This post is part of Eli White’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.
Rice
Daily memories of the monastery layer over each other in my mind; the patina of a single summer pale and thin in comparison to the lifetimes of the venerable monastics who live in Fo Guang Shan Monastery. Lately, I am thinking of the weight of a bowl of rice. The bowl, small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of a small hand. Before you really begin a meal at the monastery—and there are quite a few things you must do before you begin a meal at the monastery—you're meant to take your bowl of rice and chopsticks and eat three mindful bites. I remember thinking what I was told to contemplate with each bite. With the first, "I vow to practice all goodness." With the second, "I vow to eradicate all evil." And with the third "I vow to liberate all sentient beings." And the act of calling to mind such aspiration, as a genuine dedication of purpose, leaves a person changed.
A standard meal at the monastery. Photo courtesy Fo Guang Shan.
Maybe just a seed of disturbance against a selfish habit. Maybe a sprout of an open-minded heart. A rhythm of moving plates, bowls, and chopsticks; shaven heads, brown and black robes; something larger than yourself, of which you cannot be anything but wholly a complete part. Intertwined: history and tradition, Dharma and embodied practice. Food in the monastery—as, in truth, really *all* things in the monastery are—is not a route practice, a simple chore of living, but something that engages the mind, heart, soul, and body. All of it—the words and images of the hall, the people sitting with you, and the rice in your bowl—is a lesson. A lesson that is, in fact, compound and myriad hundreds, if not infinite, lessons. The dining hall is a classroom.
During the 10 weeks I spent at Fo Guang Shan monastery in southern Taiwan this summer, I experienced more than a singular modality of living and engagement with Buddhism. A body in a space does not exist without dynamics of expectation, history, and limitation. I only took Refuges and Precepts to formally become a Buddhist 2 years ago. My proficiency with Mandarin is nothing to write home about. But the goal of this research was not to come back to you with an extensive ethnography that offered a concrete conclusion about what I think, or a highly technical analysis of the carbon inputs and outputs of the monastery that could quantify a carbon footprint. I am mostly only, if you can call me anything at all, a student.
Photo courtesy Fo Guang Shan.
For a week in July, I had the tremendous opportunity to participate in a short-term monastic retreat. Rather than my normal schedule, which was fairly flexible outside of work hours and had me living with the other international volunteers, the retreat had me living in a smaller part of the monastery under the guidance and discipline of the monastics. I gave up my phone, which had been my lifeline in the previous weeks to everyone I love. I brought essentially no more than a towel and underclothes; they provided a uniform for the week. For the duration of that week, we slept in the dormitories of Tsung–Lin University, the monastery's school for both beginning monastics and lay people who want to seriously learn more about the Dharma. Tsung-Lin is like a heart or a brain of the bigger monastery, always filled with movement and enthusiasm for learning and practice. We went nowhere without the groups–we got up together to the sound of the bell, went to morning prayer, did chores together, ate together.
Receiving Alms Bowls, as part of ordination at the monastic retreat. Alms bowls are an incredible important object of the Buddhist monastic tradition, where monastics originally subsisted only off of begging. While Mahayana Buddhists generally no longer practice this, traditional alms-rounds are still practiced in many countries. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University.
In the monastic environment, you spend a lot of time lining up—by assigned number—and walking together in two even lines. There is a certain art to moving around the monastery this way, in monastic robes. You have to follow the paths together, know how the collective is going to move, keep your body in flow with the pattern. Post-retreat, I took time to pause and watch as the long line of nuns and students from Tsung-Lin walked past after breakfast, their dark brown and black robes moving like the waves of a peaceful ocean. At retreat, we would line up in the courtyard and chant the name of Amitabha Buddha as we went together to lunch. From Tsung-Lin, you can see the golden-colored great standing Amitabha Buddha that face out towards the highway, bathed in the warm light of the sun.
