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Tasting
Zen
If
you eat, you should know how to cook. Knowing how to cook is not
something that that can be known all at once. But then nothing is.
Nonetheless, some people feel justified in saying that they don’t
know how to cook as if this meant that they were incapable of
learning. Outside of what one learns through the process of formal
Zen practice, cooking is the most important thing to learn. The
bodymind is the food that it has consumed...
...The art of cooking is the most intimate of all art forms. The
work that you have created actually becomes your audience...It can
change you as you learn how to cook and it can change how the people
who eat your food understand flavours...
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It becomes
an art form through exploring in a very thorough-going manner ingredients,
procedures, spices and herbs, equipment, developing a sense of timing
during preparation and a sense of nuance and balance...
As with Zen brush work that requires thousands of strokes to learn how to
brush a stroke so that the unexpected can be incorporated into the body of
the stroke as a whole, each meal is like a sketch. Be willing to fail
miserably.
And throughout, see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and think clearly and
openly. Cook with the whole bodymind and eat with the whole bodymind...
-
Zen Master Anzan Hoshin
excerpts from "It Becomes You", teisho five in the series
"Zen Arts: The Flowering of the Senses", 1999
©
1999-2004 White Wind Zen Community. All rights reserved.
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