Mind What You Eat
Mind What You Eat
§ “We human beings have long tongues, you know. You sit around and suddenly your tongue flicks out to sea: You want to eat seafood. Then it flicks around the world: You want to eat foreign cuisine. You have to train your tongue and shrink it down to size.”
§ “When you eat, keep your mind on your breath, and contemplate why you’re eating. If you’re eating simply for the taste of the food, then what you eat can harm you.”
§ After his trip to America, one of his students asked him if he had had a chance to eat pizza while he was there. He mentioned that he had, and that it was very good. This surprised one of his students who had gone along on the trip. “You ate only two bites,” he said. “We thought you didn’t like it.”
“Two bites were enough to fill me up,” he answered. “Why would you want me to eat more?”
§ Once a woman who had been studying with him for only a short while decided to prepare some food to donate to him. Wanting to make sure it would be something he liked, she asked him straight out, “What kind of food do you like, Than Phaw?”
His answer: “Food that’s within reach.”
§ It was a Friday evening, and a group of Ajaan Fuang’s students were riding in the back of a pickup truck on their way from Bangkok to Wat Dhammasathit. Another student had sent a bushel of oranges along with them to donate to the monks at the wat, and after a while on the road one of the students decided that the oranges looked awfully good. So he came up with the following argument: “We’re Than Phaw’s children, right? And he wouldn’t want us to go hungry, right? So anyone who doesn’t have an orange isn’t a child of Than Phaw.”
Some of the group were observing the eight precepts, which forbid eating food after noon, so they were able to slip through the net. Everyone else, though, helped him or herself to the oranges, even though a few of them felt bad about eating food intended for the monks.
When they arrived at the wat, they told Ajaan Fuang what had happened, and he immediately lit into them, saying that anyone who takes food intended for monks and eats it before it has been given to the monks is going to be reborn as a hungry ghost in the next life.
This scared one woman in the group, who immediately responded, “But I only ate one section!”
Ajaan Fuang replied, “Well, if you’re going to be a hungry ghost, you might as well eat enough to fill yourself up while you can.”
§ During the Rains Retreat in 1977 a couple from the town of Rayong came out to the wat almost every evening to practice meditation. The strange thing about them was that whatever happened in the course of their meditation would tend to happen to both of them at the same time.
On one occasion they both found that they couldn’t eat, because they were overcome by a sense of the filthiness of food. This lasted for three or four days without their getting weak or hungry, so they began to wonder what stage they had reached in their meditation.
When they mentioned this to Ajaan Fuang on their next visit to the wat, he had them sit in meditation, and then told them. “Okay, contemplate food to see what it’s made of. Elements, right? And what’s your body made of? The very same elements. The elements in your body need the elements in food in order to keep going. So why get all worked up about the filthiness of food? Your body is even filthier. When the Buddha teaches us to contemplate the filthiness of food, it’s so that we can get over our delusions about it — not so that we won’t be able to eat.”
That ended their inability to eat food.
