The Way of the Modern Ronin, Part 14

  

Essays and Thoughts on The Dokkodo
Part Fourteen
DO Not Pursue the Taste of Good Food

Apparently not everyone agrees with Musashi, as the Netflix tv show "Samurai Gourmet" is all about tasty food!

As with the previous maxim, here we have another seemingly straightforward maxim that must be - yet again - an example of how ascetic Musashi was, and (of course!) asceticism is not something that we can abide by in our modern world.  So that must mean that Musashi was a little off, right?  And since he lived such a long time ago, it must mean that we should only "take what we find useful, but reject the rest" (to paraphrase Bruce Lee)? I think the criticism of Musashi's ideas, because they are seen as both (a) ascetic and (b) "ancient," misses a couple of key points.

First, let's tackle his "asceticism."  I don't think there is any reason to NOT follow an ascetic life in the modern world.  In fact, the reason you may want to follow an ascetic route is for the very reason that asceticism has often found popularity in the world down through the ages: it goes against the world.  The "world" says that "greed is good," that pleasure - and really what is meant here I think is dopamine release - is the highest pursuit to be, well, pursued.  But the reason one turns toward Musashi, and other "ancient" works of a similar bent as The Dokkodo, is because one has realized that the "truth" one's culture has fed one is a lie.  You "come to your senses", to use a phrase found in the gospel parable of the Prodigal Son, and realize that worldly pursuits do NOT bring worldly peace.  And they do nothing for your own personal tranquility and peace-of-mind.  So you "return to your father" - your own inner peace - and you realize that the ONLY way to maintain this peace is through giving up your worldly, earthly desires for a more lasting peace, a "peace that passeth understanding".

Second, because we believe Musashi's work to be "ancient", we believe that it must somehow be inferior to our modern world's "ability" to think, and that this also somehow means that it lacks the complexity of us "moderns."  But I would argue that ancient people - and therefore ancient philosophers, as well - were more complex than we are today.  They grasped and understood subtle nuances within very complex thought, and I'm not sure we can always say that about today's world, especially the "average" person.  It also makes the mistake with Musashi to assume, even if others in the ancient world were deep, that he somehow lacked complexity, but as we saw with our previous maxim on one's living quarters, there is definitely "more than meets the eye" with the master sword-saint.

With that out of the way, so, why would Musashi insist that we shouldn't pursue the taste of good food, now that we understand that he wasn't just out to torture us?  Well, first, because he was right.  And he was correct because he DOES NOT say that we shouldn't enjoy good food!  Rather, we should not pursue the taste of that enjoyment.  If good food is prepared for us, then we should enjoy it, in fact, we're almost obliged to enjoy it.  Especially if great love and care - as when a grandmother cooks for her entire extended family - is given toward the preparation of the meal.  We will find that we will enjoy the taste of that food even more, but not because we pursued that taste, but, rather, that taste is just the extension of the love we experience when being around the one who prepared it.

I would like to share with you another quote from Roshi Richard Collins's book No Fear Zen, where he discusses this very musing, and how it applies to a Zen training hall.  (Which, by the way, has many similarities to a dojo of Budo than you may realize.)  He has this to say about the food prepared in his Zendo:

Yet some of the best food I have tasted has been prepared in the Zen temple during sesshin (CS's note: sesshin is an intense, multi-day meditation retreat where you MAY sit up to 20 hours per day!).  Is this a contradiction?  I don't think so.  One should not pursue good food for its taste.  Good food is requisite, however, for keeping the human organism, the warrior's primary weapon, in good shape, its edges sharp.  For the monk, too, good food is essential for focus and concentration.  For anyone who has not completed a sesshin, it is worth emphasizing that sitting for hours is strenuous business, a real caloric conflaguration, and serious sitting works up a healthy appetite.  Dogen's Instructions to the Tenzo, the classical treatise on the importance of the head cook in a monastic setting, shows why the tenzo is second only to the abbot in a monastery: his food is the wholesome fuel on which the monks run.

In our sangha, my master would often lavish more attention on what was going on in the kitchen than in the dojo.  Robert never gave dharma talks or teisho; he did not lecture.  His kusen were very simple and direct, to the point.  His greatest teaching moments were in the kitchen or garden.  Robert expected the food to not only be wholesome, made of the best ingredients, but also delicious.  This was not an idle desire or preference.  Meals were a time to demonstrate an earnestness of one's practice, a performance of one's concentration in the art of cooking, no less important than one's ability to sit with correct posture or to play the instruments in a ceremony.  Taste is not always about "taste."

So I think we have a couple of takeaways here: For one, when training in martial arts, we need to keep in mind that we need "good" food (in other words, nutritionally dense food) to fuel our training.  We won't be able to perform at our highest level if we are trying to "get by" on fast food, or on food that isn't made with the highest ingredients - typically processed food with a lot of sugar.

For another, we need to take the utmost care in all that we do!  If you are a martial artist who is trying to perfect his/her technique, then you need to try your best to achieve perfection in other aspects of your life as well, as in cooking or in gardening, and this will carry over to your training in your particular art.