The Spirit of Cooking

By borges, Section The Kitchen
Posted on Thu Jun 30, 2005 at 08:59:17 AM CST

A friend of mine, who happens to not be Buddist subscribes to the Dharma_Quote _of_the_Week that is published by SnowLion_Press and sent the following:

In his autobiography Freedom in Exile, His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks of his attachment as a child to the monastery's Master of the Kitchen, commenting, "I sometimes think that the act of bringing food is one of the basic roots of all relationships."

The rest in full story...

And the connection between giving food and understanding the interrelationship of all life is recognized also in stories about the belated discovery of an enlightened master who lived humbly as a monastery cook; or the stories of a great lama who gathers his disciples to test their progress, only to discover that the most highly realized of all is the cook, who has neither meditated nor studied, but who simply served the others.

May you have long life,

may the house be filled with grain,

and may you have the luck

to make use of this abundance.
-Tibetan drinking song
-- from The Lhasa Moon Tibetan Cookbook, by Tsering Wangmo and Zara Houshmand