"All beings subsist on nutriment" — this, according to the Buddha, is the one single fact about life that, above all, deserves to be remembered, contemplated and understood.[1] If understood widely and deeply enough, this saying of the Buddha reveals indeed a truth that leads to the root of all existence and also to its uprooting. Here, too, the Buddha proved to be one who "saw to the root of things" (muula-dassaavii).[2] Hence, it was thought useful to collect his utterances on the subject of nutriment (aahaara), together with the instructive explanations by the teachers of old, the commentators of the Paali scriptures.

The laws of nutriment govern both biological and mental life, and this fact was expressed by the Buddha when speaking of four kinds of nutriment: edible food, sense-impressions, volitions, and consciousness. It is hunger that stands behind the entire process of nutrition, wielding its whip relentlessly. The body, from birth to death, craves ceaselessly for material food; and mind hungers as eagerly for its own kind of nourishment, for ever new sense-impressions and for an ever expanding universe of ideas.

Craving (ta.nhaa) is the principal condition of any "in-take" or "up-take" (upaadaana),[3] that is, of nutriment in its widest sense. This is the first factor common to all types of nutriment, be they physical or mental.

The second common factor is the process of the assimilation of food. In the process of eating and digesting, what was external becomes absorbed in the internal; what was foreign matter becomes "one's own" and is identified with one's personality. A German proverb says: "Der Mensch ist, was er isst" — "Man is what he eats." And this applies as well to mental nourishment. Our mind also feeds on "external" material: on sense-impressions and variegated experiences; on the contents of the store-house of knowledge accumulated by the race; and on the precipitate derived from all these sources. Also our memories, when they become objects of mind, are as "external" to the present thought-moment as the ideas read in a book. What cannot be absorbed by the system is discarded, and thus, in the body as well as in the mind, there is a constant process of grasping and rejecting, assimilating and dissimilating, identifying with oneself and alienating. When we look closely at this process of nutrition, physical and mental, we shall notice that it is not only the eater who consumes the food, but, in the course of assimilation, also the food devours the eater. There is thus mutual absorption between them. We know how much people can be changed (for better or worse) by ideas they have absorbed and which finally have absorbed and consumed them.

These laws governing nutriment (physical and mental) are indeed sufficient to convince a thoughtful observer how illusory the conception of an abiding self or substance is. This alone should be enough to vindicate the Anattaa doctrine, the Buddha's deeply revolutionizing teaching of not-self.

Individualized life is, as Paul Dahlke says, "neither a metaphysical 'I'-identity (pure spirit, pure subject, according to the soul-theory of the religions) nor a mere physical process (pure body, pure object, according to scientific materialism), but a nutrimental process and as such it is neither something which is in and by itself, nor something caused by another, but something that is maintaining itself: and all these so-called higher faculties of thinking and feeling are different forms of eating, of maintaining oneself."

But in addition to the vindication of the Anattaa doctrine (not-self), nutriment is likewise a convincing teacher of the two other characteristics of life, Impermanence and Suffering.

Change, or Impermanence (anicca), is at the very root of the nutritive process which cries for constant replenishment of the food consumed. The bottomless gaping hole has to be filled again and again as long as the being lives. And it is no different with our mental hunger that craves for change and variety.

This repetitive monotony of the process of nutrition kept going by the urge to preserve life — this is enough to reveal the dukkha-nature of life, the tiresomeness of the tedious round of eating and being hungry again. Hence a medieval Jewish sage was moved to say, "I am fed up with being hungry again and again, and I hunger after final satiety."[4]

