Obesity in the Sangha

Q & A
61

No stone was thrown. Just simple awareness and transparency.

62

Monks teach maleness to Thai ‘ladyboys’

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Thanks Bhante for the info. My point is still valid though, no matter how much info. and fact you’ve shown, there’re still people venerate and donate money to false teachers. We’ve got a case in point going on right now!

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64

Thai amulet craze “unacceptable face of Buddhism”

Disciplinary & legal action against any officers involved in alleged Dhammachayo escape

Thousands of Thais obstruct search for wanted monk

Buddhist monk uses racism and rumours to spread hatred in Burma

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Nice try to divert. But you can’t escape what you said:

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Theravada Buddhism has its fair share of false and morally bankrupt teachers, but Shinran was a decent person who made Buddhism accessible to the common people of Japan, at a time when the Dharma was only available to the elite.

Until Shinran’s time, those in the lower classes were treated as outcasts by official Buddhism. He is the most venerated religious figure in Japanese history for a reason.

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“They’re just as bad as me” is a typical and expected excuse. No surprise there. Now, about Shinran, he might very well be a nice man. But that’s not the point I disputed. It was the fact that you falsely dragged Avalokitesvara into the midst of this that is in-appropriate and wrong.

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Hi Guys,

Please cool it with the arguments. Please keep in mind the guidelines for this forum, which you can find here.

Also, please keep posts in a topic related to that topic, without sidetracking the conversation.

Thank you.

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69

Thank you. Exactly.

I really don’t understand this maliciousness against Shinran Shonin and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. Even non-religious Japanese people recognize the important contributions he made to the advancement of Japanese society.

While I’ve highlighted certain bad things that certain Theravada religious figures have done, that’s only to make the point that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

I meant no disrespect to Theravada Buddhism as a whole, as a legitimate expression of Buddhism.

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To get back on topic… I think there are a few issues at stake with monastics and obesity/diabetes. I’ve come to a clearer understanding of this over vasa as we’ve had a ‘20 vasa’ Sayalay staying with us who has multiple dietary related health problems; diabetes, heart disease, anemia and blood pressure!

I also come at this from a background of spending a lot of time over the previous 5 years with some of the top minds in sports nutrition science.

  1. Genetic predisposition in SE Asia, aboriginal and islander populations is much higher than western populations.

  2. Education of monastics is well behind that of general populations. They’re generally not reading news on such topics if they are reading news at all. This is where most gen-pop get their ideas of what is ‘healthy’

  3. The food we are offered is not just high in simple carbs and fat, it’s severely lacking in protein and fibre. These are two components of a diet which can increase satiety. As someone who is aware of this, it’s still really hard to take in RDI of either.

  4. The common ‘discarding of the body’. We focus so much on the mind and are told to see the body as foul/mon-beautiful and not be attached to it and can easily ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’. Our bodies are a vehicle for our minds and after becoming quite sedentary for about a year I’ve discovered benefits to my practice of incorporating exercise into my routine. Less knee and back pain and a more energised happy mind when I sit down. Yet physical activity other than walking and ‘work’ is actively discouraged in many SE Asian monasteries. Plus, once you get into a habit of not exercising it get harder and harder to start. It’s not easy moving a sore unfit body.

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I think it is worth noting that statistics indicate that despite having lots of rice Asians are not among the most diabetic in the world.

At the top of the ranking you find a mix of countries from the Middle East and Oceania, as well Latin America.

:anjal:

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This is a very positive post, Anagarika @Pasanna . If I ran a wat (which I won’t, but if I did) I’d have a gym for the monastics, with cardio and free weights. I’d have a yoga room. I’d have some instuction for the laity on diet and nutrition, so that the meal dana was healthy, with lean proteins and veggies. The Buddha taught with wisdom and compassion, and so in the modern age, it does not seem to me unseemly for modern monastics to care for themsleves and to have the resources that promote health, mental acuity, and long life.

I seem to recall that at Abhayagiri, LP Pasanno allows monastics to practice yoga in their kutis, and to do other calisthenics. Because he has a hip injury (from an injury in Thailand, as I recall), he does stretching and yoga, too. The food at Abhayagiri ( I know, as I was one of the visiting anagarikas there doing the cutting, chopping and cooking one weekend) is nutrition focused, beyond what I ever saw in a Thai wat or the Thai wats in the US ( a lot of carbs, cakes, etc).

I also recall in Thailand one of the farang monks built a set of weights ( a curling bar) with a pole and two cinder blocks that he kept hidden outside his kuti. This kept him fit, and kept his mind fit as well, he said, as he exercised daily. It seemed odd to me that an activity that promotes physcial and mental fitness would be considered verboten , and I have this gut sense that the Buddha would not be offended by monastics diving deep into activities that ground the mind and body, and promote fitness. Wisdom takes on many elements, to to allow our valuaed monastics to suffer with poor nutrition and lack of fitness strikes me as contrary to the ethos the Buddha promoted.

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I’m not sure about a full blown gym! But then I gym’d to the extreme as a lay-person, competing in bodybuilding and powerlifting.

