Pacific Ocean and become what it needs to be in America -- a salvation from canned soup and freedom fries. And so, up in our green Buddhist retreat, we see food being treated as something precious ("as precious as your eyesight," Brown likes to say, a metaphor which obviously resonated with me) and food-making as a meditative, collaborative, loving activity.
The Japanese in the room were rather quiet after the film. They mostly found the English-language Zen prayers (affirmations of the holiness of food preparation, recited in unison at the start of the day's work) amusing, and marveled at how one organic farmer featured in the film used liquidised turkey fertiliser on his organic vegetable patch ("It doesn't seem wrong to me," he said, answering the charge that this made the vegetables somewhat carniverous, "we Buddhists believe that everything is connected to everything else, so of course there's meat in vegetables".) But as we walked home, Hisae told me she was shocked at how over-emotional Brown was -- he actually burst into tears describing the humble goodness of a battered kettle -- and how aggressive he seemed to be as he tried to tug open a shrink-wrapped slab of tofu or hacked at the plastic sprinkler top of a vinegar bottle, cursing. No Japanese Zen master would give in to these fits of pique, she thought.
I wondered, as usual, whether you could ever embrace Japanese philosophy without being Japanese (a thought which also seems to have crossed the mind of the Financial Times Japan bureau chief recently), and I noticed that, although there'd been so much mention of Japanese Buddhism in the film, we hadn't heard a single reference to Shinto, the agricultural folk religion which, I'd say, has much more to say about our relationship with food than Buddhism. Though both play a part, it isn't Buddhism ("worldly attachment is suffering") or capitalism ("time is money") which have made Tokyo the world's best food city. If anything, it's the attitudes contained within Shinto that make for great respect for food. It seems that E.E. Brown has picked up a lot more Shinto from his Zen teachers than he realises, but is somewhat in denial about it.
I have to say, though, I've never seen anyone chop a carrot so skillfully.
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Now, I cook very little, but I think cooking is one of the cool things, the life-affirming things. I cluster it with walking and gardening in a bouquet of skills it would be worth dedicating more time to (instead of, for instance, the bloody internet). While I found Brown -- author of "Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings" and "The Tassajara Bread Book" -- likable and sane in the movie, I have to say that attacking the mainstream American food industry is like shooting fish in a barrel (not that Buddhists would ever do anything so cruel). American food (which of course means the relationship of the American body to the American soul) is a system so self-evidently broken it could be criticized from a hundred different angles, with or without the ideological help of a hundred different imported, Californicated cults.
My comment when the movie ended was basically "Interesting, but I don't want to learn Buddhism from an American... unless it's John Cage!" Here's a clip of Brown's master, Suzuki Roshi, imparting wisdom:
[Error: unknown template video]
Even that -- and I appreciate what he's saying about the bird being one with us, and so on -- strikes me as a discourse full of slightly wobbly assertions. When things (Japanese philosophies, for instance) get boiled down and spelled out in a foreign language, a lot gets lost, especially when the philosophies have cultural work to do in the new soil, and in the new air (by which I mean the mediascape, the ideological battle with Kraft and McDonalds). You begin to wonder if anything remains of the original feeling and thinking.
I spent the afternoon yesterday writing a column for Frieze.com about how superstition, far from being banished in the consumer era, persists in all sorts of assertions -- dispensed by marketing gurus, fashion experts, economic advisors, political commentators -- about the true meaning of this, that and the other. These assertions depend, for their acceptance, on the charisma of the person retailing them. It was hard, after writing that, not to feel that Brown was simply another American patter-merchant selling an admirably organic brand of snake oil.
Ultimately, How To Cook Your Life is a dialectical response to the low quality, industrialised food industry in the US, with its cornoil, transfats and gasoline, its waste, its eco-unfriendly logistics, its immigrant labour and machine processing. Japanese Buddhism is called on to exemplify the "alternative" to this system, becoming an "other" which has essentially lost its particularity somewhere midway across the Pacific Ocean and become what it needs to be in America -- a salvation from canned soup and freedom fries. And so, up in our green Buddhist retreat, we see food being treated as something precious ("as precious as your eyesight," Brown likes to say, a metaphor which obviously resonated with me) and food-making as a meditative, collaborative, loving activity.
