During the 10 years that I lived in Kyoto,
besides doing my studies in Chinese and Japanese
and Buddhist history and thought,
I took up the study of biology and ecology
in primarily in English language because, you know,
Japan is a very sophisticated place.
And there was a--
the Maruzen bookstores, which you will find some places
in this country like in Manhattan and in San Francisco,
there's six or seven Maruzen in bookstores in Japan,
they have--
they had anyway, better stocks of English language books
than you'll find most of the time in this country,
including big shelves of scientific works as well.
So I got some very good books there in the early days
of ecology when ecology meant a science and not
just the outdoors.
So working through that and conceptualizing, working out
my own thoughts of concepts like the food chain, the food
pyramid, and so forth, it finally
dawned on me that the ecology that
was being taught at that time was
all about things eating each other and, in particular,
about how energy got passed along
in and out of organic and inorganic matter also.
Working with that, I wrote a poem
called "The Soul of the Taste" about the food
that we human beings eat.
"Eating the living germs of grasses,
eating the ova of large birds, eating the fleshy sweetness
packed around the sperm of swaying trees--
apples-- the muscles of the flanks and thighs
of soft-voiced cows, the mounts in the lambs leap,
the swish in the ox's tail, eating roots grown swole
inside the soil, drawing on life of living.
Clustered points of light spun out
of space hidden in the grape.
Eating each other's seed, eating each other.
Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread--
the tulip.
So that's really about the sacrament in a way.
The sacrament understood as deeply ancient
and more involved in the life of the flesh
than the later church would allow, moving from metaphor
almost to the literal.
And it turns out that that's probably the case actually.