The level of fitness for monastics could be easily met by walking, body weight exercise and yoga imho.

My experience in the Australian forest monastics is that exercise in your own kuti is fine. One of the nuns even ran Qi gung for a while! In my kuti I have a yoga mat and 2 8kg kettle bells. It’s more than adequate as ‘medicinal requisites’.
I remember reading a while back that Aj Sumedho had a rowing machine and that he was very big on yoga.

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Awesome!

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This conversation about gym reminds me of what we find in the Vinaya Pitaka:

And Dabba assigned lodgings to the monks according to their character.
He assigned lodgings in the same place to those monks who were discourse experts, thinking, “They’ll recite the discourses together.”
And he did likewise for the experts on monastic law, thinking, “They’ll deliberate on the monastic law;”
for the teachers, thinking, “They’ll discuss the Teaching;”
for the meditators, thinking, “They won’t disturb each other;”
and for the gossipers and the body-builders, thinking, “
In this way even these venerables will be happy.”
– Analysis of SS#8

I take the above as confirmation that body building in the Sangha can be traced back to the earliest days! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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He woke up at 2am, doing rowing machine for 1 hour. Great whole body exercise that pumps blood into every part of your body, elevates your heart rate, sweat out some toxins, Primes the body for the piti-sukha juice for the 2 hour sit that follows.

People shouldn’t wait for health problems to start doing this though. Whatever your health condition, your sitting meditation is going to be better with regular exercise.

I remember a time when Ajahn Sumedho was hav-
ing heart problems. He was close to sixty and had been
a monk for thirty years. He was strapped up to a gad-
get so that his heart rate could be recorded for a week
or so. When the doctors reviewed the results of the test,
they noticed a pattern that they found bewildering. At the same time every night, Ajahn Sumedho’s heart rate
went up extremely quickly and stayed fast for about an
hour, before returning to normal. It turned out that he
was getting up at two in the morning to exercise for an
hour on his rowing machine. He then showered and sat in meditation for two hours. This is another wonderful example of Ajahn Sumedho’s commitment to training.

https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/dont-hold-back

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If monks eat only one meal a day, how do they get overweight? Are they eating massive amounts of fattening foods during those meals? Or does eating only one meal a day slow down their metabolism so they gain weight?

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It’s not the meal frequency that’s causing the metabolic problems. I can find you journal articles on this. For now I will illustrate it simply with Eric Helms’ nutrition priority pyramid. He has detail videos explaining this, referenced with academic papers. IMG_0725

The problem is that their activity is so low. If you find a bmr calculator you can see that a 36 yr old female who is 171cm and 70kg (me) only needs 1450ish calories to do nothing and sustain the body at this weight. There is some movement of course. However, when we are meditating we are slowing our heart-rate and reducing the fuel requirements of our body. Conclusion: meditation is unhealthy :wink:

It’s not hard to eat 1400 calories in one sitting if there’s curry, rice and dessert. Very easy to eat that if you have a 400 calorie breakfast. Ie milk tea, porridge, fruit and nuts. Then you only have 1000 calories for your main meal.

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My understanding is that a sign of progress in the path is the sort of understanding and awareness of one’s body in which food intake is callibrated to what the body really needs.

The issue driving obesity may be then that most are not there yet and the lay supporters just throw too much of food requisites on those individuals.

Not every monastic community achieves a proper system to dealing with the surplus food and therefore pressure to overeat builds up.

I noticed that at the forest hermitage in Thailand I usually visit the abbot assigned a lay supporter to deal with the daily surplus of untouched food donations, he will collect it and bring it back to the village (what works great as everyone is invited to partake in that food in an indiscriminate way). The monks in turn are encouraged to follow the suttas and eat only up to when they are mouthfuls from feeling full. Their leftovers are then given to the dogs that the villagers themselves drop at the hermitage or discarded in the ocean ( fishes and crabs love it!).

Here in Australia I noticed that Ajahn Brahm and his monastic community make sure whatever is untouched is given back straight away and they don’t seem to eat more than they should as none of them are critically overweight.

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I don’t think this is common, and suspect that without some nutrition eduction somewhat impossible. Satiety and energy balance is a very complex thing. If you are active it’s easy to overeat. If you are tired, it’s easy to over eat. If you are thirsty you can overeat. If you have unpleasant feelings of hunger it might not indicate insufficient calories or even macronutrients.

I spent years being hyper-aware of my nutrition intake and energy balance. The thing I learn through Buddhism and bodybuilding (tnx for the EBT above!) was that desire and aversion, related to food arise. We can believe them to be really real and justify them a lot easier than other desires. It’s very strongly tied to our sense of self.

An example that happened recently is that someone one more than 8 precepts told me they had a strong craving for vegetables in the evening. They followed through with that craving because ‘it’s healthy’ and ‘what the body needed’. This puzzled me. I’m pretty certain their body could’ve held out until dawn for some veg! This is the delusion of believing that the body knows what it needs.

As for weight gain in the WA sangha, I think those that are gaining weight are happily doing so! This is probably the case in Sanghas all over the world. Balancing receiving food with gratitude and not over consuming calories is hard. :slight_smile:

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