Three Lacquered Bowls

On Monday afternoon I made my first visit to Shogun's Gallery in NW Portland. The folks there are good friends of the monastery, and the relationship is a mutually beneficial one. Their upscale clientele isn't very interested in arcane Buddhist figures and instruments. We, by contrast, are often thrilled to purchase these, both because we like to care for sacred antiques, and because the prices are a small fraction of what it would cost to buy similar items from a Japanese temple-supply catalog.

In the clearance room in the back of the store, I found what I was seeking: bowls. We eat formal meals as a ceremony, using a little eating kit that is anchored by three bowls of descending size. Three antique lacquer bowls with gold edging came home with me. Total cost: $15.

Good lacquerware is hard to find these days. Traditionally, only certain families worked in lacquer because the process involved highly-irritating and -allergenic resins. The process itself takes place over many weeks, as dozens of extremely thin coatings are applied to an object carved from aged cryptomeria wood. The result is a very light, durable, and beautiful article. The Chinese pioneered lacquerware, but the Japanese raised it to an art of profound accomplishment. Today the best pieces are old.

I do a lot of thinking and silent kvetching during meals, but sometimes I am actually just sitting there. Just being present, aware of the act of eating, of receiving and transforming. These bowls, now dust-free and glistening under the fluorescent lights, have witnessed untold meals, parties, quarrels and ennui, without ever being noticed. I know this is true, because I can taste the slightest flavor in them.

When I finish drinking tea from the bowls, a little puddle collects at the bottom, and it soaks into the lacquer, making a dark spot. I realize that, although the finish is durable, it is also permeable: water is exchanging in and out of the lacquer all the time. As it soaks in, it displaces something, and when I drink the dregs of the bowl, I am ingesting a faint, almost-familiar flavor. It's a hundred-year-old meal, from Japan, sealed in dust and resin until now.

That was yesterday. Today the bowls taste normal. They still carry a sense of otherworldliness, though. Their improbable lightness, given size and shape, is part of the effect. But beyond that, they have some aura of another world, one where their users had no concept that I would ever exist to cup my hands around the same article. And how could they have imagined that the world would be this way?

An age ago, a small number of people developed a resistance to lacquer-- allowed themselves to be poisoned, in fact-- so that objects of enduring beauty could be created. In this age, we are beginning to perceive that a planet-wide poisoning is underway. Penile malformations in baby boys are creeping into the double digits; pollution is the most likely cause. Most of us can sense that the weather is noticeably changed from twenty years ago, and only the lunatic fringe (conveniently funded by Big Oil) is so foolish as to assert that humankind is not to blame.

We are all paying the price for something. And what we have purchased is the way the world is today: technology, entertainment, and the intoxicating stench of ego-driven existence. Hundreds of years of this sort of activity now comes due-- it is unfolding in our bodies, and in the assurance of an uncertain future.

The great truth of time and life is that there is only change, and we have as little idea of the future as the long-dead ones who made and used these three lacquer bowls.