Sugar Satori

On emptiness and confectionery

What is the secret that connects each of the world religions? What is it, silent, sticky, and shared, that links all sects of monastic practice, that adheres to mysticism, that binds the minds of anchorites, hermits, and mendicants in their singular cells?

My travels as aspiring ascetic have taken me to clifftop monasteries and inner-city convents, to forest temples, and desert ashrams. What I craved was not so much fulfillment as emptiness. To access those last unconsumed corners of the world, where silence and stillness and shadow still held.

Since moving to Los Angeles, my monastic fantasy has subsided in favor of diamanté-framed license plates and perfecting my rollerblading technique. However, those years of pilgrimage were not in vain. They have since distilled and crystallized to one lasting revelation: the sudden knowledge that the vocation to asceticism can be traced to a predisposition to sugar addiction.

My own vocation was primarily that of vacation. As a graduate student, testing whether my stipend could transcend the stubbled horizons of the Midwest, I quickly mastered the time-honored travel hack of being subsidized by monks. At competitive rates – approximately the nightly price of a grimy motel – among the Carmelites and the Benedictines I could be sure of a spotlessly clean room, a neat and narrow single bed, a desk with reading lamp, starched sheets and towels, a vow of silence, and two cooked meals per day plus vegan option. The presence of an iron crucifix nailed above the bed, absence of Wi-Fi, and the intermittent clanging of bells cajoling (but not obligating) me to join the monks at mass was an acceptable exchange rate for budget-friendly cleanliness. A three-night stay at a monastery ultimately seemed less risky than a 20-minute dry-cut at my local Great Clips in Cedar Rapids where, scissors to my neck, the flared and mustachioed hairdresser would lean close and whisper, “Have you discovered the love of Christ?”

Each religious order I visited had developed their own cottage industry, a practice of “ora et labora” that neatly aligned prayer and profit. As strategy for financial autonomy, this isn’t so different from the business model of other enterprising intentional communities in the U.S. – the silverware business of the Oneida Community in New York, for instance, or the smoked sausage empire headquartered at the Amana Colony in Iowa. The differentiating factor, as far as I could discern, was primarily calorie count.

Again and again, I fell prey to the honeytrap of monastic labor. At New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, I have purchased holy granola and brandy-dipped fruit cake. At the Monastery of the Angels in Los Angeles, I have sampled pumpkin bread and nibbled on peanut brittle. At Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, I have enjoyed eight different flavours of fudge, including butter walnut, chocolate bourbon, and mint julep.

The association of sugar and spirituality is not solely an U.S. phenomenon – a way of courting capitalism by catering to the consumer habits of a dopamine nation. Across continents and religious traditions, the sugar-spike is integral to the mechanics of ecstatic experience.

At the Ram Raja Temple in Orchha, Madhya Pradesh, I have stood in a crowd of worshippers at hot dusk. I have felt a collective rattling intake of breath and the raising of hundreds of hands – have seen the effigies of Rama and Sita revealed in the sanctum, have been carried forward in the rush to deliver the evening’s offering at the lovers’ feet. Sweets – cubes of condensed milk and sugar, saffron and cashew; deep-fried swirling syrup; spheres of jaggery and coconut. Sweets sold outside the temple, intended to be eaten only by the gods and the flies that settle, at ease with their divinity.

During Ramandan in Paris, I have cycled through the steam of roasting meat as street vendors prepare for sunset. I have watched small bowls of dates placed on trestle tables, as a gesture to the piety of self-mastery – and seen instead, the unraveling of shawarma, the tearing of pita, the destruction of pyramids of baklava and spun-gold kunafa.

But nowhere have I witnessed the relationship between sugar and spirituality stronger and stickier among the Zen monks of Japan.

As a student of Zen – that is to say, a student of sweets – I do not pretend to be anything other than a dilettante. Nonetheless, a militant two weeks of 3am wake-up calls, pre-dawn meditation, synchronously slurped rice gruel (no time for mindfulness), samu labor – sweeping leaves, raking sand, mopping spotless corridors – has afforded me a certain expertise.

The trip, a package-pilgrimage organized by a Los Angeles Zen center, involved staying at a monastery at the center of Sapporo, the wintry city known for its snow sports and dairy-based confectionery – most notably, Shiroi Kobito, a white chocolate-filled langue-de-chat cookie. I credit the cookie with curing me of my addiction to asceticism; I have not crossed the threshold of a monastery since that trip.

Perhaps at this point I should backtrack, reverse engineer the links of religio, the conditions of the cure.

