📒 How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment

6/5 How to cook your life is a timely book. Dōgen’s approach strongly resonates with Stoicism (as if Marcus Aurelius had sent his Meditations in a bottle that, after a dozen centuries, washed up on the shores of Japan — and Dōgen just happened to know Latin).

The main idea of the book is that you should focus all your life energy on whatever life throws at you:

I do not live my life to have fun. The way I experience the meaning and value of my life is by throwing all my passion for living into everything I do.

That is the essence of Sōtō Zen Buddhism. Meditation and other rituals are not as important as paying ultimate attention to everything you do and living in a permanent state of Flow.

Last year, I came to the conclusion that the meaning of life lies in flow activities. But I hadn’t realized that flow can be found everywhere — not just in work or hobbies. This book seems to have put an end to my search. The state of flow can be reached absolutely anywhere, under any circumstances, in any environment, and in any activity. It’s difficult, but striving to live this way makes life rich, meaningful, and free from anxiety and other side effects of our overly developed brain.

A few quotes:

good part of the reason people treat things roughly and are hard on others is because they are thinking only of what is beneficial to themselves, or else because they dislike putting all their energies into their work.

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Devoting the whole of life’s ardor to all the circumstances and people we encounter in our lives in the same way we devote ourselves to our own children is precisely how we shall find the true meaning of life.

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No matter what circumstances we fall into, we have no real choice but to live through it by ourselves.

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Practicing the Buddha Way or practicing zazen is never a matter of putting aside our day-to-day activities to search for truth in some mystical realm, nor does it mean to look for truth through some scholarly research.

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Whatever goal we grab onto, accumulating money or credentials, gaining status, or having a family, can decline and fall apart. That way of life has no true stability.