Just eat
“To just eat a meal, is the most difficult thing in the world.”*
When you eat, do you ever just eat?
Forgetting for a moment any meals that you share with others, if you find yourself sitting down and eating alone, do you ever just eat or do you always have to have something else going on at the same time? Something to listen to, to read or watch? Or if not these, then do you lose yourself in thought the whole time in order to get through the terrible ordeal?
It’s quite challenging to just live and thoroughly inhabit what we are doing, yet whatever seems hard to face is where the truth of our living, the truths of being alive, the truth of ourselves, is. What we have come to mistrust and be averse to, is actually our original freedom. We can’t realize this freedom by avoiding anything at all. When we do face ourselves squarely, however briefly, where is any difficulty to be found?
It’s easy to lose sight of food’s fundamental place in living. Food and eating can easily come to be seen in terms of fun and enjoyment, as an assumed right, a focus for obsessive health concerns, taken for granted or looked down upon in various ways. The regular things that make up our actual daily living, cooking, eating, washing up, going to the toilet and so on, is where zen practice takes place. For generations Buddhist teachings have pointed to examining eating as an opportunity for studying what is true, precisely because it is so essential and repetitive activity. Eating is basic, and basic is never a derogatory or dismissive word in Buddhist teachings. Basic is the ground of experience and direct experience is where awakening to what is real takes place.
Are there something’s about eating that we have become accustomed to seeing as difficult in some ways? Is it such a basic, essential activity that we find it unpalatable, perhaps reminding us of our animal nature? Does eating in relative silence bring us into too close a proximity to what it means to be a vital living and mortal creature? Is resistance to painful mental states being rekindled in the activity?
Does the direct act of putting fuel into our bodies undermine the imagined life that we are living? Is the action and sounds of putting food into our mouths and chewing it up, too visceral, too vividly communicating our fragility and our utter dependence on the material world? Pretty intimate and basic isn’t it, putting things into your system in order to survive?
Is eating boring? If it is, doesn’t that suggest that there is a problem in us, one that could do with a little examining rather than allow it to roll on and control us? Our senses are without restriction or fault, if eating is boring, then existing is boring and the problem is certainly not just limited to meal times.
These kinds of questions can only be really answered in just eating, just living. A certain curiosity about what is beneath our noses must be necessary to actualize ourselves and to hear the answers. Doesn’t it come down our resistance to turning around and facing ourselves?
In appreciation there is sensitivity to the world of experience and the quality of our attention is deeply significant to appreciation. To habitually seek reliance on distraction to get through the days means that the days and the things that make them up, are somewhat wasted and passing us by. To eat a meal and have to have something else going on to divide our attention inevitably leads to a lack of respecting ourselves, the food and the radio content or whatever, even if we deny this.
There is a beauty in the most mundane of everyday objects, human made or natural, and even if something is not beautiful, there is integrity in everything. Respect and appreciation doesn’t lead to being starry eyed and lost in beauty and the vibrant world and nor is it found in obsessively drilling into it. The vividness that appears with the dropping off of self obsession does not groove over things or get lost in things, forms are let loose, allowed to fly and allowed to die, totally. There can’t be any real respecting of things while we are caught up in ourselves.
A plate of food before you is like a multi-dimensional portal to the cosmos, in attending to it with care, you won’t find the limits of the plate, the food, or yourself, no matter how hard you look. Just one mouthful includes the dimensions of the universe. Is it boring then? It’s also just a plate of food and you are just eating it, how could entrances into reality be special? That something isn’t special, doesn’t mean that it’s not a treasure and it doesn’t mean that we have seen everything that there is to see even in a solitary pea. Each moment, each plate of food, is new. Any activity can draw us into an endlessly rich existence which the senses bring to life in attention, but not in dissociation. Enjoyment of the ordinary may seem like thin gruel and not worthy of attention, though the thin gruel of the ordinary proves itself to be truly sustaining as it is made up of many things (perhaps everything), unlike specialness which is highly exclusive. The proof is there from the beginning, any doubts about this ordinary sustenance are cleared up by just continuing to eat without expectation.