While most world religions are structured as a ladder to heaven, Zen is a stumbling block positioned to trip up hypocrites. The koans – a set of insoluble non-questions and obdurate anti-parables – are designed to tie the receiver into binds of brain until she finally capitulates to insight beyond thinking. This is satori. Awakening, understanding, sudden enlightenment. Absolute acceptance, acceptance of the absolute, an experience beyond words, the end of this essay.

But for those who like to chew on language a little longer, do continue.

The koans have a Strewwelpeterish quality in their delivery of empty lessons; the characters of these tiny dramas are often subjected to all sorts of gratuitous violence. There is the boy whose finger is chopped off with a knife when he imitates the gesture of a Zen master. Monks are repeatedly slapped, struck, shouted at. A cat is torn in two. And if you meet the Buddha, kill him.

It's a mood very different from the burbling fountains and groves of bamboo I had come to associate with Californian Zen. My fellow soft-edged pilgrims – nervous types with frown lines etched and shadowed by the sun – were joined by a squad of young Japanese businessmen and baseball players, sent by parents or coaches for transferable training. Together, we learned a new logic of carrot and stick; chiasmically flipped to keisaku and mochi, beating stick and sticky rice ball.

In the monastery, unpredictability is training for immediacy. Like the theme-and-variation of the eeriest koto music, the elements of the day are generally consistent – what differs is the order in which they are arranged and the time allotted to each task.

The rhythm of activity follows the fluctuating moods of the head monk – he who is granted command of the bell and thereby the right to sculpt time. The result is a schizoid mishmash of rote action and unpredictable flips and switches in schedule. Zazen, seated meditation, may last as little as 10 minutes or extend across wastelands of brain-bludgeoned hours. Samu might involve trudging into the rain with the goal of tweezing pine needles from a manicured landscape of moss – then called back inside just as you’re finding your flow, tasked instead with peeling hundreds of unsoaked and intractable chestnuts.

Thus stripped of expectation or reason, each action may become as direct and uninflected as an arrow from a bow.  To the monkey-mind, gnawing on the rinds of speculation and conditioned by a craving for inner peace, such straightforwardness might sound like the definition of freedom. However, Zen has a way of negating any action driven by desire. Goals – however pearly and polychrome they might appear to the imagination – collapse in upon themselves like nebulae. The projection of a path is a heavy-handed scrawl across the emptiness of the present, and peace is no more preferable than distress. What is, is. If equanimity is attained, this is less an achievement than a falling-away, a slow subsiding of story.

There is something inherently eerie about the breakdown of conventional values. Encircled by the happy hum of urban activity, the Sapporo monastery  opened a space like a vortex at the center of the city; on passing through the arch of the temple gate, the cheerful consumerism of the surrounding streets faded to grey. I retained vague memories of oysters bobbing in restaurant aquariums and the fuzzy mouthfeel of cappuccinos in cat cafés, but the scents and flavours of the outside world now felt garish and unconvincing; a vitrine of varnished and inaccessible sampuru.

Unlike the mountaintop monasteries I had come to associate with Zen – delicate sketches of sweeping rooftops, slatted verandas, and translucent shoji screens – the urban version had the cinderblock aesthetics of a juvenile delinquent center. Dharma talks took place in a beige carpeted classroom hung with mildewed scrolls, fiberboard drop ceilings and sulphurous overhead lighting conditioned the quality of attention. It was to this room that we were led on first arriving, one rainy twilight in the warp of jetlag. We sat on stackable chairs in an A-A style circle and were welcomed by the roshi, who – smiling and unreadable – handed us each a blue cotton fukusa and a cookie contained in air-tight plastic. We were told that the evening’s meditation would be deferred to the morning; that the contents of the cookie were rum-soaked raisins and buttercream; that the kanji printed on the fukusa could be translated – “if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” We were sent, with the symbols of sugar and milk and stick, to an early bed.

I found myself locked within the contortions of a koan. Overnight, the wind-up of the day’s broken clockwork would turn around and around in my dreams – to be released in the hypnogogic pause before the first bell of the morning.

In Zen, there is a concept of warming the bell before the full sound, a type of muffled half-note to prepare the soul. Sleeping alongside my fellow pilgrims in a tatami-lined dormitory, that warming – that warning – would be half-heard as the beat of bare feet running along dark corridors – or forests, or supermarket aisles – before the monk of the morning seized the bell, flipped the fluorescent lights, and set our nerves jangling.

As we rolled up our futons and tied our bat-like black robes, those disembodied feet still paced in the background; whether heard, or my heartbeat, or an extension of dreamspace, impossible to know. In Japan, it is an accepted fact that ghosts have no feet, and yet those footsteps pursued me with their own peculiar hauntology; a tripping rhythm that became the metronome of the monastery.

