Customer Reviews

Nothing Is Hidden : Essays on Zen Master Dogen's Instructions for the Cook

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book contains an annotated translation of Instructions for the Cook and a series of essays related to it.

Instructions for the Cook itelf is an amazingly charming piece of writing. Dogen comes across as a kind and gentle teacher, reminding us that we should be ever mindful, even in the most dull and mundane tasks. As such, just this alone would be worth the reading. The annotations ranged from helpful to entertaining to useless, but that just seems to be the way of annotation and it didn't get in the way of the charm of the original text.

The essays are then divided into two sections: "Practice for Your Whole Life" and "Roots of Mealtime Practice."

The essays in "Practice for Your Whole Life" are overall quite good. I took some issue with Kurebayashi's "Magnanimous Mind" because it didn't appear to really belong in this book so much as in a more scholastic book on Dogen's work. The rest of these essays are written from personal experience, some focusing in on a few words from the text (Aoyama's "A Monk's Mouth is Like an Oven"), some on the experience of being head-cook at a monastery in relation to the Instructions. I enjoyed all of them and I think they have left me with rather a bit to think about.

"Roots of Mealtime Practice" contains only two essays. The first, Mizuno's "Eating Customs in the Sangha in India," is easily my least favorite essay in the book. It led me to read the next, Shinohara's "Rules for Meals in China," with outright trepidation. The two essays couldn't be more different. Mizuno utterly fails to place early Buddhist tradition in the cultural context of India. One would think, reading it, that Buddha came up with the concept of the mendicant monk out of wholecloth. It fails to touch on which of the Indian traditions regarding mendicancy Buddhism maintained and which it rejected. (As you might guess, I feel strongly about this.) Shinohara, on the other hand, does a wonderful job of placing Chinese Chan Buddhism in the cultural context of China. The relationship between Chan practice and Confucian practice is gone over in great detail. As such, he gets the gold star.

If I have one overall complaint about this book, it is that despite being about Instructions for the Cook, none of the essays touch on food or food preparation in a more mundane sense. I would have liked a bit of food-talk to go with my dharma-talk and was rather hoping it would include some. Just sayin'.

Overall, it's a lovely little book and I recommend it for anyone interested in mindful practice, whether or not they consider themselves Buddhist.