The Knot and the Bowl: What I Learned About Evaluation at the Dragon Gate
The first morning I struggled with the knot.
The hall was a mix. Some people had decades of practice behind them: one smooth pull and the cloth fell away, bowls nested inside like the whole thing had been waiting to open. Others, like me, were new to oryoki. I’d done it exactly once before. So while the veterans unwrapped their sets in one unhurried motion, the rest of us quietly fought our napkins, stealing glances down the row to see what came next.
I returned Sunday from a sesshin at Ryumonji Zen Monastery, the Dragon Gate Temple, tucked into the driftless hills of northeast Iowa. I went with my sangha, the community from my local Zen Center. And I’ve been thinking about that knot ever since.
This is the first post in a four-part series about what I learned from the Dragon Gate, four things I carried home that keep speaking to my work as an evaluator: the oryoki lesson, lineage, the shuso ceremony, and sitting practice itself. We start with the meal. Food. The nourishment that makes everything else possible.
What a sesshin is
Sesshin means something like “gathering the mind.” It’s an intensive silent retreat, days built around zazen, sitting meditation, in a steady rhythm: forty minutes of sitting, ten minutes of kinhin (walking meditation), then forty minutes more, several rounds a day, woven between work practice, services, and formal meals. Over the weekend it added up to about eight hours of zazen. Eight hours of doing, by any productive measure, absolutely nothing.
Ryumonji was founded by Rev. Shoken Winecoff, a dharma heir of Dainin Katagiri Roshi, one of the Japanese teachers who brought Soto Zen to America and the founding abbot of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. The monastery runs on forms that have been handed down for centuries. Wake to the bell. Sit. Walk. Sit. Eat. Work. Sit.
Here’s what I keep relearning: practices like zazen and oryoki don’t stay on the cushion. They train me to be mindful in every other corner of my life, including my work. By day I’m the data governance lead at the Department of Children, Youth and Families, working with early childhood data. In the evenings I’m building Anthralytic, software to make social impact work accessible to resource-constrained organizations. I spend my weeks thinking about how information moves between systems, who touches it, and what care it deserves. It turns out a monastery meal has a lot to say about that.
What oryoki is
Oryoki means, roughly, “just the right amount.” It’s the formal meal practice of Zen monasteries: a set of nested bowls wrapped in a cloth, with utensils and napkin folded inside in a precise way. Meals are taken in silence, in the meditation hall, with chanting, in unison, according to a choreography that covers everything: how the bowls are opened, the order food is served in, how you signal enough, how the bowls are cleaned, and how the whole set is folded and tied back into that knot.
The cleaning deserves its own moment. At the end of the meal, hot water is poured into your bowl. You wash the bowl, and then you drink the water. This sounds strange until you understand why: nothing is wasted. The meal ends the way it began, with just the right amount. Every grain, every trace, is received rather than thrown away. The last of the water is collected and offered to the hungry spirits, so that even what you don’t take in becomes a gift.
It is, on paper, just eating.
What I love about it is that it makes the connections visible. Sitting there with my bowls, I thought about everything that arrived with the food: the fields it grew in, the hands that harvested it, the cooks in the kitchen who woke before the rest of us, the recipes honed over decades of monastery practice, the people eating beside me in the hall, the meaning carried in the bowls themselves. The meal chants say this out loud. Before eating, we chant the Five Contemplations, which begin:
We reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us.
Nothing in the bowl is separate from anything else. The chants reach backward to the ancestors and the labor that brought the meal, hold the present company in the hall, and then dedicate the meal forward to all beings. Past, present, future, all at one meal.
If you’ve read my work on evaluation from a Buddhist lens, you’ll recognize this as interbeing. But sitting in the meal hall, it isn’t a concept. It’s breakfast.
The transfer bowl
Here’s where my evaluator brain woke up.
The first bowl, the largest one, is the Buddha bowl. When the servers come down the row, the grain is received there first, and then you transfer it into the second bowl before you take it in.
That’s data work. That’s exactly data work.
Data almost never arrives ready. It comes to us in whatever vessel it was collected in: an intake form, an administrative system, a survey built for someone else’s question. Before anyone can actually take it in, it has to be transferred, carefully, into another bowl. Cleaned, restructured, matched, made usable. In my governance work, most of what I do is tend that transfer from a relational lens. The care you bring to the pouring, not spilling, not mixing bowls, honoring what the first vessel held, is the whole practice. The bowl the data arrives in deserves respect, because people filled it. Their lives are in that bowl.
Everyone waits
The other thing oryoki taught me: no one eats until everyone is served.
The servers move down the rows, you receive your food, and then you sit with your full bowls and wait. When seconds come around, everyone stops eating, mid-bite if necessary, and waits again until every person has been served. Then the meal resumes, together.
It’s a beautiful acknowledgment of each other. The meal is not mine; it’s ours. And it made me think about how rarely evaluation works this way. We serve findings to the funder first and everyone else eats later, if at all. The community that filled the bowls is often the last to be served, or never served. What would it mean to build evaluation where nobody eats until everyone is served, where the pacing itself says we are doing this together? In my Buddhist evaluation work I’ve argued that the knowing is distributed, so participation isn’t a courtesy, it’s an epistemological requirement. Oryoki builds that requirement into the rhythm of the meal. You cannot rush ahead alone. The form won’t let you.
Easy, then hard, then easy
And then there’s the knot.
I’ve noticed this pattern in almost everything worth learning. At first glance, oryoki looks simple. It’s eating, and you’ve been eating your whole life. Then you actually try it, and it’s overwhelming: the fold of the cloth, the order of the bowls, which chant comes when, how to clean, how to re-tie the set so it’s ready for the next meal. You are certain you will never get it. And then, with repetition, it becomes simple again. A different simple, one that has the whole choreography inside it.
Evaluation is the same shape. From the outside it looks like common sense: did the program work? Then you get inside and it’s all knots: designs, frameworks, stakeholders, data transfers, competing definitions of “work.” Stay with it long enough, through enough repetitions, and it becomes simple again. Not because the complexity went away, but because your hands learned it. Mountains become mountains again.
By the last meal of sesshin, the knot fell open. I hadn’t gotten smarter. I had just practiced.
What’s coming
That’s the oryoki lesson, one of four. In the coming weeks I want to sit with the other three. Lineage: we chanted ours at Ryumonji, every name in the line, and it has me thinking about our lineage as evaluators, all the people whose work we build on whether we name them or not. The shuso ceremony: I got to witness the head student, who had spent six months living with a single koan, stand and answer questions about it from the whole community. Six months with one story. What would it mean to sit with our questions that long? And sitting practice itself: eight hours on a cushion, and everything that comes up in waves when you finally stop moving.
For now, I’m back at my desk, untying knots of a different kind. But I’m trying to bring the meal hall with me: receive what arrives with gratitude, pour the transfer carefully, and don’t start eating until everyone is served.
Glad you’re here at the table.
Anthralytic builds software that makes social impact work accessible to organizations without data teams or big budgets.