This is the suffering inherent in the very function of eating, though mostly hidden by the habituation to this most elementary feature of routine life. The concrete suffering and pain involved in the search for food and its acquisition, is obvious enough to all and this misery was, is and will be life's constant companion. There is the mute suffering in the animal world where "devouring each other is the law" (and man joining in it by even rearing animals for food); we also know of primitive man's fight for pasture land (basically the same as modern man's wars for "world markets"); we also know of the pangs of hunger among the poor, and of starving children the world over. And though the resources for feeding humanity have grown considerably in our days, man still has not controlled famine, even where it would be in his power to do so; and all progress in the field of food-production threatens to be dwarfed by the rapid growth of world population. This problem looms large on the horizon of present-day humanity and may well become desperate if the disparity between available food and increasing population reaches a critical point. Should that critical point be reached, we do not know what dire consequences may follow from that situation, unless a united mankind can solve the problem by concerted action and peaceful means. Hence, also for mankind's future, what the Dhamma teachers of old said remains true: that the search for food (aahaara-pariye.t.thi) is an ever-present source of suffering (vattamaana dukkha) and as such it can stir man's sense of urgency (sa.mvega) when he considers, in the light of "nutriment," man's own nature, his incessant needs and his situation in the world.

This contemplation of the dukkha-aspect of nutriment leads us to a formulation of the Four Noble Truths in terms of nutriment, as given in the last text (§ 7) of this anthology. The four nutriments of life stand for the first truth of Ill; the craving for the four nutriments is the origin of Ill, the second Truth; the stopping of that craving is the cessation of the continued process of grasping for material and mental food, which is the end of Ill, the third Truth; and the Noble Eightfold Path is the way to that cessation.

It is because the process of nutrition (material and mental) demonstrates the conditioned nature of all existence that we have found it to cover those salient features of the Dhamma — the three signata (impermanence, suffering and not-self) and the Four Truths.

We shall now consider each of the four kinds of nutriments singly.

Simile: A couple, foodless in the midst of a desert, eat their little child, to enable them to reach their destination.

Just like the husband and wife in the Buddha's simile, mankind ever since it emerged on this planet, has traversed the desert of life where food is the most urgent concern. And again, as in that story, the stilling of man's hunger has often been a heart-rending business — if not for the sometimes quite callous "eater," then for his prey and for a sensitive observer. Often, in his search for food, man has destroyed what is commonly dearest to him, be it relatives and friends or the ideals of his youth. True, this is only one aspect of life: life is not "desert" entire; it has a goodly number of oases where travelers can rest and enjoy themselves to such an extent that they are prone to forget the surrounding desert, which often encroaches on the tiny oasis and buries it.

The couple in the Buddha's story, coming near starvation, eat their own beloved child. It is a gruesome and seemingly fantastic story indeed. But knowing from the records of history that, at times of famine, war or shipwreck, men did resort to cannibalism, we have to admit that what our story tells may have substantially happened ever so often, in one way or another. In his incessant search for food, or for better food or for control of food resources, how often has man killed, cruelly crushed or exploited his fellow creatures, even those who are close to him by common blood or common race! And is there not close kinship between all that lives? These last words are not merely a sentimental phrase (as which they are mostly used); but they are also a hard and cruel fact. Are we not akin to the voracious greed, the cruel rage and the destructive stupidity, which we encounter in life and of which we become victim or perpetrator in the struggle for food or power? If we were not akin to it, could we encounter it, in one way or another? For an unfathomable time, caught in the ever-turning Wheel of Life, we have been everything: the prey and the devourer of all, parent and child of all. This we should consider when contemplating the nutriment of edible food and the Buddha's simile for it.

If we wish to eat and live, we have to kill or tacitly accept that others do the killing for us. When speaking of the latter, we do not refer merely to the butcher or the fisherman. Also for the strict vegetarian's sake, living beings have to die under the farmer's plowshare, and his lettuce and other vegetables have to be kept free of snails and other "pests," at the expense of these living beings who, like ourselves, are in search of food. A growing population's need for more arable land deprives animals of their living space and, in the course of history, has eliminated many a species. It is a world of killing in which we live and have a part. We should face this horrible fact and remain aware of it in our Reflection on Edible Food. It will stir us to effort for getting out of this murderous world by the ending of craving for the four nutriments.

