喫茶喫飯 kissa kippan Drinking Tea, Eating Rice

喫 is to take in, of drink and of food alike. 喫茶 kissa is drinking tea, and 喫飯 kippan is eating a meal. 飯 is cooked rice, and so a meal.

Asked how the sickness of the Buddha is cured, the master Qiyun Lingzhao says: drink tea, eat rice. Baoci Guangyun gives the same answer when asked what the ultimate is.

The master Baoci Wenqin, asked what the ordinary mind is that accords with the Way, answers: drink tea, eat rice, let the hours pass; look at the water, look at the hills, and the heart is truly glad. The question echoes 平常心是道 heijōshin kore dō, the ordinary mind is the Way, which has its own history in our library.

Dōgen's chapter on everyday life ends by calling the everyday of the buddhas and patriarchs nothing but drinking tea and eating rice. Kazuaki Tanahashi's English of the chapter says rice; Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross say meals. Our history of 喫茶去 kissako tells the chapter.

A Sōtō tradition tells that Keizan, pressed after his awakening, answered: when I meet tea I drink tea; when I meet rice I eat rice. Our history of 平常心 heijōshin tells the story, and why a modern scholar reads it as built later. A book of 1909 glosses that answer with these four characters: drinking tea and eating rice is the common way of living.

Matsudaira Fumai, the daimyō of Matsue, was the great collector and tea master of his age. A biography compiled by his family's editorial office, issued in 1917, tells how he wrote his death verse. He wrote it ahead, it says, with his age left blank, and the figures six to nine on a separate sheet. On his deathbed, lying on his side, the biography says, he wrote the verse whole himself: drinking tea, eating rice: sixty-eight years; the last word: handed down, not handed down. The autograph, the biography says, was kept at 孤篷庵; another life of 1917 places it there, within Daitokuji.

In his Theory of Literature of 1907, Natsume Sōseki quotes Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. A reader who cannot enjoy its plain world, he writes, speaks as one grown used to the ease of drinking tea and eating rice, who has forgotten the great merit of the ordinary.

Our history reads it kissa kippan. In the National Diet Library's full-text index, kitcha kippan is the older, less common reading, and a 1917 life of Fumai prints kitcha beside his verse.

Our history reads the phrase this way: nothing has to be added to the day, and the everyday round, done fully, is the practice. On a scroll in a tea room, our history reads, it also carries Fumai: a life of ordinary days, and the last word left open.

An answer given by Chan masters, two of them at Fuzhou, recorded in the 祖堂集 (952) and the 景德傳燈錄 (1004); Dōgen closes the 家常 chapter of the 正法眼藏 with it (1243); 松平不昧 opened his death verse with it (1818). In English, Drinking tea, eating rice is D. T. Suzuki's (1927), the earliest known in the Internet Archive's full text and Google Books.