Once everyone is seated in the dining hall, there is still more that happens before we eat. Two monastics strike the guiding bell and the wooden fish, the signals for mealtime. Then the lead chanter intones the offering verse, and collectively the community sings the prayer to offer the food available to all Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and sentient beings. Someone lights incense. Then, and only then, does everyone, seated in long rows of tables, begin to take in their rice and soup bowls and their vegetable plate. Everyone eats in silence–and not just silence of voice, but also as absolutely quiet of body that can be achieved. The discipline master for the retreat would call out the sound of chopsticks clattering against a bowl, or of a chair that was carelessly pushed backwards with a protesting screech. Everyone tries very hard. Mistakes are made, and pointed out, and corrected.
There is a correct way to do most things at the monastery. It is very possible to fail. There is a specific order to take in your bowls, and hold them, and put them back to request more. You shouldn't rest on the backrest of your chair at all. Your robes will slip down your shoulder, or drag in your congee, if you aren't very careful. Even if you are, you will still probably fall short of perfect, and someone will call you out on it. *Don't panic.* Be willing to accept the correction. Move on. Pay more attention and, eventually, it gets easier. You remember–three bites of rice to begin, three aspirations. Consider: rice as a teacher of etiquette.
Tofu
Outside of the retreat, I worked this summer with the International Volunteers at Fo Guang Shan monastery, mostly serving food and cleaning in the Cloud-Dwelling Building (the main dining hall). The International Volunteers is a more fluid group, with some people coming and going and only staying for as little as a week, or less. Most days, my schedule was very easy–with my primary task being helping for second meals. After formal meals, we take the leftovers from various places and line them up in an efficient buffet outside the kitchens. People—monastics, volunteers, anyone with a busy schedule or who was serving for first breakfast/lunch/medicine meal– line up with their reusable containers and move efficiently through the line.
Before retreat, keeping up with the schedule of the monastery sometimes weighed on me. I had gotten upsetting news, which I couldn't do much about but wait, and I felt very far away from everyone and very lonely. I was grasping at moments where I could make myself meld into the flow of things, feel happy for where I was. Losing the will to go to morning prayer left me often dragging my feet all day; I didn't want to eat.
The dining hall is often also referred to as the hall of Five Contemplations in monastery, because of five phrases that are often displayed on the wall. These are as follows:
Assess the amount of work involved, weigh up the origins of the food.
Reflect on one’s own moral conduct, perfect or not, take this offering.
Safeguard the mind against all errors, do not give rise to hatred or greed.
Regard this food as good medicine, so as to treat the weakened body.
In order to accomplish the Way, one deserves to accept this food.
The monastery asks the individual, not without kindness, to be real and honest about their conduct. The point is always to move forward, do better. Food is a medicine that helps us do that.
There's always some kind of protein on your plate at the monastery, and it's most often tofu that's been cooked in one way or another. In its simplest form, it's maybe just tofu with a bit of sauce. It's usually the first thing I clear off my plate into my rice bowl, mixed up with the rice into bites. The exception to this is if it's dry and more sponge-like–then, I save at least one piece until after I eat the vegetables, to get as much juice and sauce off as possible. When eating in the dining hall, one wants to leave their plate as clean as possible, both for the people picking the plates up, and the people in the dish room.
Preceptors of the monastic retreat walking to visit the Patriarch Shrine. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin University.
Something I would later be told at retreat is this: you're only here for a short time. Are you focused on the short time, or on being here? Leading up to retreat, and after retreat, I felt a shift coming over me. Discipline, by which I am trying to say *living the kind of life you actually in principle want to live*, happens in the moment. In the breath, in the focus and attention to what's on your plate in front of you Today.
The prevalence of tofu in the monastery diet is, of course, because the monastery is vegetarian. The monastery restricts a number of other foods too—the kitchen uses no alliums. Between these restrictions, Fo Guang Shan is also building affinity and joy for vegetarianism with the volunteers who visit. When there were summer camps with kids, we even had soy-meat "chicken" nuggets.
