Comments on Cook Ding

Life is Art - as beautiful as bovine slaughter.

To apply the story only to producing art is to exercise inadequate ambition. This story is not about "art" as you perceive it, but about life as art. It has nothing ot do with praise or the audience; artists' lives are often a mess because they can only "find the space between the joints" when producing their art, but not in everyday life; this is egoic art. The message here is to LIVE like the cook, not to just make art like the cook. Clearly the lord understands the story in this way.

And thus was Benihana's born.

Or as Marco Pierre White describes the butcher from whom he learned his knife skills: "I love the way he opens a piece of meat up with his hands, using his palms and fingers, the whole thing so effortless, and how he then rides the knife through, as though it's a part of his hand. Forget the knife. It's like this. These are your fingertips, right? They just glide through. That's knife discipline. That's what it's all about. And I used to stand next to this old boy--I was sixteen, and he was in his fifties--and watch him, until finally I'd learned enough that I was told I could do the turkey legs, to bone them and take out the sinews. It was my first important job, and I'd learned how to do it from hours of watching. Then I tied up the legs--to get used to working with string--massaging the meat first, to even it out. It was so difficult at the beginning, you're so uncoordinated, until it becomes natural, as if someone has programmed your fingers."

And no cod Eastern Spirituality to gum it up.