Home > Dharma Dew  The Three-Bowl Ritual  By Andrea Blum, Common
Ground, August 2006  Breakfast in a Zendo  San Francisco, USA --
On a recent Saturday morning I rolled out of bed and made my way
to the San Francisco Zen Center for breakfast. The 1920s brick
building, originally designed by Julia Morgan for young Jewish
women in need of a place to live, is now home to a throng of
gentle monks in what is the largest Soto Zen Buddhist
congregation outside of Asia. I was there to experience the
cooking of the tenzo—the Zen cook—and a meal called oryoki,
which is an elaborate ritual that involves eating from three
bowls of descending sizes.  Inside, the mostly bald and closely-
shaven, black-robed monks gathered in a circle with hands folded
over their bellies, then quietly made their way downstairs to
the meditation hall, cradling their oryoki bowls wrapped in
white linens. In good form and silence they sat like Buddhas on
their pillows, bowing and chanting, then bowing some more in a
dance that went on for 40 min