In Buddha's Kitchen (eBook)

Chapter8: They Used to Call Me God, but They'll Never Call Me Buddha Thismorning, I got a postcard from my friend Sally in the English department, apicture of a palm-lined stretch of white beach. 'Really envy you all thatquiet and peace, but aren't you ever coming home? We miss you.' Thefall quarter at the university had come and gone without me. There was too muchto do at Dorje Ling to even think about leaving. A few phone calls was all ittook to burn my bridges. Now my family and friends seemed to think that Ioccupied a blissful cocoon, lapped round with serenity and love. Whatdid they know? How could I explain that these past six months at Dorje Ling hadbeen the most challenging of my whole life, that moments of quiet and peacewere few and as rare as daytime stars. Furthermore, hard as I workedphysically, it seemed a vacation compared to my hard-hat level of mentalactivity. Everything I had ever thought, every hang-up and habit, turned thisway and that until underlying assumptions yielded up their patterns anddistortions, their hooked claws of attachment. Inmy childhood, my grandfather once gave me a microscope and let me make slidesout of anything I wanted: a flower, a fly's wing, a bit of bread dough, a pieceof yarn. Understanding that there were levels and levels of vision affected meprofoundly, leading me to daydream that by twisting my ear, I could turn myeyes into microscopes, enabling me to see through whatever baffled me. I feltthat at Dorje Ling, I'd turned such a microscope back on myself but had beenunprepared for its disclosures. Ithink a lot about anger these days. How the commercial kitchen used to run onrage. How appropriate it felt to indulge in tirades about what should orshouldn't be done. I'd seen anger as a divine dance, something I'd earned aright to express. Besides, hadn't I worked my way up from kitchen help by beingunrelentingly precise and demanding in every detail? Hadn't I made a point ofnever faltering in my zealous control of both the process and the product?Anger released adrenaline, energy, force. It kept the kitchen going. But atDorje Ling I discovered that it has a big price tag hanging from its toe.People dislike you afterward, so you have to keep feeling angry, keep feedingit, keep pushing that energy outward in order not to wind up with the letdown,not to take in the effects of your anger on other people. LamaTashi once said that when someone gets angry at you, it's as if they wereshooting arrows. If you respond with more anger, it is as if you picked up thearrows that fell at your feet and proceeded to stab yourself over and over. Acook isn't necessarily angry, but a chef is almost always furious on somelevel. Why? Will. Control and perfection. Professional entitlement. And whathappens to all of this anger in the kitchen at a Buddhist center? To beginwith, it starts to feel like damage rather than privilege. I would track theimpact of anger, follow its effects on myself and others. I noted my racingheart, narrowed eyes, intense concentration outward onto something that others, they,weredoing wrong. An inner dialogue raged over flaws, the rightness of my position,my method, my perfect food, my idea of how a dish should look, should taste. Inshort, I concentrated on myself, my own assumptions. I would take what wasinside my head, project it outward—,reify it—,think it was real in itself. I'mright, theyarewrong. Puff, puff. But the center of energy still raged on inside my own being. Thatin itself, I came to realize, isn't the whole problem. When I engage withanger, nothing else can happen. Nothing. No love. No joy. Only...