The Universe is a Kitchen

The Universe is a Kitchen December 10, 2014

In a recent article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Natalie Gummer lays out the sacrificial cosmology embodied in early Buddhist texts. The premise is that the world is a kitchen, in which things take the forms of ingredients in a cosmic stew – saps, juices, broths, remedies, poisons (1094, in a quotation from Francis Zimmerman.

Gummer elaborates: “In one of the founding myths of the sacrifice . . . the creator deity Prajapati, conceiving the desire (kama) to ‘become manifold’ (that is, to give birth), heats himself through tapas – the ‘heat’ of sexual desire, of embryonic incubation, and of asceticism – and thereby incubates and gives birth to all creatures, including the gods. But this process leaves the creator so broken and sapped of virile strength that death threatens both Prajapati himself and the creatures he has just produced.” 

So he asks his son to reassemble his body, and this takes the form of the erection of an altar, which is constructed according to the proportions of a human being. The sacrificer is identified with the altar and the sacrifice, and thus is transformed into a “divine, immortal body” (1096). To do this, the sacrificer must himself be cooked: “This he achieves through a consecration ritual (diksa) that includes the heating of a cauldron filled with white liquid to the point of boiling over – a ritual orgasm of sorts –  as well as the sacrificer’s gestation in a ritual womb” (1096-7). The whole consecration rite aims to form the one sacrifice that is really valid, the body of the sacrificer himself, though he offers himself in a substitutionary animal or vegetable.

Thus the “associational thought” of these sutras links creation to sexuality, sacrifice to transformation into union with the gods, cooking as heating with the process of creation, with sacrifice, and with the “cooking” of new human beings through the heat of sex. These texts thus display one way in which sacrifice provides a clue to the meaning of the cosmos and of human existence.

Natalie Gummer, “Sacrificial Sutras: Mahayana Literature and the South Asian Ritual Cosmos,” JAAR 82:4 (2014) 1091-1126.


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