The footsteps of the evening feet unfurled from the lotus position; heavy with sleep, ankles hobbled and dactylic. The pre-dawn feet of kinhin walking meditation; a human ōmukade coiling a moonlight path between moss and raked sand. The feet that reportedly salted the pickles served with rice gruel at breakfast. And the predatory pad-pad of the feet of the head monk, as he prowled the meditation hall brandishing the keisaku.

In my former life as a West Coast Zen-weekender, I had assumed the keisaku was symbolic. A wooden stick about the length of a boarding school cane, unhooked from behind the altar during meditation and applied to redirect attention to the here and now. In Los Angeles, receiving the keisaku felt like a special blessing . If selected by the jikijitsu – the monastic officer responsible for maintaining order during zazen – you would bow your head and receive two light taps on each shoulder. Awoken, invigorated, full of reverence for life, the chosen would adjust their posture and realign the wandering mind, grateful for the stick’s gentle gift of encouragement and admonition.

In Japan, the keisaku took on new meaning. The symbol of the stick, formerly a means of pointing to the present moment, became a weapon of wakefulness; mindfulness redefined as disciplinary action, made into matter, crashing down with the force of monastic anger management and written-in as red welts across the back of the meditator.

We would be seated in the zendo, minds suspended in the half-light of dawn or the slow falling rain of early evening. And then the jikijitsu, still as a corpse or coat hung from a hook, would twitch and reach for the keisaku. I traced his movements with my peripheral vision, keeping my head straight to mask my errant mind. The jikijitsu held the stick with both hands and sliced the air with the finesse of a samurai, pausing for a moment to survey the rows of inmate monks and monkey-minded visiting pilgrims. Walking heel-to-toe, as though along a tightrope, he made his way slowly through the zendo.

 There was no knowing which one of us would be chosen – no way of anticipating what small offense or excessive diligence would cause the jikijitsu to pause, and turn, and administer discipline. My logical mind assured me there was nothing to worry about, but my body expressed my animal instincts; shoulders tensed and hackles raised. When the stick eventually selected its scapegoat, the decision would be accepted with the equanimity of gassho – hands together in gratitude and supplication – and then – a symbolic half-step to satori – consciousness is awoken, broken, robes binding with bleeding skin and ego very-slightly unstuck.

In time, I learned that we thin-skinned Westerners would not be submitted to the full thwak of the keisaku. The novice monks – those who had earned entry to the monastery after weeks waiting outside the gates and being repeatedly turned away – had proved their sticking power. Their desire to straightjacket the self within monastic regulation was strong enough to warrant slow-healing wounds. We pilgrims, however, had simply paid the price of entry – a few thousand yen of the crispest new banknotes and several boxes of the finest quality Japanese sweets.

These gifts would be our undoing. Though spared the rod, the monks had devised for us a more twisted form of torture; we were not to escape being spoiled.

After morning meditation, we would file into the windowless, carpeted, exposed-brick dining room where we received our daily ration of rice and pickles. Served in three rounds (the third was serving was a formality, designed to be declined), breakfast was ingested with symbolic speed. Meals were not for the sake of sustenance but for practicing unreflective action; dawdlers and leftovers were not to be tolerated. Bowls were not for washing, but would be wiped with a cloth once the remaining grains were swilled down with green tea. The cloth was then used to wrap the bowls in precise and bacteria-lined folds. After breakfast we would change into prison-style samue and engage in a pointedly pointless activity: shifting imaginary dust from one side of the zendo to the other, sweeping leaves with picturesque brooms made with inefficiently bunched twigs.

Without the consolations of meaning or intention, temptation or fulfillment, daily rituals became tests of endurance. Each task and clasp of time – extending with no predetermined ending – would condemn us to the exile of the present moment. Yet neither breakfast nor samu, rice gruel nor leaf heaps, were dreaded so much as a surprise sprung upon us within each 24-hour cycle: sarei, the call for tea and sweets.

Relentlessly recurring with unscheduled regularity, sarei developed its own flavour of affliction. On our first morning in the monastery, the sudden announcement of a tea break had felt like salvation. We were not yet acclimatized to the duties of the dharma; meditation in the damp and drafty zendo would last for hours without stretches; samu involved scrubbing the wooden slats of the outside walkways, knuckles swollen from immersion in tin buckets of soapy water. Hunger rose and fell like the crest of a dragon, forefront of mind then forgotten as the hours encircled – around and around with no promise of an ending.

Then, the chime of the sweetest silver bell – a sound that was later to induce rabid and fearful salivation. We walked through the drizzle to the dining room, where we were met by monks bearing industry-standard kettles; we sat at the grey, scratch resistant tables and were served green tea.

At that stage in the day – samu-battered and jet-lagged – caffeine would have been sufficient to cast us into ecstasy. To our delight, the monks did the rounds again and again, the kettle as attentive to free refills as a coffee carafe in an American diner. Then, just as the jitters set in, the arrival of the sweets.

