One meal a day in the Theravadan tradition

Bunks

Hi all

I was just interested to know if the Buddha himself advised that monks / nuns should only have one meal a day in the Pali Canon? And if so what was his reasoning behind it?

I haven't been eating much the last few days and I feel my mind is clearer and my meditation better........perhaps this is why?

karmablues

Hi Bunks, in Thailand, most Theravada monks have two meals a day up until noon time. Having one meal a day is considered as an ascetic practice (dhatunga) and is the norm mostly for the monks in the forest tradition.

In the Pali Canon, having one meal a day is said to be the practice of the arahants (fully enlightened beings). According to the Uposatha Sutta:

Bhikkhus. Ariyan disciples in this Religion reflect thus:

"'All arahants, for as long as life lasts, eat at one time only and do not partake of food in the evening. They abstain from food at the 'wrong time'."

"All of you eat at one time only and do not partake of food in the evening. You abstain from food at the 'wrong time.' For all of this day and night, in this manner, you will be known as having followed the arahants..."

The Buddha himself said he ate only one meal a day and urged his monks to do the same as it was beneficial. This is recorded in the Bhaddali Sutta as follows:

Bhikkhus, I partake a single meal for the day, and on account of it experience few afflictions, few ailments, lightness, strength, and a pleasant abiding. Come! Bhikkhus, you too partake a single meal for the day, and on account of it experience few afflictions, few ailments, lightness, strength, and a pleasant abiding.

In the Commentaries, the benefits of ascetic practices are described as follows:

Now, while a meditator is engaged in the pursuit of virtue, he should set about undertaking the ascetic practices in order to perfect those special qualities of fewness of wishes, contentment, effacement, seclusion, dispersal, energy, and modest needs, by which the virtue of the kind already described, is cleansed. For when his virtue is thus washed clean of stains by the waters of such special qualities, it will become quite purified; and his vows will succeed as well.

In Mahayana Buddhism, having one meal a day is one of the twelve ascetic practices (dhuta) and these are highly praised and recommended. eg. in the thirty-second chapter of Discourse on the Ten Stages, Nagarjuna recommends them for those who are at the second Bodhisattva stage. Sutras such as the Lotus Sutra, Ten Stages Sutra and Samadhiraja Sutra also speak highly of these ascetic practices.

For example, the Lotus Sutra:

.....
Such people as these
Are praised by the Buddhas.
They are courageous.
They are persevering.
They are known as those
Who follow the rules of good conduct
And carry out ascetic practices.
Subsequently they quickly attain
The highest Buddha path.

......

O Ajita! You should know
That all of these great Bodhisattvas
Have practiced the wisdom of the Buddha
For innumerable kalpas.
They have all been inspired by me,
And the thought of the great path
Has awakened in them.
They are my heirs.
Abiding in this world,
They always cultivated ascetic practices,
Wishing to be in quiet places.
Rejecting the clamor of the multitude,
They did not want to have much discussion.

........

newtech

Hi:

Yes, the Buddha of the Canon Pali advices to eat one meal a day in several suttas.
You can check the reason in MN-107 (Ganakamoggallana Sutta: The Discourse to Ganaka-Moggallana).

There u will see that Moderation in eating is a practice that is done previously to practice vigilance/alertness.

The reason, eating/digestion takes a lot of energy that u cant use during meditation.

Bunks

Brilliant! Thanks guys.

I just find this stuff fascinating. I have always been interested in nutrition and how food affects the body and mind.

I really can recommend eating less to people if they want to improve energy levels and having a clearer mind. I'm not sure one meal a day suffices though. But hey, who am I to tell the Buddha he's wrong?

FoibleFull

The aim of Buddhism is not to limit calories, but to change your habitual ways of thinking and reacting to life.
Food intake does not create this change.

There is also some medical concern about the effects of semi-fasting on a long-term basis, especially regarding pancreatic function. Pancreatic cancer is very high among Tibetan monks, and it's hard to say how much of that is the diet on the Himalayan plateau, and how much of it is the timing of their eating (the semi-fasting).

The human body is designed to graze .. to eat small amounts throughout the day. And since the longer you are alive in this human body, the longer you have to work towards enlightenment, it is considered a good thing to keep that body healthy and alive. Therefore, semi-fasting is not a good idea.
You will find that eating small amounts, 5 times a day, will also give you better energy levels and a clearer mind. Instead of triggering the heightened migration instinct (which is what restricted eating does .. it gets you up and moving to a location where there IS a food source), grazing keeps your blood sugars at a steady optimum level throughout the day.

karasti

Grazing only works in certain circumstances. If person is grazing on consistently high glycemic index foods, then it keeps their blood sugar rising and crashing all day long, bringing on more cravings for the same types of foods. It has to be a balance of low glycemic index foods and proteins and fats. And many, MANY people who graze overeat in calories by a lot. The average American underestimates their daily calories by almost 600 calories a day.

Smaller meals more often can be better for people. But it's not across-the-board better for everyone depending what their grazing is leading them to eat. A lot of people unfortunately graze because they read it is better for you, but they are not eating healthy food as a result, because the average person, if they get up and look for something to eat, are going to find processed foods and junk food. Whatever way you decide to take your eating lifestyle, to do it in a healthy way generally requires planning ahead, so make sure you do that whether you eat 5 meals a day, or 2.

karmablues

FoibleFull said:

The aim of Buddhism is not to limit calories, but to change your habitual ways of thinking and reacting to life.
Food intake does not create this change.

