English | Vietnamese

 

Wednesday evening, March 7, 1973.

On Being Attentive to Food

Venerable Master Hsuan Hua

 

Well, for those who like to eat, there’s good news today. On Saturday, Guo Ming [Editor’s note: former Miss Chinatown] will make a vegetarian offering to the assembly. Buy vegetables on Friday and Mrs. Wang will cook them on Saturday. You can make room in your stomachs. Don’t eat so much food now in order to save space to fill it up on Saturday. But do not fill your stomach to capacity, because there is still another meal offering on Sunday. Mrs. Wang herself wants to cook and treat the group to a vegetarian meal. Also, Professor Yao and Professor Hsieh will be our guests on Sunday.

And so, prepare more room in your stomachs for this weekend so you can eat more food. You may wonder why I am encouraging you to eat more food. If you eat more, you will have more strength for cultivation, and you will become even more adept at entering samadhi.

But the food that we cultivators eat should not be excessively delicious. I already warned Mrs. Wang to not make the food too tasty or delicious, because I fear my disciples might stuff themselves until their stomachs burst. And then, not only would there be no merit and virtue involved, the donor would have created offenses. In Hong Kong she cooked a vegetarian meal for my three monastic disciples and they told me that the following day they had no appetite at all.

 

Timely Teachings, page 180.