An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  I went to Tassajara as a student for the first time in 1971. When I arrived Tassajara was an austere and virtually comfort-free place, except for the bath period each day, a welcome soak in those hot sulfury spring waters. The previous winter the Tassajara Creek had flooded and the road had washed out, leaving students stranded and living for a time on nothing more than brown rice and wheat berries. A residue of nervous excitement over this recent winter was still palpable when I arrived and I in turn was nervous that I wouldn’t do well with such austerity. But the road never washed out while I was there, and although we did eat a lot of brown rice and chewy undercooked wheat berries, we ate other foods as well.

  We were, all together, about fifty souls in this isolated place at the bottom of a steep canyon at the end of a treacherous dirt road marked with signs that said “Impassable in Winter.” The winter hours of sun in the deep, narrow valley were few. We weren’t hungry, but we were cold. We got chilblains on our fingers and toes. No one had money to spend on down coats and silk underwear to make life more comfortable, as students later would. It was a little like camping—in winter. Still, time there was encased in a magical atmosphere and everything was extremely vivid. There was the musky perfume of Japanese incense mingled with the strong smell of sulfur from the springs. There was also the sharp crack of oak limbs breaking under too much snow, and the softer crack of the mallet hitting the han, urging us to get up and get dressed for zazen or to stop the work we were doing and go to the zendo for sitting meditation. The quiet intimacy of the zendo was also vivid, and so was the anxiety that was often there for me along with the pain in my legs. The landscape—the plants, the smells, and the sounds—revealed itself gradually over time. I learned that it was possible to become intimate with a world I had scarcely noticed before.

  The hundred-day fall and winter practice periods that followed the very busy, hectic guest season were, at first, a relief—the quiet, the work, the return to practice. Later they became difficult, but difficult-wonderful, the way hard things often are. We followed a traditional Japanese monastic schedule and remained at Tassajara without leaving for three months. We sat a lot of zazen, worked hard, slept little, kept focused and mostly silent. Both practice periods ended with a grueling seven-day sesshin.

  When the weather turned cold, we figured out little ways to make life more comfortable: If I rolled up my sleeping bag around a hot water bottle before going to evening zazen, it would be warm and toasty when finally I slipped inside and blew out the kerosene lamp, a fleeting moment of physical comfort. I figured out that certain things could be toasted over the narrow funnel of the same kerosene lamp. There was the deliciousness of Horlicks malted milk powder mixed with hot water and the welcome relief of hot tea during sesshin in the zendo. There was a special pleasure when my Stanley thermos finally arrived in the mail, which meant I could enjoy hot drinks in my cabin as well as in the morning study hall. There were the oddly mingled smells of the kerosene, since we didn’t use electricity in our cabins, and the sweet scent of tatami mats. Sometimes there was the call of a wildcat in the woods and we were grateful for the protection of our flimsy redwood cabins. There were stars of crystalline brightness and the sound of the wake-up bell tinkling its way into my sleep. There was the work in the kitchen, the sweeping of paths, and the turning of compost. And there were studies, lectures, and the practice of zazen.

  Glancing at the moon on my way to my cabin after evening zazen, and seeing the same moon just hours later upon rising, was startling. It wasn’t really a new day just because I was waking up, but a continuation of time that I was once again slipping into, more or less awake. Or was it? Our usual reality shifted. We questioned.

  After practice period ended, it was quite a shock to take that first drive over the mountains and up to San Francisco. As much as I might have longed to be back in the world, when I finally got there it was too fast, too shiny, and too weird. But after a week or so, everything seemed pretty much normal and Tassajara was that faraway place and time.

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  Summer was when we turned our practice inside out to accommodate the guests who came from Memorial Day through Labor Day. We cooked and cleaned and welcomed them into our monastic home, which was suddenly no longer ours. Nor was it quite as monastic. We students doubled up and the guests lived for short periods of time in our eccentric little cabins. They were enchanted by the rusticity of Tassajara. Sometimes we fell in love with a guest, or with their better food. One summer I worked as a guest cook, a grueling job to be sure, but on my breaks I managed to read most of Proust while also hoping to be rescued by some knight from San Francisco. That never happened.