Actually our habitual way of dealing with food is to eat in order to satisfy our craving (which is not real physical hunger) and sensual desire for pleasant tastes, and this leads to overeating. However, the Buddha instructed his monks not to eat food out of greed but "simply for the survival and continuance of [the] body, for ending its afflictions [and] for the support of the chaste life". Therefore, it makes sense to limit food intake so as to discourage his monks from eating more than they need to sustain themselves. In this way, they are lead to practice self-control and to confront their craving and attachment to food so that they may change their habitual ways.

Here is an insightful excerpt from Life Is Like This by Ajahn Sumedho where he recounts his craving for sugar and sweets during his early years as a monk in Thailand:

.....I also found myself obsessed with sweets. We live a celibate life, so any kind of sexual activity is forbidden. That limits the pleasure we can have. We can also eat only one meal a day, oftentimes without any really delicious food. But we are allowed sugar and honey as medicine, if it is offered. One time, Ajahn Chah gave me a bag of sugar. I was so happy. I thought, I’ll just take a little taste. I opened the bag, scooped out a teaspoonful, and put in it my mouth. Within fifteen minutes I had consumed the whole bag. I couldn’t stop myself. Sometimes I would dream about sweets: I’d go to a pastry shop, sit down at a table and order delicious looking pastries. Just as I was about to eat one, I’d wake up.

The mind plays a lot of tricks. When you are living a life in which you can’t simply fulfill your wishes and do what you want, strange feelings and incredible forms of obsessive greed can arise over things that had never really seemed a problem before. When I had been a layman, my greed was spread over a wide range of things, but in monastic life it was all focused on sugar and sweets. Here I was, an ordained monk trying to lead a spiritual life, acting like a hungry ghost, dreaming about sugar. Another American monk even had his mother send big boxes of sweets and chocolate cakes.

Because the greed was so focused, I could easily contemplate it. Learning to reflect on these desires, these obsessions of the mind, is very important. It’s here that we often need the precepts to stop us from following our habits or whatever is easiest to do. Precepts help us to see our impulses, how we follow them, and the results. The restraint and restriction of the precepts give us a sense of stopping. With reflective awareness, we begin to notice how strong the mind’s impulses and compulsions can be. We see them as mental objects rather than as needs we must fulfill. Even though the mind sometimes screams, "I can’t take any more of this," the truth of the matter is that we can take more. Human beings have amazing powers of endurance. If we learn to endure and not just be caught in the momentum of impulsivity, then we begin to find a strength in our practice. We don’t have to be a slave to habits and impulses.

The many rules of monastic life were based on this restraint....

FoibleFull said:

There is also some medical concern about the effects of semi-fasting on a long-term basis, especially regarding pancreatic function. Pancreatic cancer is very high among Tibetan monks, and it's hard to say how much of that is the diet on the Himalayan plateau, and how much of it is the timing of their eating (the semi-fasting)...

First, I think it's important to point out that the one meal a day practice is entirely optional as with any of the other ascetic practices. If a monk feels that his body is not reacting well to such dietary regime then he can just quit it and resume to the usual two meals.

I tried looking for more information about the connection between fasting and pancreatic cancer but was not able to find any material on the internet. Do you have a source for this claim? However, what did pop up from my search was information about studies with animals which found that fasting cycles could slow the growth of breast cancer, melanoma (skin cancer), glioma tumors and human neuroblastoma. In several cases, the fasting cycles were as effective as chemotherapy. See news article at this link. However, there has not yet been a long term clinical trial to demonstrate whether humans would benefit from the same treatment.

Personally, from my own observation, the Thai forest monks seem perfectly healthy eating one meal a day. This ascetic practice has been observed by many generations of monks around the world and I'm sure if it really lead to a pattern of illness then the practice would have been abandoned especially since it's not a mandatory Vinaya rule. In fact it is not unusual to hear about monks being able to sustain themselves with extremely little food for long periods. For example, Dharma Master Sheng-yen's autobiography says that during his six years of solitary retreat, he ate "one meal a day of leaves from wild potatoes" which he planted himself. He lived to be nearly 80 years old.

FoibleFull said:

The human body is designed to graze .. to eat small amounts throughout the day. .

According to Dr. Mark Mattson, Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging:

Our ancestors consumed food much less frequently and often had to subsist on one large meal per day, and thus from an evolutionary perspective, human beings were adapted to intermittent feeding rather than to grazing.

Bunks

A quote below from Ayya Khema's excellent book Being Nobody, Going Nowhere when talking about the hindrance of sensual desire:

One of the things that the buddha advocated as an antidote to sensual desire is moderation in eating. And this is one of the reasons for accepting that precept of not eating after twelve noon. Moderation in eating doesn't mean eating nothing. It's eating enough to keep the body healthy. But this is a sensual desire that is easily gratified and one that arises again and again. For some people four, five, six times a day! If we are able to put a fence up against one of our desires, we are going to be able to put a fence up against some more. One fence can keep out many desires. So the one that's so easily gratified and arises so often is the one to start with...

@FoibleFull - while I agree that eating 5 or 6 times a day (grazing) from a health perspective is fine, I still think that I my focus is too often still spent on the sensual desire for food. For me, eating twice a day (perhaps a small snack at dinner time) is much better. Thanks for your input though.