The Japanese in the room were rather quiet after the film. They mostly found the English-language Zen prayers (affirmations of the holiness of food preparation, recited in unison at the start of the day's work) amusing, and marveled at how one organic farmer featured in the film used liquidised turkey fertiliser on his organic vegetable patch ("It doesn't seem wrong to me," he said, answering the charge that this made the vegetables somewhat carniverous, "we Buddhists believe that everything is connected to everything else, so of course there's meat in vegetables".) But as we walked home, Hisae told me she was shocked at how over-emotional Brown was -- he actually burst into tears describing the humble goodness of a battered kettle -- and how aggressive he seemed to be as he tried to tug open a shrink-wrapped slab of tofu or hacked at the plastic sprinkler top of a vinegar bottle, cursing. No Japanese Zen master would give in to these fits of pique, she thought.
I wondered, as usual, whether you could ever embrace Japanese philosophy without being Japanese (a thought which also seems to have crossed the mind of the Financial Times Japan bureau chief recently), and I noticed that, although there'd been so much mention of Japanese Buddhism in the film, we hadn't heard a single reference to Shinto, the agricultural folk religion which, I'd say, has much more to say about our relationship with food than Buddhism. Though both play a part, it isn't Buddhism ("worldly attachment is suffering") or capitalism ("time is money") which have made Tokyo the world's best food city. If anything, it's the attitudes contained within Shinto that make for great respect for food. It seems that E.E. Brown has picked up a lot more Shinto from his Zen teachers than he realises, but is somewhat in denial about it.
I have to say, though, I've never seen anyone chop a carrot so skillfully.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 12:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 12:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 12:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 01:04 pm (UTC)radish and radio 2
Date: 2008-02-24 01:30 pm (UTC)Unrelated, i'm not sure if you can watch bbc iplayer in far flung lands (if not you can use a UK proxy server to trick the beast) but i watched this earlier today and thought it was great.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b00814tj.shtml
that is all.
wewillbecome.com
Borges
Date: 2008-02-24 02:06 pm (UTC)When fate disparages us
during one second we are saved
by faint adventures
of attention or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
the face returned by a dream,
the first jasmine in November,
the infinite desire of the compass,
a book we had thought lost,
the pulse of a hexameter,
the key quickly unlocking a house,
the smell of a library, or sandalwood,
the old name of a street,
the colours of a map,
an unforeseeable etymology,
the smooth edge of a polished nail,
the date we we were looking after,
the counting of the twelve dark strokes,
a sudden physical pain.
Eight million is the count of the Shinto deities
who visit the earth, secretly.
These modest numinous beings touch us,
touch us, to leave us alone.
Re: Borges
Date: 2008-02-24 02:14 pm (UTC)On salvation by deeds
One autumn, one of the autumns of time, the Shinto divinities gathered, not for the first time, at Izumo. They are said to have numbered eight million. Being a shy man I would have felt a bit lost among so many. In any case, it is not convenient to deal in inconceivable numbers. Let us say there were eight, since eight is a good omen in these islands.
They were downcast, but did not show it: the visages of divinities are undecipherable kanji. They seated themselves in a circle on the green crest of a hill. They had been observing mankind from their firmament or from a stone or from a snowflake. One of the divinities spoke:
Many days, or centuries, ago, we gathered here to create Japan and the world. The fishes, the seas, the seven colors of the rainbow, the generations of plants and animals have all worked out well. So that men should not be burdened with too many things, we gave them succession, issue, the plural day and the singular night. We also bestowed on them the gift of experimenting with certain variations. The bee continues repeating beehives. But man has imagined devices: the plow, the key, the kaleidoscope. He also imagined the sword and the art of war. He has just imagined an invisible weapon which could put an end to history. Before this senseless deed is done, let us wipe out men.
They remained pensive. Without haste another divinity spoke:
It is true. They have thought up that atrocity, but there is also this something quite different, which fits in the space encompassed by seventeen syllables.
The divinity intoned them. They were in un unknown language, and I could not understand them
The leading divinity delivered a judgment:
Let men survive.
Thus, because of a haiku, the human race was saved.
Izumo, April 27, 1984
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 02:18 pm (UTC)I wonder the same thing as you: to what extent can one understand and live foreign ways of thinking and being? To let you into a secret, it was the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddhist Dhammapada that first drew me away from secularism (after a certain experience in a garden at dawn), and I was all set to study Indian religions in Edinburgh. My girlfriend at the time was doing an MA at Chelsea, and lured me down to London... Hmm, the spirit wasn't quite willing enough, obviously... Studies widened: I realised I could never really be a Hindu; that Buddhism would just torment my European mind and spirit (if I were to practice it properly that is); and found that Orthodox Christianity touched, moved, and made sense to me. But I was frustrated even here; Orthodox services are in Greek, Serbian, Polish, Russian... I continue to be nourished by Orthodox writings (and those of other religions and philosophies, to be sure), but I had to find my worship & practice elsewhere.
