The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
2 April 2024Fasting as a way to practice the MIDDLE WAY
“When you’re fasting, you’ll get hungry… Having to fight against the suffering from thinking about food will force you to keep practising. Your mind will calm down with meditation.”
Right after I ordained, I got a chance to really practise. I was very fortunate to have found it at the very first monastery that I went to. It was a place that was solely dedicated to Dhamma practice, not to mention the strictness. It was very intense, which helped me a lot. I thought my practice was already intense, but compared to other monks there, I realised that it wasn’t at all.
I thought that having one meal a day was already an achievement. But once I got to Wat Pa Baan Taad, I noticed that a monk sitting next to me would disappear for several days at a time. So I asked people where he had gone to— whether he had gone home? They said no and that he was fasting. Seeing that he could fast prompted me to try fasting myself. It turned out that fasting was really conducive to my practice.
When you’re fasting, you’ll get hungry. And when you’re hungry, you’ll have to resort to meditation practice to alleviate your hunger.
Your hunger is partly due to your thoughts (saṅkhāra). When your mind is prone to think about food, you’ll salivate just thinking about it—you’ll feel hungry, and so will your mind.
When your body isn’t hungry but your mind is, it is your mind that suffers. When you feel hungry, you need to start meditating right away. Once your mind is calm, your hunger will fade away.
So there are two types of hunger: physical and mental.
Your physical hunger is not as severe as your mental one.
When you’re not meditating, your mind will proliferate all these thoughts about food, which are very tormenting and make you really hungry. But when your mind is calm, that tormenting feeling just disappears. There will only be a sense of lightness—your empty stomach might make you feel slightly lethargic. But it is definitely not as tormenting as the mental craving.
Fasting is a way to make you constantly meditate. If you don’t, you’ll end up thinking about food. Fasting, therefore, benefits a meditation practice in many ways.
Before I began fasting, I would feel hungry in the evenings as my mind would think about food. After having tried fasting for a while, my mind stopped proliferating about food. Having gone three or four days without food made me realise that foregoing a supper isn’t such a big deal, and so it became very easy.
Fasting for three or four days makes just about anything tasty, including plain rice. It makes it a lot easier in terms of eating—being less picky. It also keeps you alert while meditating and not lazy, which is contrary to eating regular meals. Having eaten and feeling satisfied will make you less inclined to meditate and more inclined to lie down. So if fasting suits you, it can be really conducive to your practice.
To fast while practising will make you determined to meditate. Having to fight against the suffering from thinking about food will force you to keep practising. Your mind will calm down with meditation. If you keep doing it, you’ll become used to and good at practising. So then you can meditate without any condition.
By Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto
Youtube: Dhamma in English
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi_BnRZmNgECsJGS31F495g
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