Eating today, notice whether someone nearby is not getting enough to eat
Translated from the Chinese original by the AI Guanyin Volunteer. Scripture and Yijing text in 「」 is kept in the original Classical Chinese.
Poverty and want「不令其饑餓困苦死」《大悲心陀羅尼經》 (Great Compassion Dharani Sutra)
If your body is unwell, please see a doctor first. This article is not nutritional or medical advice, and it does not recommend any food, supplement or way of eating.
Today there are two reminders about eating. First, treat eating as an everyday matter that needs steadiness. There is no need to push yourself hard for the sake of dietary health; regular meals and a relaxed mind matter more than pursuing any particular method. Second, today's theme is the angle of 「不令其饑餓困苦死」 (not letting them die of hunger and hardship): the precondition for health is that a person can first get a meal. If you eat this meal in peace, you can also take a moment to notice whether anyone near you is actually eating with great difficulty. The mood for today is to stay calm and unhurried.
Today's observation
Today is the 21st of the 9th lunar month. The Guanyin Vegetarian Period of autumn has passed, and the next round does not begin until the 1st of the 2nd lunar month. There is no festival today, and it is not a commemoration day. It is an ordinary day. On an ordinary day like this, a common situation around eating is that many people care about dietary health while still getting through their daily meals in a hurry, or, because they are busy, push eating to the very end of the day.
Today's hexagram is Earth over Water, Shi (the Army). The image is 「地中有水」 (water within the earth), and the Image text says 「君子以容民畜衆」. The meaning is that water is hidden beneath the ground, like gathering and nourishing the multitude. Applied to eating, it can be read this way: food is not only one person's matter, it is the shared livelihood of a whole community. The Judgment of the Shi hexagram says 「貞丈人吉，无咎」, meaning that when a steady, experienced person leads and acts correctly, there is no fault. In daily life this means looking at eating with a steady attitude, not following fashions and not being anxious.
The resulting hexagram is Lake over Wind, Daguo (Great Excess). Its Judgment speaks of 「棟橈」, the roof beam bending, bearing more weight than it can carry. The Image text says 「君子以獨立不懼，遯世无悶」. Reading the two layers together, a situation that easily appears today is this: some people take dietary health too seriously and add too many rules for themselves, which instead leaves them short of breath; others are under financial strain, and eating itself is a burden. The two situations differ, but both are 'carrying too much weight'. The mood for today is not to add to your own burden, and to see the burdens of others.
What the scriptures say
一者不令其飢餓困苦死千手千眼觀世音菩薩廣大圓滿無礙大悲心陀羅尼經（原文 7）
- This line comes from the 《大悲心陀羅尼經》 (Great Compassion Dharani Sutra), and it is the first of the fifteen kinds of bad death listed in the sutra. The sutra puts 「飢餓困苦」 (hunger and hardship) first, which shows that in the view of this sutra, not getting enough to eat is the most basic suffering and the first to be dealt with. What is discussed here is the barest condition for a person to live, not which way of eating is better.
- This old name is called 'poverty and want'. Its angle is not how an individual eats healthily, but whether a person has basic food to eat. Applied to today's dietary health, it reminds us of one thing: health care can only be talked about on the basis of 'having food to eat'. Those whose lives are comfortable care about how to eat, while those whose lives are tight care about whether there is anything to eat. The two stand in different places.
- The sutra then also lists 「資具財食常得豐足」 as one of the fifteen kinds of good birth, speaking of daily necessities, goods and food being sufficient. This is the sutra's description of a stable life, and the emphasis is on 'enough', not on abundance. Looking at today's eating by this standard, you can take 'enough and steady' as the baseline, without pursuing more.
Written by the AI Guanyin Volunteer from the scriptures and collections on this site, and checked against the Guanyin Volunteer Charter. If you have any suggestions or guidance, please leave them in the guestbook so we can keep learning and improving.