Tomato Blessings Main Page | Ed Brown
Edward Espe Brown
Excerpts from Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipes and Reflections
Stories of Ed's life and practice at Tassajara and with his teacher, Shunryu Suzuki
This selection was not used in the book, but was sent to me by Ed while he was working on it. - DC
In 2025 Ed sent another version of this story which now appears first.
Here's a story about the beginnings of using sesame salt at Tassajara - DC's memory of this event.
Here’s the beginning of one of my versions of Tasting the True Spirit of the Grain, for your consideration/amusement.
TASTING THE TRUE SPIRIT
“I don’t understand you Americans,” Suzuki Roshi lectured us after breakfast one morning, “when you put so much milk and sugar on your cereal, how can you taste the true spirit of the grain?” We had just served morning oatmeal along with milk and cream, and a choice of white sugar, brown sugar, and honey available for enhancing it—possibly molasses as well. The true spirit? What was he talking about? Don’t you just put on condiments or seasonings to your liking?
In 1967 we were starting one of the first Buddhist meditation communities in the West—Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. (As men and women practice together, and are not necessarily celibate, I hesitate to call Tassajara a monastery.) I had been meditating for two years and had worked as a chef for two and a half months, so I guess I was the obvious choice to be invited to be the head cook. Not knowing I would be in well over my head, I said, “Sure.”
Lactose intolerance and fat-phobic were not yet everyday monikers for how to be healthy as well as spiritually advanced: “Drink Thee a white liquid with little or no fat or better yet, exploit thee not the cow, but keep it white and light, and Ye shall enter the kingdom of heaven.” But I digress. Besides milk we sometimes put out Half and Half. And for those who wanted it…canned milk! Hey, it’s a free country—have it your way.
Since we had just started serving meals in the meditation hall, the condiments that had formerly been available on the table for all to use, now had to be assembled on trays and passed down several rows of students. It took a while for people to dispense them onto their cereal.
Roshi continued, “What—did you think you could make every moment taste just the way you want it to—by adding milk and honey? There’s not enough milk and honey is the whole universe. Why don’t you learn to appreciate the true spirit of the grain? Why don’t you learn to taste your own true spirit? The true spirit of your friends? To experience things as it is?”
We went back to the kitchen, overjoyed to set aside all those dishes of sweeteners and small pitchers of milk and cream. From then on we served only the traditional sesame salt—goma shio—as a condiment at breakfast. And I began tasting more closely and carefully, focusing my attention on how the cereal tasted, rather than checking to see if it matched my preference.
The oatmeal, though plain, moist, and earthy, gently sparkled with sunlight and carried hints of almond and walnut. With this careful sensing I found it soothing and comforting. Tasting for the heart of the oatmeal hinted at my own unadorned preciousness—nothing special worth writing home about, yet the good earth, the sweet earth was my own good-heartedness, coming, as the poet Rilke says, “from far away.” Oatmeal is ordinary, not fancy or flashy, yet when no longer focusing on your desire to make it taste the way you want, then its flavor comes home to your heart, and you may hum inside.
Now I hear that the use of goma shio at breakfast was your doing. Good to know! I must have missed your goma shio breakfast. Ah, well!
All the best, dear one, all the best. Look forward to seeing you soon.
THE TRUE SPIRIT OF THE GRAIN
To come back to my arrival at Tassajara in April of 1967, there was a second custom, besides not using salt, which I did not know how to handle. With our teacher's blessing, I had started using salt in the cooking and never heard another word about it. This other custom concerned what to serve with hot breakfast cereal in the morning.
In order to accommodate diversity of taste, several sweeteners were being served: white sugar, brown sugar, and (because some people didn't want sugar) honey, sometimes even molasses. The same was true of milks. Even though this was before the advent of soy milk and the fad to use non-fat (gray) milk, we still managed to try to accommodate people's tastes by serving milk, light cream, and canned milk. The last seemed really strange to me, but I was assured that some people wanted it.
This custom was not too cumbersome when we all ate together family-style at a few tables, but it became quite a bit more awkward when we began eating breakfast in the meditation hall, and we had to pass a tray of 'condiments' down the row of meditators. It could take quite a while for a tray to be passed down the whole row, while people chose their preferred sweetener and milk. Meanwhile we would all be waiting to begin the chanting that preceded the meal.
Making up more trays of condiments got to be quite a chore for the kitchen crew, and then there was the additional task of cleaning them up afterwards. What to do? to simplify things without causing undue upset. We couldn't figure it out, but Suzuki Roshi came to the rescue unexpectedly.
After breakfast one morning he asked everyone to stay for a short talk. He didn't say we should not be using all those condiments. Instead he said that he didn't understand how we could taste the 'true spirit' of the grain when we put all those things on our cereal, and proceeded to explain how important it was to know and appreciate the true spirit of things and to not always be trying to make everything suit our own taste.
We went back to the kitchen and decided, "Well, that's that, no more sugars and milk." Then we began serving sesame salt with the morning cereal. We wanted to taste the true spirit of the cereal.
Tasting the true spirit of the grain, connects us with our shared well-being. Sometimes it helps us realize our own true spirit doesn't need to be doctored up either.
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