Painted Food, Painted Hunger

Zen has an old saying: a painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger. It is a warning that concepts are pictures of food, and that realisation is eating. The monk Xiangyan, famous for his learning, burned his notes after failing to answer his teacher's question. Years later, sweeping a path, he heard a pebble strike a bamboo stalk and woke.

Dōgen, in the Shōbōgenzō fascicle Gabyō, turns the saying over. "There is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than painted rice cakes," he writes. "Without painted hunger you never become a true person" (trans. Tanahashi). He is not praising study over practice. He is refusing the picture the saying depends on: a real, unpainted rice cake on one side, and paintings of it, pale and useless, on the other.

Take the next thing you are about to eat, a rice cake if you have one, a piece of bread if you do not, and look for the unpainted one. It appears, first of all, as food. It is not a white, soft, roughly round object that you then recognise as edible. It is already something to eat, already pulling at the hand. Remove that. Remove the name, and the knowing that it is made from rice. Remove the hunger that makes it look good, and the occasions it belongs to: the New Year table, the plate at a temple, the snack at your desk. Remove the farmer and the field, the mill, the steamer, the hand that pounded it. What is left that is the rice cake itself, before any of this painted it?

The search has the shape of the chariot's and the mountain's. Each place you look yields more appearance, designated together with its conditions, and no unpainted cake behind it. To a stone, nothing on the plate is food at all. To an ant, it is a mountain of sugar. The rice cake that is just there, apart from every way of meeting it, is not found.

It would be easy to hear Dōgen as saying that rice cakes are only pictures, that there is nothing but the mind's painting. That is the sticker picture turned inside out. There is no blank canvas under the painting, and no painter standing apart from it. The painting is not a copy of something unpainted, and it is not a fiction laid over nothing. It is how anything is met at all. And the painted cake feeds. Eat it and the hunger goes. Nothing in the analysis touches that. What is removed is only the assumption that, for the cake to really feed you, there must be an unpainted cake doing the feeding underneath.

Dōgen goes one step further, and it is the step that matters most for practice. The hunger is painted too. A hollowness in the stomach, a slight weakness, a thought about lunch, the glance at the clock: hunger is designated together with the food that would end it, the way fuel is designated only as what fire burns. Without food there is no hunger for anything. Without hunger, nothing on the table is food. Neither comes first, and neither is found from its own side. Yet hunger is not less real for that. It gets you up from the desk.

None of this makes Xiangyan wrong to burn his notes. What he burned was not concepts as such, but the use he had made of them: a substitute for seeing, the ceaseless turning of ideas, mental gymnastics performed under the name of inquiry. The cure for that was not a better note. It was the pebble on the bamboo.

But the lesson is not that awakening lies on the far side of all painting, in some unpainted, non-conceptual ground. That reading keeps the two-storey picture and simply moves the practitioner upstairs. The sound of the pebble was painted too: heard as a sound, as a click, as the end of a long search. Realisation did not escape designation. It saw through the demand that there be something unpainted behind it.

The exercise. Take the length of a meal.

Before eating, notice how the food appears: already as food, already wanted. Nothing in what follows asks you to see less of this.
Look for the unpainted food, apart from its name, your hunger, its history and its use. Go slowly. Notice that each place you look yields more appearance and no food standing behind it.
Look at the hunger the same way. Where is it, apart from the food, the stomach, the hour?
Then put the looking down and eat.

The point is not to arrive at a feeling of emptiness while chewing. It is to notice that the meal is exactly as satisfying as before. Painted food, painted hunger, painted satisfaction, and nothing missing.