When I first started searching out Buddhist teachings, I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s well known book, ‘The Miracle of Mindfulness’. Decades later, I now see how its meaning can so easily be lost in remaining just another book title, another book we’ve read and put on the shelf like the thousandth blog/video/quote of the week. This is a very common and critical problem, no matter how much we read, if the words are not being put into practice, they’re wasted. Even the many simple, clear, practical examples given in writings like The Miracle of Mindfulness can stay ineffectual words on a page as if they are nothing to do with the person reading. Perhaps simple advice is, ironically, even more prone to be neglected like this. The tradition I now practice, Soto Zen,with its emphasis on zazen, is not a mindfulness practice, though zazen does contain elements of mindfulness with it. It could shock us how easily we can fool ourselves into thinking that we are putting teachings into practice when we are only sporadically living the ideas in our heads. To live in commentary is a way of keeping ourselves apart from the true illumination of zazen. Teachings will just remain ideas as long as we aren’t applying ourselves to grounded presence where immediately body and mind are influenced in the experience. It is harder to actively engage with the dharma than it is to read about it and real teachings are not even about ‘it’ anyway, they are it. The difference between remaining in words and putting our body into practice-experience may seem like nothing and the result innocuous. This is to entirely miss the point of teachings though, the difference is between sustaining restriction and realizing unrestricted self. Confronting habit is an integral part of practice but it is only a part and not an obsessive focus.
Getting stuck with ideas about forms is a hindrance, making use of forms is another matter. Just like sitting facing a wall is, in itself, not necessarily an expression of awakening, I could eat in ‘perfect’ silence for my whole life and just be fooling myself (OK, maybe I am now, I’ll leave that to others to decide if they want to). There isn’t practice-enlightenment when thinking that I am ‘doing it’ because that’s not just eating, just sitting, just living. I am one thing, the activity is another. If we mistakenly get stuck with imposing an idea of practice on ourselves, we will become rigid and our living inhumanely sterile. It doesn’t matter if we watch TV or not, we have to get over obsessive thinking about and measuring of our own imagined purity and progress or lack of these, but we don’t do this by avoiding aware questioning either.
Sometimes I listen to the radio or watch the telly when I’m eating alone, mostly I don’t even though it’s frequently tempting to do so. What matters is what is going on in me, am I giving myself to life or am I creating problems? It is not a matter of right and wrong and ambiguity is no longer a problem to be fixed either. We can only see as far as we can see at any one time, and there is a constant calling of a kind, a calling to explore the indefinable edges of how far we can see, rather than resigning ourselves to the comforts of imagined limits. I think that this examining is what it is to be alive in the way of the Buddha. Perhaps I listen to radio to help me rest and wind down for a moment and so on, and so on. Perhaps I do fool myself and waste time sometimes. In any case, there will be prompts asking to be heard, but not insisting. What is good to do today, may not be tomorrow. Most significant is not to get stuck anywhere or to face up to it if I am getting stuck and not to dismiss the signs of discomfort and unsatisfactoriness. When I do eat and listen to something as well for example, I can’t escape from the effect that both the food and the radio content are being somewhat disrespected and as a result there may be a subtle unease asking to be accepted. What may seem like falling short of an ideal to me, may also possibly be allowing for things that I am largely unaware of, giving them space to do their thing. There is much unseen outside of a mind too consciously deliberate in its focused attention while it ignores the generous support of the universe. Attentive, agile and appropriate use of the will is critical in practice, it’s not the boss though.
All of what I am trying to say does not involve ‘should’, there is no one and no thing that makes us practice ourselves as the dharma, it’s there if we want it. Where would should come from? Saying that things are important does not imply ‘should’ but this doesn’t diminish the importance. The treasures of real nature are always being offered freely and if the offering is wasted through our dissociating, there is still no need to grow a space for blame to develop in. Within wholeheartedness however, the open way of awakening opens, graciously and sympathetically including our humanity, our need to be normal and to switch off a bit here and there, even as wholeheartedness takes us beyond assumed limitations when circumstance and conditions ask. Clearly, the way of awakening is not based in what we want. Kicking back, aiding relaxation by “tuning into some friendly voices, talking about stupid things”** – having background accompaniments to activities does not necessarily equate to mindless dissipation. A light and clear attention can still be present in distracting and simple pleasures because there are not really two things going on. Still, justification, smustification. If we need to justify anything, what does that say about us?
Practice is realization, that’s all there is to say really, this article could be reduced to these three words. If we don’t investigate and unpack – practice is realization – ourselves, the teaching is wasted on us. So maybe an article like this shows something of what is involved, what is unpacked in the simple direct path of zazen.
No practice, no enlightenment. And when there is practice – there is nothing to be found***.
*A centuries old quote of a Buddhist teacher/practitioner. I can’t remember the source (likely somewhere in the Shobogenzo), or whether I’ve got it exactly ‘right’. As well as being relevant and meaningful to this article, I think that what it is saying is worthy of serious investigation, which I realize may sound ridiculous, how could just eating a meal be the hardest thing in the world?
**Kate Bush, moderately adapted lyric. Song not particularly relevant.
*** ‘Nothing to be found’, I feel an urge to explain, but I am not going to. Enough already, too much even.