Besides the highly-ritual, specific food environment of the dining hall on the monastery, Fo Guang Shan also had a number of cafes spread out, run by both monastics and lay people. Here they served vegetarian food also, in more casual settings. Sometimes you would even see monastics there for lunch. There’s a coexistence of things at Fo Guang Shan monastery. Old and new, traditions, austerity and joy, people. The name of the cafes are “Water-Drop teahouses,” which the founder of Fo Guang Shan, Venerable Master Hsing Yun, imagined as places for people to gather with feelings of generosity and community. The meaning is to “respond to a water drop of kindness by returning with a gushing spring.” These are places of rest for visitors, amidst all the movement and work.
All my life, I mostly thought of the motivations for discipline coming from an external place of fear, pressure, and pain. I had more success when I focused on joy: on what made me joyful, and how I could bring joy to others.
Vegetables
When eating a meal, there's a shared language of movement of plates and bowls that helps communicate needs, without creating noise. You can leave your vegetable plate, for example, for several moments until someone comes by to take something off for you. Once you bring in your plate, however, you are obligated to finish whatever is on it. At retreat especially, we were encouraged to accept all the food on our plate as offering. In absence of a good tofu sponge, it's best to reserve a sizable chunk of soft vegetables on your plate for the purpose of cleaning off sauces.
The system in the dining hall at the monastery centers around preventing food waste. This is, in part, the principle of wiping your plate as clean as you can—to accept everything, down to the last drop. It was offered for your benefit, that you might continue with the strength to do the most good for the world with your day. The food on your plate is not important simply because it is delicious. To ignore part of it, and simply discard it, would be to throw away something precious. In Fo Guang Shan, we talk about the four acts of giving: Give people confidence, give people joy, give people hope, give people ease. Generosity is talked about as being cultivated in all acts of life–to even walk to work in such a way that others are inspired.
Dishwashing at Short-Term Monastic Retreat. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin University.
Waste creates problems. At the end of meals, the serving team works together to collect the plates and bowls as quickly as possible. Managing the waste—separating out any aluminum containers or paper napkins from fruit peels—is a task. Dealing with any leftover food would be a whole other task, of which there just simply isn't time for. There's more important things to get to. Then the food waste is heavy, and needs to be sorted and disposed of. Gratitude begets joy and ease. The venerable monastics would often tell me—the dining hall is a place of shared equality. There is merit built in the act of service, and merit built in the act of receiving. Finishing the food on our plates is part of building affinity with each other–a collective act of consciously valuing the resources we are provided with.
While working in the Cloud-Dwelling building, I occasionally helped in the mornings after breakfast with preparing fruit for lunch. I was working one day counting out grapes for to-go bags, and being very precise about trying to get 10 grapes, with an equal distribution of size, in each bag. This also meant that I was lagging behind, and slowing up the production line we had going. One of the Venerables who works in the dining hall grabbed my baggie to show me how she was doing it—less precise, much faster. She turned to me and said emphatically, "We race time!"
There is a common perception, perhaps, that the Chan and meditative environment of the monastery lends itself to a slow environment. While the monastery was certainly less hectic than the general world environment for me in many ways, I was also startled by the quick pace of life. People move around Fo Guang Shan with a certain dedicated energy of purpose. There is a low tolerance for waste here; food in the dining hall is not wasted, time is also not. I have actually several times heard wasting time is likened to breaking the precept against Killing, as “killing time” reduces the meaning of a life. Sometimes it felt like we were rushing from task to task, behind schedule from the moment we woke up. This is not to say the monastery is not also a place that contains great stillness; the enormity of focused, collective stillness found in morning prayer or lunch mealtime offering verse touches the heart and the soul. But all things here are done with dedication and purpose, an aversion to waste.
Ceremony during the Short-Term Monastic Retreat. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University.
Soup
With every meal at the monastery, there is some kind of soup. In the morning, it might be warm soy milk or congee. At lunch or dinner, it often is some variety of (local and seasonal) vegetables in a lighter broth. There is a trick to leaving your plate as clean as possible—hot broth poured over the vegetable plate and rice bowl loosen oils, leaving behind something that can be finally wiped even cleaner by a saved piece of greens or tofu. In the morning, the serving team prepares teapots of hot water, which you can request by moving your emptied soup bowl slightly in front of the vegetable plate.
