Food Fights and Table Manners

Discussion of ordination, the Vinaya and monastic life. How and where to ordain? Bhikkhuni ordination etc.
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Dhammanando
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Food Fights and Table Manners

Post by Dhammanando »

Anthony Fiorucci's 2019 MA thesis on a rather under-explored subject - the gastronomic ethnology of Theravāda monasticism.

Food Fights and Table Manners: Food, bodies and ideology in the dāna encounter of Pali Buddhism

Abstract

Previous scholarship has suggested that ritualized giving (dāna) by laity to monastics constituted a significant factor in the creation of Buddhism as a viable historical phenomenon. The giving of almsfood, in particular, provides a prime site of social interaction between monastics and laity, wherein sustained mutual relations may develop.

This study aims at discerning some of the cultural dynamics of this interaction by analyzing the ritualized giving of food from two interrelated perspectives.

Firstly, utilizing the concept of ‘food ideology’, this study investigates the ideological value attached to the substance (i.e. food) given in the transaction. Thereafter, the ritual performances of the mutual participants are examined. I argue that, while normative Buddhism ascribes a more positive value to food than its ascetic contemporaries, it implemented a thorough program of corporal discipline that functioned as a novel form of ‘civilizational’ asceticism congenial to the contemporaneous cosmopolitan landscape. This positive value ascription to food and emphasis on discipline converges with urban, lay sensibilities and serves to bring cohesion between the lay and monastic elements of the normative Pali tradition.

Key words:

alms, asceticism, corporal discipline, dāna, dakkhiṇā, domestication, food, forest renunciation, gift, health, liberality, merit, monasticism, meat, medicine, middle way, monastic discipline, pāṭimokkha, sacrifice, śaikṣa dharma, sampajañña, sekhiya dhamma, sikkhā, śikṣā, urbanism, vegetarianism, Vinaya
https://www.academia.edu/40264143/Food_ ... view-paper
Yena yena hi maññanti,
tato taṃ hoti aññathā.


In whatever way they conceive it,
It turns out otherwise.
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Eko Care
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Re: Food Fights and Table Manners

Post by Eko Care »

The Benefits of Donation (Dananisamsa)

"Bhikkhus(Monks), there are these five benefits of giving(donation). What five?

(1) One is dear and agreeable to many people.
(2) Good persons resort to one.
(3) One acquires a good reputation.
(4) One is not deficient in the layperson's duties.
(5) With the breakup of the body, after death, one is reborn in a good destination, in a heavenly world.

These are the five benefits in giving(donation)."

By giving(donation), one becomes dear,
one follows the duty of the good;
the good self-controlled monks
always resort to one.

They teach one the Dhamma(path)
that dispels all suffering,
having understood which
the taintless one here attains nibbana(nirvana).
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