Delicate crunching sounds of the apple mingle with the
texture of its tart taste against her palate. The magic tree bursts with joy as
it sees the fruit’s delicious red roundness disappear with the first bite. Strangely it created an image of the bitten
apple that people in the future will connect with their machines rather than with
the very elixir of life. The desire to
share the fruit’s sweetness with her companion arose in Hawwa according to this
version of humankind’s many origin myths.
As Aadam took the next bite, their journey of awakening to
the multiple flavors of life began. The
tale has been interpreted many times over with mostly negative inflection,
blaming Eve/woman for the troubles in the world. On the eve of this Thanksgiving as the
evergreens in our backyard bow down with their snowy burden, I ponder the
meaning of Hawwa, Eve’s other name in Hebrew that means the source of life. Thinking
of her, whose origin may lie in the ancient near eastern goddesses, as
Annapurna (a food bestowing Hindu goddess), I imagine a Zen Thanksgiving in the
Garden of Eden.
This year as the prophecy of a heavy snow storm took over
their minds, people in the east coast began their travels early and rushed to
gather all the ingredients for ritual consumption of excess. The American Rite of Thanksgiving is a yearly
reminder of their blessed entry into a new Eden after their expulsion from their
European homeland. Since the first European emissary mistook this
land for an eastern paradise calling the natives Indians, I claim my right to
infuse Zen into the mix of recipes people will consume this season. The natives inhabiting this land, who came
from Asia millennia before, joyfully shared their food, according to the American
myth, with the new arrivals. The encounter did not end well.
Well, human history is as bitter sweet as our food. It is
funny that one meaning of the word Adam connects him to the color red! In a
version of the tale the Prophet of Islam explained the nature of the clay used
to create the first humans thus: “The dust resembles him most because it is
white, red, green, pink and blue. It has sweet, sour tastes, agreeable and
disagreeable temperaments, hard and soft qualities of mind. This has caused the
people to be soft and hard, red, black, yellow, pink based on different types of
soil.” So we are many colored clay according to this tale; we are made of food
according to the Upanishads where anna (food) itself is Brahman or ultimate
reality. If we traverse to China and mix India’s Buddha with China’s Laotzu, we
enter the Zen Kitchen to savor our collective feast of gratitude.
The cover of the latest National Geographic is adorned with
an apple, and the issue is dedicated to the joy of food that brings family and
friends together. We learn that “From
Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv comes evidence of ancient meals prepared at a
300,000-year old hearth, the oldest ever found, where diners gathered to eat
together.” The magazine article reminds us that “’To break bread together’, a
phrase as old as the Bible, captures the power of a meal to forge
relationships, bury anger, provoke laughter.”
The ritual of Thanksgiving repeats that ancient relationship, but in our
daily life many of us have lost our joyful connection with food.
In today’s mechanized age in a strange twist of fate, people
in the richer suburbs of the earth gobble down their fast food, heat up frozen
entrees, and consume canned goop. In their benighted capitalist mindset they
also think of paying women for their “job” in the kitchen. In most ancient
cultures food preparation and partaking has been a sacred activity. It is strange that even in India where Shiva
as a beggar stands in front of Annapurna for the benediction of food, people are
now falling over each other to imitate such weird ideas. In this new century, when women scramble to
keep the rhythm of their lives together with demanding external jobs, many still
see their food bestowing role as a privilege. However, that does not mean that women
are born with a cooking gene, or they all belong barefoot in the kitchen.
Feeding is not economic consumption but a life sustaining
activity and although there are celebrated chefs who are men, women who feed
their babies with their bodies can associate life, body, and food with a sacred
materiality. Ishigaki Rin, a Japanese
poet, writes in a poem called “The Pan, the Pot, the Fire I Have Before Me”
that “cooking was mysteriously assigned to women, as a role, but I don’t think
that was unfortunate” and her speaker wants to “study government, economy,
literature as sincerely as we cook potatoes and meat.” It is difficult to do
that for either women or men if they are all running helter skelter to make
more and more money to obtain the latest gadget when Black Friday rings in, abbreviating
their giving of thanks.
Although cooking for the family is not a role assigned to
men, women find their men who cook quite irresistible. In a remarkable film called Eat Drink Man Woman Ang Lee, the
director from Taiwan, creates a sumptuous visual metaphor for the pleasures of
life that are delicate, plentiful, deeply nourishing and profoundly satisfying
if one knows the secret of the flavors of life.
