There’s a new post on Access To Insight, telling the story of King Prasenadi, who had a serious eating problem. Once, after he had eaten a whole bucket of food, he went, “engorged and panting”, to visit the Buddha, who was staying nearby. The Buddha, seeing the king’s condition, uttered this teaching:
And knows when enough food has been taken,
All their afflictions become more slender
— They age more gradually, protecting their lives.
The king, recognizing the truth of the Buddha’s words, requested his attendant to memorize them and repeat them to the king at the start of each meal.
The king eventually got to the point where he was eating only a cupful of rice each day; he slimmed down and gave great credit to the Buddha for showing him the way to a better life.
I sent the story to a friend from AA, who is also working a 12-step program for her over-eating (it’s working, and she is quite trim and lovely); she wrote back:
I felt that she’d missed the point, and I told her so.
I was talking to a woman at the Brew House at lunch; she’s a painter, and working in the neighborhood. She used to hang out there, and we were remembering people from the old days. She mentioned that she’d stopped drinking 12 years ago, and I asked her how she’d done it. She said that she just decided to quit and did. I mentioned AA, and she said that she’d tried that many years ago; had stopped for 4 years in fact, but picked up again when she just got fed up with the rigidity of the program. This time around, without AA, she seems quite sane about what drinking did to her, and how much better it is to wake up clear-headed; she’s clearly not white-knuckling it, and I would bet on her continuing sobriety. The point of all that being simply that there are numerous ways of dealing with an addicted state, and no one best way. There is, to my mind, one clearly superior way of dealing with our human condition of duhkha (suffering/frustration/stress/dissatisfaction); dealing with addition is an essential component of realizing that dharma, and realizing the dharma makes any method of dealing with addiction more likely to work.
I was happy to find the story of King Prasenadi. It was just posted on the Access To Insight site yesterday. I intend to commit the Buddha’s word’s to memory and recollect them at the beginning of each meal. We’ll see how it works. Indeed we will.
So, the point of all this is that I am now on a Buddha-inspired path to lose weight. Here is how I have re-worked the teaching to fit me:
Knowing what I’ve eaten and when I’ve had enough,
My body and my troubles will lose their burdensome weight;
I will age more gracefully, with fewer ills.
I repeat that whenever I sit down to eat, or when I feel the urge to eat between meals. I hope that it works for me as well as it did for King Prasenadi. I will let you know.
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