Early in the summer, when I was just working for the second lunch, I got assigned to serve soup. There's a fair amount of communication that soup serving requires—how much broth do you want, do you not like this?, how many scoops? just broth?—and the shape of the kitchen ladles felt unwieldy in my hands. People were often putting to-go containers in front of me that I was leaving messy.
The first time I helped with formal dinner service, a student from Tsung-Lin showed me how to hold the ladle differently, so the handle braced against my wrist as I moved down the long line of tables serving. Ladles became a source of comfortable familiarity; the tool fit nicely in my hand. The work of serving soup was a joy, even when tiring. Even still–formal meal service is weirdly terrifying.
Everything is on a rhythm of life that gives us limited time to do anything. At the dining hall, soup, rice, and vegetable dishes have to all be served in the time it takes to sing the offering verse. It's a matter of giving people ease, hoping that their meal is prepared with the equanimity of the entire environment. Even before ladling soup, we have to set out hundreds of chopsticks in long straight lines. The chopsticks are round and metal, and prone to rolling right off the table.
Peaceful is not a state of being that is stagnant. The mind will drift away from the tasks at hand, if we let it. We are so very often elsewhere from our work, boundless in our ability to be led along by our attention spans. We ought to care an awful lot, I think, about the rhythm of life we live within. All rhythms of life leave footsteps upon the earth; a singular want can leave jagged grooves. If I'm left with one thought from soup this summer, it's that the ingredients in the soup shifted over the course of the summer, and I didn't even know enough Mandarin to ask what everything was.
Meals at the monastery are coordinated like something of a very specific dance. Everyone knows their parts, the music is set and specific, and the timing is a coordinated effort. Over the course of the summer, there were days where as many as a thousand people were sitting in that hall. For a big festival, especially Lunar New Year, the monastery feeds even more at once. Sometimes it was visiting volunteers, monastics, sometimes it was many kids for summer camp. The four teams divide the dining hall, and work together to efficiently feed everyone. I was often struck by how much slower I moved, and how lost I fumbled about. After the retreat, and getting to talk a little more with Tsung-Lin students, I thought a lot about the number of places people in that dining hall came from. All of us, floating around in some cosmic soup broth, ladled out in this bowl or the next only by chance.
Preceptors setting the tables for Lunch at the retreat. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin university.
Fruit
Every day there is fruit prepared to go with lunch. Local Taiwanese fruit was, simply put, a profound experience for me. Orange, sun-ripe; Mangoes, sweeter and softer than ice cream; Pineapple, soft and yellow-sweet all the way through the core; Lychee, full to their skins with sweet juice; Passionfruit, tangy and bright; Avocado, softer than butter.
Snacks were a larger part of life at the monastery than I expected. At the main shrine, we'd usually find ourselves invited to sit down after cleaning with a cup of juice and a packet of crackers in hand. At the dining hall, I almost couldn't make it out of a shift without, between the kitchen aunties and the monastics, my apron pockets bulging with various treats. Fruit, crackers, sticky rice dumplings. Juice boxes, electrolyte packets. Even at monastic retreat, there was a morning after chores they had us sit together for a tea-meditation. And outside of retreat, I was often in the reception center enjoying tea, prepared by myself or by friends.
The monastery was an environment of abundance, even as it was an environment of austerity. It was an enormous privilege to get to walk under the walkways shaded by bamboo, my stomach full of food and my tongue still remembering the delight of mango. Less felt like more. Every second, something to be grateful for.
Great Compassion Shrine. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University.
There are many ways to live a life, and many ways to live a life that is meaningful. In some ways many lives are lived in ways that are parallel to each other, interconnected, or crisscrossed in strange patterns. I wish I could share with you the morning I felt incredibly lonely and far away from home, and I walked up to the Shrine of Great Practice and ate a mango I had been given. I felt a great, energetic love and joy for life in my bones. My soul felt awake, a flock of swallows rising up, as in the soft evening sky at the monastery.
View from the terrace outside Tsung-Lin’s dining hall of the standing Ambitabha Buddha that faces the highway, greeting visitors. Photo is my own.