In one short lifetime, how many trainloads of food have passed in and out of our puny body! How many people have had to labor in the production, preparation, and distribution of that food, for keeping unbroken the "traffic line" that runs straight through our body! It is a grotesque picture if we visualize it.

There is yet another aspect of that "life-giving" function of eating. To illustrate it, let us think of a silo, or a storehouse or food bag: after it has been emptied, a few grains or other tiny morsels of food will mostly remain in it. Similarly there will always be left some tiny remnants of food in our body that are neither assimilated nor expelled but remain and putrefy. Some physiologists say that it is this putrefaction of residual food that ultimately brings about the aging and death of the organism if there are no other causes. If they are right, then food is not only life-giving but also death-bestowing, and it appears that we have in this life of ours the choice between death by starvation or by putrefaction. "The food devours the eater!" This close connection between nutriment and death is very poignantly expressed in Greek myth, according to which Demeter is the Goddess of corn (that is, food) and of death as well. Bachofen, that great explorer and interpreter of classic myth, has expressed the significance of it very succinctly: "She feeds man as a prey to herself."

People, as far as they give any thought to the humdrum act of eating, have taken very different attitudes towards food. Some who became tired of the dull routine of eating dull food, have made a "fine art" of it and became gourmands. To them the Buddha says: "All nutriment is miserable, even divine food." Others, keenly aware of the importance of food for good health, have devised various ideas about "pure food": we have here the dietetic rules of several religions, and the belief of ancient and modern sects in man's "purification by nutriment" (aahaara-parisuddhi), of which already the Buddha made mention (adversely, of course), down to our own days with their ersatz religions of numerous food-reformers. Others, again, have tried to solve the problem of the body's dependence on food by reducing nourishment below sustenance level and by long periods of fasting. This harsh and futile method of self-mortification the Buddha, too, had tried out and rejected before his Enlightenment, and had vividly described his experience in the Discourse on the Noble Quest (Ariya-pariyesana Sutta). Also later on, the Buddha never recommended periods of fasting beyond the abstention from solid food after noon enjoined upon bhikkhus, and in the periodic observance of the Eight or Ten Precepts. What the Buddha, as a teacher of the Middle Way, advised was moderation in eating, non-attachment to the taste of food, and wise reflection on nutriment.

Simile: A skinned cow, wherever she stands, will be ceaselessly attacked by the insects and other creatures living in the vicinity.

Like a skinned cow, man is helplessly exposed to the constant excitation and irritation of the sense-impressions, crowding upon him from all sides, through all six senses.

The Paali word phassa, rendered here by sense-impression, means literally "touch" or "contact." But it is not a physical impact that is meant here, but a mental contact with the objects of all six senses, including the mind. Sense-impression, together with attention (manasikaara), is the mind's first and simplest response to the stimulus exercised by the world of material objects and ideas. According to Buddhist psychology, sense-impression is a constituent factor in each and every state of mind, the lowest and the highest, occurring also in dream and in subliminal states of consciousness.

Sense-impression is a basic nutriment, that is a sustaining condition of life, and what is nourished or conditioned by it are feelings or sensations (vedanaa) which are living on that multitude of constantly occurring sense-impressions and assimilating them as pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent. This relationship has also a place in the formula of Dependent Origination: "Conditioned by sense-impression is feeling (phassa-paccayaa vedanaa)." As long as there is craving (ta.nhaa) for sense-impressions which arises from unguarded feelings (vedanaa-paccayaa ta.nhaa), there will be an unlimited supply of that foodstuff to be digested by feeling. In an unending stream and in rapid alternation, forms, sounds, smells, flavors, bodily impacts, and ideas impinge upon us as long as we live. It is the poignant awareness of that constant bombardment by sense-impressions that induced the Buddha to choose for the sense-impressions the simile of a skinned cow whose raw flesh is the target of swarms of insects that cause intensely painful feelings to the animal. According to the Buddha, any type of feeling is bound to cause suffering and conflict in him who has not yet freed himself from attachment. Painful feeling is suffering in itself; pleasant feeling brings suffering through its transience and its unsatisfying and unsatisfactory nature; worldly indifferent feeling produces suffering through the dullness and boredom involved in it. It is sense-impression that is the constant feeder of these feelings.