  The summer was just as vivid as the winter, only with the intense heat gathered in that narrow valley. The blue jays grew increasingly bold as they joined us at our lunch table under the trees and helped themselves to the food on our plates. I once caught two of them, one in each hand, as they flew all blue and brazen through the guest dining room. The intensity of work made a wonder out of having an entire day off to spend alone, hiking away from the tight grip of our valley, over one rise to another, less-visited part of Tassajara Creek where I could quietly eat my lunch. I fell in love not with a guest but with fellow residents, the plants of the California coastal chaparral and their particular smell. I got to recognize plants the way one knows friends. I started to spend my time on the zafu, the round black meditation cushion, imagining hillside plantings of clarkia bordered with toyon. I was not such a good Zen student perhaps. I was extremely interested in words, cooking, and plants. But Patrick reminds me that everyone was probably thinking about something, so maybe plants weren’t so bad. Plants or not, we were all interested in eating. Obsessed. Take away movies, music, the city, and sex, and the only things left are food and the Dharma. And for a few of us, plants.

  11. Three Nested Bowls

  Each person at Tassajara ate from three black lacquer bowls that started out nested within one another. A folded napkin, a lacquered paper “place mat,” and a cotton packet of utensils sat on top of the bowls, and all were wrapped up in a cloth to make a single, tidy unit. There was also a mysterious stick with a cloth end called a setsu. The setsu was for cleaning our bowls and it was right there, nestled with the chopsticks and spoon. The entire package was called an oryoki. It was easy to carry to the zendo and stash by your cushion. When it was time to eat, you placed the oryoki in front of yourself on the wooden edge of the sitting platform, then unfolded and set it up for a meal with a few minutes of origami-like activity.

  The Zen monastic way is to eat quickly and silently in the meditation hall in cross-legged meditation posture. Once everything—the bowls, the utensils, the lacquer place mat, the napkin, the setsu—is in place the food is silently served. But before that, there are drum rolls on the big taiko drum, food offerings made to the Buddha, bells rung, and clappers clapped to announce the first gatha, or chant.

  Actually our meals were anything but silent; it was just that there was no talking. For example, one never served oneself, but instead received from others. If I wanted the gomasio that had been placed near me but was out of reach, say on the other side of the person next to me, I’d raise my hands in a formal gassho—palms together in front of my chest—rather than pointing or going “pssst.” I would be at the mercy of my neighbor to notice my raised hands and I’d wait until he or she did. (And if I had the gomasio and I didn’t notice my neighbor waiting for me to pass it, I’d feel like a jerk once I did notice.)

  As for eating, we would lift the lacquer bowls to ourselves. Soups were sipped; morsels were lifted with chopsticks and brought to the mouth. Cereal and grains were eaten with the shallow lacquer spoons from the largest lacquered bowl. The bowls became extensions of the body, whereas our everyday plates and dishes seemed more like extensions of the table. It was a very different orientation, one that held connection and intimacy with our food.


  Chants and offerings, a kind of extended grace, began, ended, and punctuated the meal, which helped keep the mind focused on gratitude and appreciation rather than sensual enjoyment. The meal chant during the time I was at Tassajara opened with the words “Seventy-two labors brought us this rice, we should know how it comes to us.” The wording has been changed many times since. Over the years it seems that the entire Buddhist lexicon, both short verses, or gathas, and the longer sutras, has been translated and retranslated in an effort to make it more relevant and meaningful to practicing Americans. But it’s possible that the poetry of a chant was sometimes lost in doing so.

