The Essence of Faiths
Whispers from everywhere
The Spiritual Vegetarian
Huike (the 2nd Chan Master in China) was confused when Bodhidharma (his teacher) said that contemplating mind was all that was required to become enlightened. He was confused because the Buddhist scriptures say that to become enlightened you should be “constantly practising the Path and maintaining a vegetarian diet”.
Bodhidharma explained that there was no contradiction. The Buddha knew that most people have dull faculties and cannot easily understand profound meanings. Therefore he spoke about ordinary worldly things by way of representing the inner truth. He knew that if you only perform the external rituals and neglect the cultivation of inner practices you will make no real spiritual progress. But the discipline of observing the external rituals is a good way for beginners to prepare for controlling their bodies and minds.
The external rituals involved in Buddhist practice include burning incense, scattering flowers, fasting, fuelling the ever burning lamp, and walking round the outside of the temple. But these are all external rituals representing inner truths involved in contemplating mind. Here we will consider the inner meaning of the concept of “maintaining a vegetarian diet”.
You should be constantly controlling the influence of the six senses, and be constantly on guard against the effects of the three poisons - greed, anger and spiritual ignorance. Thus you will come to be in control of body and mind so that they are not randomly distracted by external events. The state of ‘evenness’ which results is what is meant by maintaining a vegetarian diet.
Those on this vegetarian diet have five kinds of ‘food’ which they can enjoy. There is the food of joy which comes from enlightened understanding; the food of contentment from harmonising the inner and outer worlds through meditation; the food of remembrance of the lives of past Buddhas so that words and thoughts match each other; the food of the vows of goodness when walking, standing, sitting, or lying down (ie all the time); the food of liberation when the mind is always pure and unstained by worldly dusts.
All religions go through phases of dilution. The later priests and ministers and ‘holy’ men become obsessed with churches, statues, uniforms, dogmas and rituals. They do not always connect properly with the deeper spiritual truths. Bodhidharma thus spoke for all religions when he said:
If you do not practice the Dharma of inner truth and just cling to external learning, then on the inside you are deluded and so give way to greed, anger and ignorance, and always commit evil deeds; on the outside you vainly manifest physical signs but how can this be called religion? You are mocking the true faith and deceiving the ordinary people.