A monk of old, yearning to see still more vividly the burning and irritating nature of sense-impressions, was moved to exclaim:

When shall I with calm endowed Wisely see as caught in raging blaze The countless forms, sounds, scents, and tastes, And contacts and mental things? Theragatha v. 1099 (Taalapu.ta)[5]

Though man is amply aware of the host of impressions that cause painful sensations in him, yet he is quite willing to pay that price for his pleasurable experiences, nay, for almost any sort of "experiencing" which he prefers to no sensation at all, unless the pain it causes comes too close to tolerance level. What is at the psychological root of this situation is man's hunger for ever new experiences. If that hunger is not temporarily but regularly satisfied, it leaves him empty, starved and helpless. From that comes man's wish for change and novelty, and his longing for a close contact with life that for its own sake becomes a habituation and makes solitude unbearable for most men.

The nutriment sense-impression feeds the "World as Enjoyment" or the "World as Enjoyment of Experience." It feeds the craving for existence (bhava-ta.nhaa). This habitual craving can be broken only if one ceases to identify oneself with the stream of impressions and learns to stand back as an observer wherever one can dispense with active response. Then feeling that is nourished by sense-impression will cease to turn into craving, and the Dependent Origination of suffering has been severed at this point.[6]

Volitional thought here means chiefly kamma — i.e., rebirth-producing and life-affirming action — and the Buddha has compared it with a man dragged by two others towards and into a pit of glowing embers.

The two dragging forces are man's kammic actions, good (but still deluded) and evil. It is our kammic proclivities, our life-affirming volitions, our plans and ambitions, that drag us irresistibly to that deep pit of sa.msaara with its glowing embers of intense suffering. Hence it was said that volitional thought, in the sense of kamma, is the nutriment for rebirth on the three planes of existence.

The nutriment volitional thought manifests itself in man's incessant urge to plan and to aspire, to struggle and conquer, to build and to destroy, to do and to undo, to invent and to discover, to form and to transform, to organize and to create. This urge has sent man into the depth of the ocean and into the vastness of space. It has made him the most vicious of predatory animals and also enabled him to reach the lofty heights of a genius of creative art and thought.

The restlessness that is at the root of all that lust for activity and of the creative urge, is the constant hunger for all four nutriments of life and for a variety of them on different levels of coarseness and sublimity. It is volitional thought that has to go foraging to provide man with the other kinds of nutriment he craves for. It is an incessant task, yielding a conquest of but short duration, and one that again and again ends in defeat.

In volitional thought, the world appears as will and power, and as creative force. Nourished by this powerful nutriment, the process of world-building and world-destruction will go on until sa.msaara is seen in its true nature as a pit of glowing embers, the bottomless depth of which cannot be filled by our plunging into it again and again in whatever guise we assume in our migrations.

The nutriment consciousness has been compared with the punishment of a criminal who thrice daily is pierced with three hundred spears.

The sharp shafts of conscious awareness, the punitive results of past cravings and delusions, inflicted on us at all times of the day, pierce our protective skin and lay us open to the impact of the world of objects.

This shockingly harsh image of consciousness as a punishment reminds us of one of Franz Kafka's main motifs so often appearing in his work — the hidden, unknown, intangible, and seemingly quite amoral guilt of man inherent in his very existence, for which he is inscrutably punished and which punishment, in the depth of his being, he accepts as just (see, e.g., The Trial, The Castle, and In the Penal Colony).

The desire for conscious awareness has the same character as that for sense impressions: the craving to be alive, to feel alive in the constant encounter with the world of objects present to consciousness (or present within consciousness — as the idealists prefer to say).