  I was and am, still, especially taken by the idea of seventy-two labors. “Innumerable,” the first word that replaced “seventy-two,” is almost too big to reckon with, so there’s a tendency to dismiss it. But seventy-two is a number that catches. Seventy-two? Not more? Not less? Where did this food come from and what was involved in producing it, in cooking it? What were the seventy-two labors? As I thought about what they might be, I realized that I knew almost nothing about the labor food entails. Perhaps a student who worked in the garden would know something of these labors, someone who had dug beds, made furrows, planted seeds, covered them, and watered them daily, then protected the emerging plants from birds and animals. Then the mature fruits would be harvested and sent to the kitchen for washing, chopping, cooking. It wouldn’t take much to get to seventy-two labors just for the basil in the salad or the zucchini in the soup. Like using food miles: we commonly say that our food travels fifteen hundred miles to our table, but if we looked at everything on the plate (or in the shopping cart) we’d have to keep multiplying and soon the number would be huge—far in excess of fifteen hundred miles, or seventy-two labors. And what about tea, or miso, or cheese, or rice? Although I had a sense of the labors from cooking, the idea of these seventy-two labors caught my attention and has held it for a very long time.

  Between the chanting, unfolding of cloths, formal serving of firsts and then seconds, followed by the cleaning of the bowls with warm water, and finally, drying and reassembling them in their cloth packaging, monastic meals took a while to get through, but the actual time spent eating was very little. We didn’t linger and daydream, but ate with purpose and attention.

  Even though I’ve been away from monastic life for many years, I still eat too fast and it has been difficult to learn to slow down and interlace bites of food with the conversation that is a part of most meals.

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  Given the structure and form of the zendo meal and the dishes themselves, it was not surprising that monastic food was simple. The food was not about variety or complexity, although it could be varied and complex. It was also not about style and presentation, although a soup might be stunning in its black lacquer bowl. And while great importance was placed on the role of the tenzo, or monastery cook, the food was not intended to provide the kind of culinary experience that a chef provided, nor was cooking about obtaining the rarest and finest ingredients, as a modern chef might do. Rather, the tenzo labored to acquire the monastery’s food, cared for it so that it wouldn’t spoil, tended to it so that it wasn’t wasted. There was a fine line between providing enough nourishment to sustain students through hours of outside work and more hours of meditation indoors, but not so much food that a surfeit of calories would make the monks feel sluggish and sleepy. Similarly, the tenzo wouldn’t want to serve combinations of food that were hard to digest: It is difficult to sit in meditation with a stomach that is knotted with indigestion. There were many challenges for the tenzo to consider, but they were not those of the restaurant chef. The tenzo was more like a mother caring for the welfare of her family, making her budget stretch where it needed to go, making sure her children were well nourished for the business of growing up and that they remained safe from harm from the food they were fed.

  I’m sure my mother felt that this was what she was offering her kids. She even said as much. “You kids were well nourished,” she told us firmly and more than once. She mentioned custard in particular. Of course we kids knew she was frugal, but custard was nourishing. A tenzo might have to be frugal as well, but he or she wouldn’t have to deal with the importance of conformity that comes with the territory of childhood, of peer pressure.

  When we were still new to California and living in the country, my family got six loaves of white bread delivered every Monday afternoon by the baker, Mr. Vienna, a pasty-faced man with a sweep of thin black hair across his forehead. But when we moved into Davis proper, all that changed. My mother made a deal with a neighbor to paint portraits of her six children in exchange for healthful, heavy, dark brown loaves of bread. That bread became the stuff of my sandwiches throughout junior high and high school. I eventually saved up some money, threw my lunch away, and ordered a bologna sandwich in the cafeteria. I mispronounced its name, but the cafeteria lady knew that I meant “baloney.” I was so happy when I got that squishy white bread and a circle of thin pink meat with a swipe of mustard. Finally, I was like everyone else.

  I didn’t taste real bologna or mortadella for many, many years, and then it was, where else, but in Bologna at a Slow Food meeting. When I bit into a collapsed circle of utterly thin, pink meat, a peppery mist enveloped my mouth. It was truly a most astonishing food. Of course we didn’t have bologna at Tassajara or any place in Zen Center, for any meal.

