By Jason Lim
My brother and I were picky eaters when we were small. Our mother would often have to resort to playing childish games to trick us into eating. One of the games was called, “This is so good that even Buddha would eat it!”
This is how it worked. Our mom would take a spoonful of otherwise ordinary white rice and pile on different condiments such as spicy sausage, pickled lotus roots, and kimchi and exclaim with delight, “This is so good that even Buddha would love it!” as she scooped it into our puckering mouths.
Or she would spread sticky rice onto a sheet of roasted seaweed and roll it up into a maki with a thin strip of fried spam, yellow Japanese radish, and, of course, kimchi dripping with its characteristic red, piquant sauce. She would then change up what she said since we won’t fall for the same thing twice: “This is so good that even Confucius would rise up from the dead!” Then she would shove the maki through our unforgiving lips.
Once safely lodged in our mouths, we would chomp as if our lives depended on it, eagerly waiting what delicious combination of rice and condiments our Mom would come up with and which dead sage she would bring up to get us to take the next mouthful.
I only tell this story because it triggered a totally random and very puzzling question recently: Would Buddha really have eaten kimchi if he was given the opportunity?
Ok, maybe that’s not a fair question since Buddha spent the majority of his adult life as a mendicant and would probably have eaten anything that people would have given him. A more accurate question would be: Would Buddha have liked kimchi?
To Koreans, kimchi is God, apple pie, and baseball all rolled into one. Sure, it’s an acquired taste. I don’t think even Korean babies are born with a native preference for the bright red, spicy cabbage seasoned with red pepper, salted shrimps, and raw oysters, just to name a few ingredients.
But by the time they are ready to go to kindergarten, Korean kids are so conditioned to kimchi as an essential part of their everyday diet that it becomes unfathomable that someone would possibly not like kimchi. So, if someone had asked me the question when I was little whether Buddha would have liked kimchi, I would have dumbstruck because it would have never occurred to me that anyone would have not liked kimchi. In fact, I wouldn’t have entertained the possibility that people actually had a choice in whether to like or dislike kimchi.
In Buddhist terms, I would have been “conditioned” to a certain predilection in taste that would color my culinary taste for the rest of my life. And not just me. This “kimchi conditioning” would apply to every Korean kid who would grow up in a culturally Korean household.
What does this mean? This would mean that to Koreans, the belief that “kimchi is good” would become a shared article of faith. In a Korean cultural context, “kimchi is good” would be an unchallenged truth because it’s a “condition” that’s shared by everyone you know. Whoever doesn’t like kimchi would be considered insane or, at least, weird. Worse, that person would be regarded as something less than a full member of the culturally “Korean” community; something less than a “real” Korean against whom disdain and abuses would be more allowable than to other Koreans.
But is this “truth” also shared by other peoples? For example, would the Japanese feel the same way about kimchi? What about the Mexicans?
Of course not. That’s because they haven’t been conditioned to the “kimchi is good” belief system. Rather, they would have been conditioned to their own set of taste-belief system, each having their own “sashimi truth” or “tortilla truth,” respectively. So, what’s true to Koreans would not be the truth to the Japanese and Mexicans.
And you can’t say which one more “true” than the other since these truths would all be equally valid, but only within their own limited cultural realms. Although I am speaking about kimchi, this concept of cultural conditioning applies to all aspects of our lives. Imagine if you are a male child born to a Taliban sympathizing family in Afghanistan; what are the chances that you will like the U.S.? Pretty low, I’ll say. How about if you are an Indian born in Kashmir region? Do you think that you will have a good opinion on Pakistan? Not too likely.
In short, where you are born and how you are raised will inevitably condition how you will feel about certain things when you encounter them. This conditioning is comprehensively called, “karmic field,” in Buddhist teachings. It seems like an obvious concept, but karmic field, if not understood properly, will lead different groups fighting against each other to prove the superior truthfulness of their respective “truths,” when they are really just protecting their own conditioning.
So would Buddha have liked kimchi? Of course not. It would have been so outside of his karmic field that he wouldn’t even have recognized it as food.
Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based consultant in organizational leadership, culture, and change management. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com and on Facebook.com/jasonlim2000.