It was as though the lights had suddenly dimmed; the shoji screens sliding open like the mechanisms of a stage-set, the monks as stealthy and shadowed as bunraku puppeteers. Illuminated as pageant, performing for our choosing – there were dorayaki and daifuku (the friends we knew from home ) then – tripping on the tongue – wagashi! in shades of pearly pink, powder green, periwinkle, and custard-plum. Gleaming blocks of jellied yōkan in neoclassical constructions, hard hexagonal higashi like witches’ buttons, plump nerkiri posing as lychees and maple leaves, and hidden within each matcha-dusted mochi – a fresh muscat grape.

On that fateful morning, our collective gut-brain connection skewed by gruel and sleeplessness, the sweets arrived to save us like a deus ex machina, a sudden spiriting away, a gift beyond our means. Each confection had its own special way of attracting attention – shimmying and saluting, consuming our choosing, competing for the prize of being eaten.

The monks, who had receded to the far darkness of backstage, would slide in and out of focus as they presented the offerings. During formal meals, we had learnt to decline the third serving with a slight bow of the head; in the context of sarei, the same signal switched – without warning – to an insult. The monks typically maintained a front of impenetrable detachment, keeping us suspended in a state of potential transgression, but now made every effort to cross the language barrier. Gestures and expressions became unusually communicative; any attempt to resist the onslaught of hospitality was met with a sharp intake of breath and dramatic sculpting of the brows, as though each face had converted to a Noh mask.

We were anxious to uphold correct etiquette – after all, we had travelled several thousand miles across the ocean to distance our selves from those bungling and culturally insensitive Americans. And so we accepted the sweets with resignation and grace; nausea offset by the relief of watching each mask melt into smiles of approval.  

In the hours that followed – wood chopping, dormitory dusting, evening zazen, rice gruel nightcap  – we lived in hope that sarei had been a one-off extravagance; a generous – if overzealous – initiation to the superabundance of the spiritual life. When those sessions of anti-abstinence returned day after day, it became clear that something was terribly wrong – not least, with our interpretation of what monastic withdrawal was for.  

Back in Los Angeles, I had pictured the monastery as a sanctuary apart from the consumption habits of the worldly world; a contained space, safe from temptation, where patina added value to ceramics, workwear, and kitchen implements. That picture (borrowed largely from Venice Beach boutiques) gave me hope as I trawled the desolate technicolor of the freeway at sunset. There, glinting on the horizon of my mind, was the promise of a telos, a wabi-sabi Emerald City; a place where monastic values of reverence, restraint, and measure yielded their own aspirational aesthetics.

What I found on the other side – the present moment tearing through the delicate projections of the mind’s eye – was not so much disappointment as disorientation. I had opened the door to the inner sanctum and found myself submerged beneath an avalanche of sugar. If I had set out seeking emptiness, my goal had been achieved – all sense of sanctity and discipline had dissolved like sherbert into seltzer; monastic life was just another setup for the desolation of excess.

We had brought this upon ourselves. Like other visitors to the monastery, we pilgrims had arrived bearing gifts; a neat stack of the crispest new banknotes and several boxes of the highest quality sweets. The tradition is a practical symbol of sustaining the monastery – funds to fix a leaky roof, glucose to fuel the long hours of meditation. Levels of largesse are inversely proportionate to estimations of monastic appetite; the quality and quantity of the sweets rises in accordance with a perception of the monks as paragons of piety. This ritual of gift-giving is a form of sympathetic magic; by giving away what we crave, we might gain a morsel of the monks’ self-control. By exiting the outside world, we hoped to become more like those whose home we had entered – to slip, somehow, into their skin – to metabolize, monasticize, to convert an ideal-other into our ideal selves.

What we hadn’t considered was that the monks might be – just like us. That they, too, had retreated to the monastery in search of stillness, reverence, emptiness. That they, like us, desired. And hidden within that desire was a tiny twist of fear.

As we sat in sarei, knees bent in seiza, hands trembling and outstretched, we refused to let the idea enter our minds. To eliminate the gap between them and us would be to miss the point of the pilgrimage – no longer a journey, just recursion, nowhere to travel and nowhere to hide. We had paid our way – with our weight in sweets – and now we were receiving our wages.

Avalanches of sugar do not settle well in a stomach lined only by rice gruel and radish pickles. But the monks did pay us this courtesy: our gifts were never regurgitated back to us. There was no need. The backlog of sweets supplied by day-tripping tourists extended beyond the kitchen and into the kura, the fireproof storehouse typically dedicated to protecting sacred texts, temple records, and ceremonial robes.

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