Again, I share both your affinity with and misgivings about the Suzuki Roshi clip. By the by, I recently leafed through M.M. Pomedli's Ethnophilosophical and Ethnolinguistic Perspectives on the Huron Indian Soul, one of the best analyses of seventeenth and eighteenth century Jesuit records from the Huron missions. The similarity between Zen and Native American pictures of the way we think is striking (though maybe to be expected, Native Americans being Asiatic!):
Hurons emphasize a more extrinsic method of thinking. For them, the mind, in the process of thinking, transports itself or is transported into the object or event in question…. Instead of the mind using its power to assimilate, it rather has the power to move into an object, enrich it, name it, make it meaningful, and empower it. The object or event remains out there, nevertheless, but is now changed and made similar to the mind because of the free-moving thinking process…. While for Europeans thinking involves the conscious and deliberative, that is, discursive activities, for Hurons it focuses on the imaginative and intuitive, that is, excursive activities.
By the way, have you by any chance seen Into Great Silence, a German documentary film about Carthusian monks of the Alpine Grande Chartreuse by Philip Gröning? It’s out on DVD now; I’m going to stick my neck out and say I think you’d really enjoy it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 02:38 pm (UTC)In the sanctuary there is a sword.
I am the second shrine priest. Never I have seen it.
Other communities venerate a metal mirror or a rock.
I think these things are chosen because once they had been rare.
I speak freely; Shinto is the most bearable of religions.
The most bearable and the most ancient.
It keeps scriptures so archaic that they have become nearly blanc.
Deer and dewdrops are able to profess it.
It tells us to perform good deeds, but it has not made any ethics.
It does not claim that man is weaving his karma.
It has no intention to intimidate us with punishment, or bribe us with rewards.
Its believers may accept the doctrine of Buddha or Jesus.
It honors the emperor and the deceased.
It knows that after his death every man becomes a god who protects his kind.
It knows that after its death every tree becomes a god who protects the trees.
It knows that salt, water and music may purify us.
It knows that the number of gods is a myriad.
This morning we were visited by an old poet from Peru. He was blind.
At the inner yard we shared the air from the garden, the fragrance of the humid earth and the songs of the birds or the gods.
By way of an interpreter I tried to explain our faith.
I do not know if he has understood.
Western faces are undecipherable masks.
He told me that back in Peru he would record our conversation in a poem.
I do not know if he will do so.
I do not know of we will see again.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 03:00 pm (UTC)my take on Brown's emotional, irascible character, so far from the common image of a master (zen or otherwise):
in the feature, this was indeed the recurrent example for his own sincerity though, wasn't it? i found it particularly enganging in fact - he doesn't practice zen because of talent, but because of his own personal need, every day. it helps him cope with his nature. he's an imperfect teacher, rather than a venerable master. a primus inter pares. there is no master, just students, more or less advanced. "the cook is out today." to me, these kinds of teachers have always been the most inspiring, rather than those that sport a business-like professional attitude, or who seem to live above the clouds.
i'd say the kind of display of emotion simply betrays he was brought up american, rather than japanese.
(could have done without the camera zoom in the teapot-scene though.)
the absence of shinto i suppose would simply be because it was his childhood interest in good food that led him to zen, not the other way round.
Roshi
Date: 2008-02-24 09:12 pm (UTC)Well you give it a flick.
I'm going to eat my Tuna on white and glass of milk and go minimalist this afternoon.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 09:33 pm (UTC)What do you mean by "Californicated cults"?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 10:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 10:23 pm (UTC)"Presentation Sisters", Tacita Dean's quiet film about Irish nuns, was my favourite artwork in the last Berlin Biennial. You should try and see that if you haven't already.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 10:27 pm (UTC)I see what you mean about Brown being an imperfect teacher, and I think that's why those scenes of him generally mumbling and cussing were included, along with him saying "I am a human being" several times. But I think he could have gone a little deeper in the self-criticism and acknowledged that, if a bird singing can be either noise or sound, either apart from you or a part of you, the same could be said for the plastic wrapping on tofu.
Point taken on the absence of Shinto thing, but I wonder if he's been to Japan and seen how Zen and Shinto spill into each other continuously?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-24 10:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-25 01:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-25 02:50 am (UTC)I'm ashamed that I'm posting this video :(
Date: 2008-02-25 03:50 am (UTC)further reading
Date: 2008-02-25 04:55 am (UTC)Re: Euastace's comments. Take a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes - who wrote a fascinating book which probes areas which were intimated.
