| Oryoki
is a Japanese ceremonial form for serving and eating meals
in which every movement is scripted, down to the tiniest
detail, as only the Japanese can do at their hyper-compulsive
best. For example, when the second (of three or four)
bowls is served, it is to be picked up with the first
three fingers of the right hand and placed on the open
palm of the waiting server who ladles from the pot he’s
set on the floor until the eater gives the hand signal
to stop filling. Then the server hands the bowl back to
the person being served, who takes it with two hands,
and places it back down on the tray in front of her. It’s
all done silently, choreographed by hand signals and gongs.
This description barely scratches the surface of the ritual’s
details.
I got a crash course in oryoki in July, as part of a meditation
retreat at Shambhala Mountain Center in the foothills
northwest of Fort Collins. The event is called dathun,
which means “the period of a lunar cycle”
in Tibetan. I stayed for the first week of the month-long
event.
At first I hated oryoki. There are so many little details
to constantly be aware of while trying to eat. As I started
to get the hang of the form, which I figure I could almost
master in a year or so of three-time-a-day practice, the
mindfulness that came with eating this way started to
dawn on me. I was surprised to find a certain quietness
growing out of the effort to train my naturally anarchistic
attention on heaps of intricate instructions.
There were about 70 of us in a big white tent, which served
as meditation hall as well as dining hall. It was a beautiful
airy place, festooned with brightly colored pennants,
gold, red, orange and yellow at the center of the space,
and turquoise and white at the edges. While sheltering
us from wind and rain the canvas responded to the changes
of atmosphere that the foothills delivered moment-to-moment,
a sort of semi-permeable membrane between inside and out.
Birds chattered and chirped and called all around us.
An occasional chipmunk scampered self-confidently (they
and the deer and bunnies that inhabit the grounds know
pacifists when they see them) across the grey plywood
floor.
This was very different from Tassajara, the place where
I first learned to meditate thirty years ago, a monastery
affiliated with the San Francisco Zen Center. There we
sat stock still, facing the wall, seated on black cushions
on the floor of a starkly quiet meditation hall constructed
of bare polished wood. If something hurt we were instructed
to just sit with that pain and breathe.
By contrast, at Shambhala we meditated while staring into
the luminous air in front of us. We were encouraged to
change positions if we needed to in order to be comfortable
when sitting very still (a task that Pema Chödrön,
a famous Shambhala disciple, calls “the first impossible
instruction”); to keep a bottle of water at our
side; and to take bathroom breaks as needed. We never
sat for more than about forty minutes at a time, alternating
sitting with walking meditation and with instruction by
our excellent course leader.
We also did yogic stretches between sessions on the cushion
(on the chair for me and my bum knee). Just as the Tibetan
Shambhala tradition has incorporated the Japanese form
of oryoki, the teachers have recently added yoga, a spiritual
practice from India.
At the retreat center you can still hear echoes of the
hippie spirit of Boulder in the ‘60s and ‘70s,
when the Shambhala tradition coalesced around Chögyam
Trungpa Rinpoche, a highly charismatic Tibetan holy man
who had fled the Chinese invasion. Trungpa’s disciples,
including Acharaya Gaylon Ferguson, the director of our
dathun, read like a Who’s Who of Buddhism in America.
Though the local culture is kind of loose and trippy -
bright colors; a relaxed, gentle form of meditation; eclectic
practices; a choice between vegan and omnivore menus;
even a sort of slangy language sometimes used to explain
subtle points of Buddhist epistemology - the purpose is
unwaveringly serious, to help people along the path away
from pain and toward happiness and enlightenment. Meditation
is the primary tool. Thanks to the dathun experience,
which included about seven hours of sitting per day, I
have greatly improved my meditation chops.
Back to oryoki. There we are, in the meditation tent on
cushions set before short-legged black enamel serving
trays, each arrayed with precisely laid out oryoki bowls,
utensils and cloths. Five servers are making their way
down each of five aisles from group to silent group of
four eaters, stopping to serve each quadrant in the prescribed
manner. One of the servers kneels and, as humans sometimes
do when they flex their pelvic muscles, farts, loudly
enough to be heard the length and breadth of the tent.
Laughter moves in waves up and down the ordered rows of
cushions and tables. Even the umdze, the leader who guides
us through the meal’s ritual, is chuckling from
her perch next to the shrine at the front of the tent.
Gradually, we suppress our laughter, which still breaks
out in ripples of stifled guffaws.
Emma Goldman, the American anarchist said, “If I
can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”
And I don’t want your enlightenment if I can’t
laugh (or fart), which is definitely not a problem at
Shambhala.
By the end of my week of dathun I was very glad to have
done it, but also very glad, given the intensity of the
experience, to not be staying the whole month. Maybe next
year I’ll try two weeks. By then I expect to have
forgotten everything I know about oryoki, but not about
meditating, and certainly not about laughing and farting.
Marc Ringel has spent the majority
of his career as a family doctor working in rural communities,
including the last 12 years in Brush, Colorado. He has
written extensively, for lay and professional audiences,
about rural health, medical informatics and healing. Marc
lives in Greeley with his wife and many pets.
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MAY/JUNE 2009 FEATURE ARTICLES
