Steffen (Japan, 25yo, student)

During my stay at Anjaiji Docho-san gave a talk about daily food in Japan. He focused on the differences between brown rice, called "gen-mai" in Japanese, and white rice, called "haku-mai". The basis for white and brown rice is the same species. But while white rice is polished, which removes its outer and inner shell, brown rice has only its outer shell removed while the inner shell is not taken away. The two ways of processing rice cause some differences:

1. Brown rice is more difficult to chew and most people don't consider it as tasty. That leads to the fact, that people in Japan will almost never eat brown (unpolished) rice.

2. Brown rice has a much higher nutritious value than white rice. Its inner shell contains vitamins, minerals and dietary fiber.

Docho-san then compared "eating brown rice" to "living at Antaiji".

Life at Antaiji will make you chew a lot: You will have to chew morning zazen at 4am, chew the ceremony during breakfast, chew soji afterwards, chew samu until 3pm, chew as fast as possible during dinner, chew seiza during tea meeting, chew evening zazen, chew "don't move!", chew the community and chew your cup of brown rice every day. None of the above may be considered very tasty at all. But "chewing life at Antaiji" may also give you lots of nutritions back.

The idea of comparing "life at Antaiji" to "eating unpolished rice" wandered through my mind a lot. Especially during the days of the sesshin. There is nothing which would "polish the session" to make it more tasty: No nice talks, no recitation of sutras, no ceremony, no gymnastics, no tasty food. It is just "unpolished sitting" the way it is.

After the second day of the session I found that Docho-san's analogy may be correct for "normal days" at Antaiji but is wrong for the days of the session. Instead it seemed to me that a "session at Antaiji" is more like chewing on "uncooked rice" and not just chewing on "unpolished rice". And just like the human body is not made to digest uncooked rice it is also not made to sit for 15 hours a day.

Later it came to my mind that there may be a relation between the session at Antaiji and the uncooked rice which Kodo Sawaki chewed when he ran away from home. Maybe the very idea to chew on something which you are not able to digest is kept alive by the session. And it may be useful to chew on indigestible things from time to time because it turns the unpolished rice on normal days into something really fulfilling.

For me it was rewarding to chew the "unpolished rice" as well as the "uncooked rice" served at Antaiji. Until this day I live on the nutritions, contained in brown rice but even more do I live on the delight itself to chew unpolished rice every day.