Also Giorgio Agamben's 'Infancy and Experience' is a good read.
Can be downloaded here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?1tjdigymmzm
roger
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-25 05:42 am (UTC)I liked this post a lot. Write about "religion" (and Shinto) more often, if possible.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-25 06:36 am (UTC)What I have found regarding small speeches as the one posted here, or even the small passages contained within Suzuki's book, is that the text and message makes up but one part of the understanding, while the other half arises from one's own practise of zazen. This is not to say that the teaching is for a select few who do practise sitting meditation, merely that the teachings are often a way of voicing what the students already intuitively know, or have an inkling of, from their practise, but have hitherto not put coherently into words(haha, yes - coherently!). In which case, the lost/erosion of meaning as one idea is tranferred from one language to the next becomes something less of a concern, because the student is already hearing what he/she already knows, or has experienced.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-25 07:32 am (UTC)concrete "particularity" that gets "lost" or "corrupted" "watered down" or "misinterpreted," (as if the freedom, value and appreciation of interpretation and intertwining in itself isn't, well, joyful and valuable) a great example of a modernist/structuralist sentiment, indeed.
as for buddhism, one of its qualities is the way it's traversed continents and cultures, adapting and changing to mold and mesh itself to each new place it's brought to. a look at its trajectory out of north india, across china, to korea, japan, the u.s. etc. will show that to even speak of an essence to it is antithetical, to say the least. in fact, the doctrines of buddhism themselves teach non-essentialism, non-essence, non-self, if you like. rather ironic, in this case, to point to some essence of zen being "lost"! (cue some rugged old zen master's belly laugh here).
otherwise, i get what your'e saying. then it's also like when people interpret greek philosophy, but they're clearly not greek themselves. or of the enlightenment, but they themselves aren't french. or even of being christian, but aren't semitic, or even from the middle east! posers!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-25 11:18 am (UTC)Thanks for the heads up about the Tacita Dean film, I'll make sure I see it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-25 11:30 am (UTC)William Burroughs
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-25 05:35 pm (UTC)Agreed. Its essence is higher than any national boundaries. To say that Zen has to be Japanese to be authentic is to misunderstand not only its history but its very meaning itself.
"But as we walked home, Hisae told me she was shocked at how over-emotional Brown was -- he actually burst into tears describing the humble goodness of a battered kettle -- and how aggressive he seemed to be as he tried to tug open a shrink-wrapped slab of tofu or hacked at the plastic sprinkler top of a vinegar bottle, cursing. No Japanese Zen master would give in to these fits of pique, she thought."
Show Hisae this old Zen story for me:
"One day there was an earthquake that shook the entire Zen
temple. Parts of it even collapsed. Many of the monks were
terrified.
When the earthquake stopped the teacher said, "Now you have
had the opportunity to see how a Zen man behaves in a crisis
situation. You may have noticed that I did not panic. I was quite
aware of what was happening and what to do. I led you all to
the kitchen, the strongest part of the temple. It was a good
decision, because you see we have all survived without any
injuries. However, despite my self-control and composure, I did
feel a little bit tense-which you may have deduced from the fact
that I drank a large glass of water, something I never do under ordinary circumstances."
One of the monks smiled, but didn't say anything.
"What are you laughing at? asked the teacher.
"That wasn't water," the monk replied, "it was soy sauce!"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-03 07:01 pm (UTC)of course the plastic wrapper, and the plastic bottle cap, just stand in for the people he's angry at, and he does acknowledge, if not stress, that it's dealing with people that is the hard part, the only one that matters. the annoying cries of a bird are a beginner's excercise really - there's nothing you can change about them, so they are easy to accept. people are a different matter... and it doesn't get easier when you've made the decision to make it your job to be their teacher...
anyway, i didn't really see a problem there: he went berserk over the wrapper for effect, let off steam for the camera. no-one got hurt. he didn't slap anyone. now that would have been different! not unheard of from zen masters either though.
shinto: yes, i wonder too. but even if he (or doris dörrie) should be aware of its relevance, they may have decided to leave it out in order not to confuse or alienate their audience - shinto, unlike zen (and most other belief systems), doesn't seem to be translate well, doesn't it? zen seems to have a much more immediate universal appeal anyway.
(at the rate this blog is going, this feels like answering an e-mail from last year...!)