In this earthly paradise, human beings have been gifted with the most
gorgeous fruits- plum, sweet and sometimes bitter but unfortunately often we
fail to taste them because we mix up the real with the mental.
It must be my recent return from the American Academy of
Religion conference whose book exhibit was overflowing with thousands of books
on the Bible that made me want to read the Hebrew tale from an eastern perspective.
While the Tree of Life coexists with the Tree of Knowledge, life sometimes
frightens man because his mind reminds him that the apple’s crunchy sweetness
is momentary and transient; soon his palate will return to dust so he imagines
a permanent heaven in the future. In the
process he forgets that he actually resides in paradise, now. Since no two monotheists agree on what their
tales mean, glancing from the Coptic, to Orthodox, to Gnostic readings of the story
of a Jewish man named Jesus, this desi woman can surmise that he had woken up
from his slumber and wanted others to awaken to the knowledge that the kingdom
of heaven is within us.
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As I walked through the book publishers’ aisles, I noticed
more faces of the Buddha peer from the covers of newly minted Tibetan and other
Buddhist Studies texts and found enough splattering of Vedas, Upanishads and Daodejing
to remind the unwary alien wanderer that humankind has produced other books
too. Buddha and Laotzu who ignore the
concepts of creator gods teach us to wake up to the beauty of the moment where
eternal life resides. They would say to Hawwa and Aadam that each has to eat
the apple and take the journey into their own depth consciousness to recognize
that Eden is just each person’s awakening to life’s magic. Buddha nature is our
birthright; it makes us aware of the texture of life in its splendor once the
illusion of a separate self falls off the shelf.
In the Zen Kitchen to
Enlightenment, Master Dogen exhorts the disciple, “When washing the rice,
remove any sand you find. In doing so,
do not lose even one grain of rice. When
you look at the rice see the sand at the same time; when you look at the sand,
see also the rice. Examine both carefully.
Then, a meal containing the six flavors and three qualities will come
together naturally.” Then he says, “Handle even a single leaf of a green in
such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest
through the leaf.”
Meditating on food while handling a salad leaf, let’s now add
the taste of mango chutney to our palate and paint this writing palette with
the colors of India. Mango is mana, a
divine fruit of the most sensuous kind.
Its intoxicating fragrance is meant to invoke the desire to live and
taste its most maddening flavors. While food is Brahman, Isha Upanishad says it
must be shared and eaten with detachment: Tyakten bhunjhitha. Taittiriya Upanishad speaks of eating
together in another mantra.
Today our appetitive desires have left all boundaries, and
strange notions of hunger games have distorted our original relationship with
hunger. The psycho-spiritual effects of abstract notions that see life as
punishment and our material existence as sinful can be far reaching. India too
suffers from such abstractions. A film called Compulsion with Heather Graham hints at pathologies around
excesses. In India the Great Goddess herself is the indwelling hunger and she
is its satiety. One must be a beggar
Shiva with an empty bowl stretched in front of the abundant goddess Annapurna
who fills it with the most delicious delicacies. Shiva’s hunger sated, he
returns to his meditation.
Abundance of the American Thanksgiving is a gift indeed but
so many political calls to change food labels and portion control mechanisms
speak of an epidemic. Alan Watts, the western world’s Zen master
extraordinaire, describes our “abominable kitchens” that are “not the result of
poverty.” He writes in an essay called “Murder in the Kitchen” collected in a
remarkable book Does It Matter: Essays on
Man’s Relationship to Materiality that these kitchens “reflect the fact
that the richest and most powerful civilization on earth is so preoccupied with
saving time and making money that it has neither taste for life nor capacity
for pleasure.” That is a true fall from grace.
Although I have been fortunate enough to eat the most
marvelous food in many corners of the world, I often recall the image of my
grandmother with a Bengali knife (bonti) sitting in the courtyard. She took her utmost time to cut lau or lauki
(a kind of squash) in the finest pieces possible for a favorite recipe of
mine. She would also cut its green peel
in thin bits so that the entire vegetable can be eaten in its delicate
finery. She also taught me my first
rituals that sustain me even today. She must have known the mystery of our
interiority, the female knowledge of life.
Remembering her, I pray may we this Thanksgiving, become aware of the gift
of life, breath, and food and truly relish a gathering of family and friends.
