Dave Koch

"My Most Exciting Food Experience"
Shojin Ryori: Buddhist Cuisine
in a Japanese Temple

---

It was a dark and stormy night. A typhoon was about to make landfall on the eastern shore of Japan and we had just returned to our temple from Okunoin, a massive 500,000 grave cemetery surrounded by a moss-laden cedar forest.  The guide books said not to take pictures of the gravestones but the place was surreal amidst the downpour.  I had to.

We were staying in Koyasan, a mountain town in Japan’s Wakayama Prefecture and a UNESCO world heritage site.  Known for its more-than one hundred Buddhist temples, visitors can stay at about 50 of them.  They all serve their own take on shojin ryori, a completely vegetarian Buddhist “devotion cuisine” - and while we were excited about the food, we were completely at a loss for what to expect.

After touring the cemetery in the pouring rain we changed out of our wet clothes and into the kimonos the monks had provided for us.  They had put us in our own room with bamboo mats, a paper door, a pot of tea, a comforter, and an oil burning heating element.  No one spoke much English and my self-taught Japanese was worthless.

When you enter your room in the temple you are required to remove your shoes.  We would just pile them up in the corner and every so often a monk would come by to check on us.  The monks would invariably straighten out shoes and line them up in rows.

When they would leave, I would pile them up again in the corner.  The next time a monk would come, they would straighten out our shoes.  When they would leave, I would pile them up again.  This became our little game and it helped pass the hours until the food arrived.  I hope they enjoyed it as much as we did because we enjoyed it tremendously.

At one point a monk came in and asked if we would like some beers with our dinner.  Yes.  Yes we would like some beers with our meal, arigato gozaimasu.

What arrived was a bento box on steroids.  There may have been 20 different small dishes.  Most of them were pickled vegetables and different kinds of tofu.  As a well-fed American, some foods were recognizable (although some were not) - but the variety, nevertheless, was inspiring.

Every color of the rainbow was represented on our plate.  There were hot dishes, cold dishes, and room temperature ones.  There were things that were boiled, baked, fried, and raw - and like I said before, loads of pickled.  There was salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, but there didn’t seem to be any spicy.

Every bite made me think about how the monastic Buddhist lifestyle has helped hone shojin ryori into what it is today; carefully manipulating each vegetable so that its essence is portrayed best.  I wondered, why did they cut the daikon there?  Why one mushroom and not another?  What could they possibly have done to that tofu to make it look and smell like that?

I ate everything - and I consumed it in as much mindfulness as a backpack-toting American could.  I gave reverence to the 1200 years of Buddhism I was treading on in Koyasan.  I thought about the monks who prepared the meals between prayers.  I almost poured out a little beer for those monks who weren’t with us anymore.

The shojin ryori meal was one that I’ll never forget; I only wish I took more pictures.