š š Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! šš
Mrs. Hanamoku and I made Christmas cookies yesterday (today is the day after Christmas 2025). As usual, I made a few big cookies of my two friends, The Eternal Fishnu and the Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet. I made a sunfish representation (ocean sunfish, mola mola) of both of them as sunfish are my “fish of the year”. (Last year was the lookdown.)
As it can happen for many people these days, my interest in sunfish began with a seemingly random YouTube short about sunfish that popped up a couple of months ago. I have been aware of them. We loved seeing them at Monterey Bay Aquarium years ago. I knew they grew very big and are oddly shaped, but I didn’t know their oddball-ness went so much deeper.
Be careful about searching for other videos of sunfish because it can get kind of macabre. They are “big and dumb”, very slow-moving, and aside from their huge size (they can grow to about a ton) they are defenseless. So there are many videos of seals, sharks, and orcas taking bit bites out of themāproportional to a human bite out of a cookie.
What apparently saves them is they are awful to eatāvery thick skin, gelatinous, rubbery … yum. I’m not sure what that means to a shark, orca, or seal, but it must be really bad for them to forsake such an easy meal. Fortunately, the sunfish often recover from these huge bites. Since they don’t really move quickly anyway, I suppose losing a big part of their body might not make that much of a difference.
I’ve heard the bites don’t bother them since supposedly they don’t feel pain. I don’t know because I’m not a sunfish. But they do seem remarkably unfazed in videos, otherwise I would think pain would have encouraged evolving defenses of some sort by now.
They get as big as they are, even being very slow moving, by eating what is not at all self-propelling and at least equally as unappetizingājellyfish, which are plentiful.
Yes, sunfish almost literally “go with the flow”, are content with simple foods (aren’t stressed by greed and desires), and react calmly to attack with an “Is that so?” attitude. Those are among the most admired traits of a Buddhist/Zen practitioner.
But that doesn’t sound right at all in isolation. For better or worse, all the wonders we experience through our Gift of Sentience are from intricate interactions of forces, Yin and Yang. With a sense of duty to all others, we diligently play our parts as uke and tori.
Sunfish are the result of a very strange evolutionary path. But it works for themāat least it did until massive net fishing came along, where theyāre caught and die almost entirely as bycatch. Theyāre still here, and they arenāt teetering on extinction the way truly coveted fish areānot like Bluefin tuna, or other high-end species such as orange roughy and groupers that are fished precisely because theyāre valuable. If ocean sunfish werenāt swept up and thrown away in industrial nets, they likely wouldnāt be in any danger at all. In a strange way, a kind of evolutionary humilityābeing large, slow, and deeply unappetizingāsaved them from being actively overfished.
However, whatever your spiritual beliefsāreligion, science, alien civilizations, atheist, or an AI yet to comeāthink about this: Forced to take a guess about intelligence superior to human intelligence, I’d go with there being intelligences “out there” that when we’re compared to it, we’re just as “big and dumb” as the sunfish seem to us. And I would imagine we’re fortunately unpalatable to it. We must be thankful we’re not a prized culinary species like bluefin tuna. We must be compassionate towards all beings. We’re blessed with the ability to see something without it first actually happening. We must refrain from plundering any resource, the gifts of God (again, whatever your belief might be), using them wisely.
I don’t say that as a “fear tactic”. I say it so that you see the incredible wonder in this world and sentient life we do have. It’s indescribably rich with wonders. We can’t see most of it because we have yet to climb to the peak of perspective. But we’re so busy being drawn into the games of others that we squander our precious time at the foothills of perspective and don’t see it. We’re all incredibly wealthy.
Please enjoy the photos of the 2025 cookies.
The next Bodhi Day (today is Dec. 26, 2025) is January 26, 2026, the Lunar Bodhi Day. To calculate Lunar Bodhi Day (8th day of the 12th lunar month) for 2026, I relied on the Chinese lunar calendar for the Yi-Si year, starting Jan 29, 2025, which includes a leap 6th month, as verified by chinesefortunecalendar.com. The 12th lunar month begins on Jan 19, 2026, in China Standard Time (UTC+8), so the 8th day is Jan 26, 2026.
Faith and Patience,
Reverend Dukkha Hanamoku
Bodhi Day 