But there is still more meaning than that to be derived from the description of consciousness as a nutriment if we consider that it is explained primarily as rebirth consciousness. This rebirth consciousness, which is a single moment's occurrence, feeds (or conditions) the mind-body process (naama-ruupa) of the present existence; and it is the arising of such moments of rebirth consciousness at the beginning of each successive life that continues the interminable chain of future births, deaths and sufferings. Growth or proliferation is a characteristic feature of all consciousness. Each rebirth consciousness, though its direct link is with the life immediately preceding it, has behind it the inexhaustible store-house of the beginningless past, a vast granary of potential seeds of life. Fed from the dark unfathomable recesses of the past, lurks consciousness, an octopus with not eight but a thousand arms, ready to grasp and take hold wherever it finds a chance, and there to procreate a fresh breed of beings, each with its own set of grasping tentacles.

The writer once visited large subterranean caverns which had long passages and high-roofed temple-like halls with huge stalactites and stalagmites resembling the lofty columns of a cathedral. For the convenience of the numerous visitors to the caverns, electric light was installed, and where the bulbs were low enough one could see around them a small spread of lichen, the only trace of organic life amidst the barren rocks. Life springs up wherever it gets the slightest chance through favoring conditions like warmth, moisture, and light. In the spectator's mind this little harmless proliferation of primitive plant life assumed the menacing features of a beast of prey that, having lurked long under the cover of darkness, at last got the chance for its hungry leap.

Life is always in readiness to spring up, and its most prolific manifestation is consciousness. Seen from our limited viewpoint, it is consciousness that contributes most to the "expanding universe" of sa.msaara. Hence the Enlightened One warned: "Do not be an augmenter of worlds!" (Dhp v. 167). It is by our insatiable and greedy feeding on consciousness and the other nutriments that the world "grows"; and the potentialities for its growth are endless. Also the end of the world of consciousness cannot be reached by walking. Seen from that world-wide perspective, consciousness appears as the feeder and procreator of innumerable beings all of whom undergo that daily ordeal of life's piercing spears. Such a visualization of the reach of consciousness will increasingly lead to revulsion, to turning-away and dispassion, undeceived by the magician's enchanting illusions with which the aggregate consciousness was compared by the Buddha.

Looking back to the Buddha's similes for the four nutriments, we are struck by the fact that all four evoke pictures of extreme suffering and danger. They depict quite unusual situations of greatest agony. Considering the fact that the daily process of nutrition, physical and mental, is such a very humdrum function in life, those extraordinary similes are very surprising and even deeply disturbing. And they obviously were meant to be disquieting. They are meant to break through the unthinking complacency in which these so common functions of life are performed and viewed: eating, perceiving, willing, and cognizing.

The contemplations on the four nutriments, as presented in these pages, cut at the very roots of the attachment to life. To pursue these contemplations radically and methodically will be a grave step, advisable only for those who are determined to strive for the final cessation of craving and, therefore, are willing to face all consequences which that path of practice may bring for the direction of their present life and thought.

But apart from such full commitment, also a less radical pursuit but serious and repeated thought given to this teaching of the four nutriments will be beneficial to any earnest follower of the Buddha. To those who feel it premature for themselves to aim straight at the cessation of craving, the Dhamma has enough teachings that will soothe the wounds received in the battle of life, and will encourage and help a steady progress on the Path. Though gentle guidance will often be welcome amidst the harshness of life, yet when there is only such gentleness and when, for a while, the winds of fate blow softly and pleasantly, there will be the danger that man settles to a comfortable routine and forgets his precarious situation in this world, which the Buddha so often described. Hence there is the need that man, and especially a Buddhist, should face now and again such stern teachings as those on the nutriments, which will keep him alert and will strengthen his mental fiber so that he can fearlessly meet the unveiled truth about the world in which he lives.

The contemplation on the four nutriments of life can do this for him. From that contemplation, man can learn "not to recoil from the real and not to be carried away by the unreal." He will learn from it that it is suffering which is nourished and pampered by the four nutriments. He will more deeply understand that

Only suffering arises where anything arises and only suffering ceases where anything ceases.

And another word of the Master will gain fresh significance and increasing weight: