Barugongyang
Pre-meal ChantWhere has this food come from?
My virtues are so few that I am hardly worthy to receive it.
I will take it as medicine to get rid of greed in my mind and to
maintain my physical being in order to achieve enlightenment.
Barugongyang is a formal monastic meal in which people eat from a "baru"(a wooden bowl).
Rice, soup, side dish and water are each placed in a set of four bowls in different sizes.
Pairing just right amount of food from salty side dishes to go nicely with the rice can be a bit tricky to achieve.
One must carefully consider how much of rice and side dish to serve oneself so the right amount of both foods can be eaten till the end.
The key to baru-meal is taking only what one needs.
Baru-meal is one of the most environment-friendly ways of eating because it does not produce any left-over.
Even the water that everyone rinses off their baru bowls with is clean.
There is no room for bacteria to grow because the bowls are washed immediately after each meal.
The bowls and other utensils are disinfected under the sun on a regular basis which is more sanitary than using wet towels to dry excessive water.
Buddhist monastic meals are carried out in an orderly manner.
They are an important part of monastic practice.
The meaning contained in barugongyang is well represented in the verses chanted at each stage of the meal.
After the Buddha attained awakening, two lay Buddhists offered him his first meal.
At that time, each of the four heavenly kings offered a stone bowl to the Buddha,
from which the Buddha ate and then stacked together.
Following this example, disciples of the Buddha also began using four bowls for their meals,
creating a tradition that is still practiced today.
During the formal monastic meal ceremonies at Korean Buddhist temples, a set of wooden bowls called baru are used to serve food.
The ceremony is named baru-meal or barugongyang after the bowls.
The bowls come in a set of four to five and each piece is slightly smaller than the previous one so that they can
all fit into the biggest bowl for convenient storage and portability.
Eosibaru (or Buddha-baru) is the largest bowl exclusively reserved to hold rice and the
second largest bowl is gook-baru (or Bodhisattva-baru) for soup.
They are followed by cheonsu-baru (or Sravaka-baru) along with banchan-baru (or Pratyeka-baru).
When there are five pieces of baru bowls, the smallest bowl is called shishikbaru and used to offer meals to beings in hell,
hungry ghosts and asuras, but it is seldom used.