AN ARTIST I WORK WITH in Haiti hadn’t communicated in a long while. Approaching the end of 2020, I asked him how he was, given the state of the world. He said, “The time is a difficult one for everyone. But you know, before we came to this world in this time, they prepared us for this.” It’s true—all the buddhas and ancestors do prepare us, and in spite of the difficulty, the bodhisattva chooses to be in this world to wake up together with all beings. Practically, though, amid systemic racism, mass sickness, and other hardship, what on earth does that choice look like?
Dogen Zenji taught that we should maintain “a joyful mind, an elder’s mind, and a great mind.” This instruction, a description of the internal world of the bodhisattva, is found in his teaching Instructions for the Cook. It is a practical teaching for anyone who cooks—or eats—and for all the positions within the monastery, or anywhere else. It is for us.
At the same time, it is helpful to remember that he wrote this for a of people. In a monastic community (or in a more communal society like Haiti or Japan) it is more difficult to fall into the delusion that our practice is all about creating the perfect conditions in which we personally can feel happy. In community, someone else’s bright eyes, snoring sleep, or smelly clothes