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  Breakfast at Tassajara went something like this: The first and largest of the three bowls was filled with a warm cereal, maybe soft nubbins of brown rice surrounded by their soupy, glutinous sauce, seasoned only with a little salt, but gomasio, that mixture of toasted sesame seeds crushed in sea salt, was on hand if anyone wanted more seasoning. On cold mornings it warmed the hands to hold this bowl as we ate from it. The second bowl might have held miso soup with tender cubes of tofu bobbing in it along with spinach crowns, the pretty root ends of the spinach that are so often thrown out, or sea greens. Placed in the last bowl were slivered carrots sautéed in sesame oil with ginger and hijiki, a delicious black sea vegetable.

  Or the menu might have been less Japanese and more Western, containing, say, oatmeal in the first bowl, stewed fruit in the second, and a boiled egg or yogurt in the third. Regardless of the specific foods served, the sequence of dishes followed a progression from large to small and from bland to intense. You can eat a lot of bland food but not very much food that is rich or strongly seasoned. Moderate portions—the second bowl contents—were right for foods that lay between these extremes.

  Zendo lunches tended to consist of more grain, maybe millet, white rice or brown, buckwheat; soup—split pea, lentil, vegetable, or pinto bean—and a salad or vegetable, such as sautéed sweet potatoes or stir-fried winter squash and cabbage. Brown rice, miso soup, and hijiki and carrots (again) was a menu that I still have a fondness for today, although usually for dinner. Whatever it was, the food had to fit easily into the oryoki bowls and be easy to manage with chopsticks or the fairly flat and therefore essentially useless lacquered spoon.

  When boiled eggs were offered, someone announced from the back of the zendo whether they were hard or soft. I had a deep dread of the soft-boiled egg. A runny yolk was pretty much inedible in my estimation, but when it came to the zendo meal, you couldn’t pick and choose. You could ask for a little of something, but you had to commit to the whole menu, or not take anything at all. A soft-boiled egg wasn’t something you could ask for a little of—an egg is an egg—so during those meals when one was offered, I just sat there, hungry, without eating. At one point I decided I should toughen up on this matter, so when a soft-boiled egg was next announced, I put out my bowl. A brown speckled-shelled egg appeared on the black lacquer dish. I gave it a whap with my spoon and got ready for the yolk to spill out, just as it was spilling into the bowls of those on either side of me. My egg, however, was hard-boiled. I was just lucky.
But maybe a little disappointed, too, that I still hadn’t confronted the runny yolk. I have gotten closer to it with time, but always with caution and a piece of crisp toast in hand to offer a textural contrast.

  Dinner, known as “the medicine meal,” was also eaten in the zendo, just as breakfast and lunch were, except that the zendo dinners were pared down, the chanting omitted, and only two bowls were used for food. One was filled with gruel and the other with a vegetable.

  Gruel was an interesting concept. Essentially, it consisted of the day’s leftovers put into one pot and heated through. It could be quite delicious, but it was the kind of thing that sounded utterly off-putting and easily could be if it were not built with care. I had to hope the tenzo didn’t just throw everything in a pot willy-nilly and leave it at that, but kept the idea of the evening’s gruel percolating as each day unfolded so that a righteous combination of elements could be noticed, then brought together in a good way. (I admit that this is a cook’s perspective.) A good gruel, for example, would be one made with rice, leftover pinto bean soup, and the addition of some Cheddar cheese and minced scallions. If you just poured beans over rice and garnished it, you’d have rice and beans, a dish you’d be happy with. The gruel version just mixed it up a little more and was made from leftovers. But it was delicious. Another good gruel might consist of brown rice with sesame soybeans thinned with a little miso soup, flavors that went well together.

  Bad gruels weren’t held together by any culinary logic at all. For me, a bad gruel included leftover scrambled eggs mixed into, say, oatmeal and miso soup. Everything about it was unappealing. Nothing went together, not the colors, flavors, or textures. But I found that if I was truly hungry, I appreciated it. Sometimes I could anticipate a good gruel, or a bad one, based on what we had been eating for lunch and breakfast, but whichever it was, I had to face it the same way. It was a kind of archaeological gamble. I encountered bits of things and remembered the meal they came from. If you were a person who was interested in cooking, you might even get some ideas about combinations you’d never thought of.