Even eating one meal a day is not much. I’m eating one meal because I’m too busy. Not just because of practicing simplicity, but because I’m also too busy. If I keep eating three, four times a day, snacks and all that as well, and then am tired and go to sleep, how would I have time to do all of this inside and outside work? I truly don’t have time to sometimes meditate in one posture or another posture at the time to fortify my work and help the world. I do the best I can, but my body is not made of cement. Even eating one meal a day is not a big deal.
So if you guys really want to eat once a day, don’t be proud of it. There’s nothing to it. I don’t even drink juice after the one meal. I just eat one meal, that’s it. And if I’m thirsty, I just drink water, that’s all. And then the rest is just work, work, work – inside, outside; meditating, or Supreme Master Television.
If you keep cooking all the time alone for yourself, then you have to wash and you have to clean the floor anytime. It’s a lot of work. And I don’t take a bath or shower a lot – sometimes once a month, or once every one month-and-a-half. It depends on if I have water nearby or not; depends on where I live. Sometimes I live in some area in the mountain. Water is not available all the time; have to use rainwater. So I have to be frugal with water as well. It depends on where I go – where I have to go, chasing my spiritual outlets to be stronger spiritually, so that I can do my work better, and also stay alive; be strong so that I can survive. Eating once a day, it’s doable. I do it, so I know it’s doable. And you don’t even have to be a monk to do that.
There was one lady, she runs to take these prizes for her animal-people. She rescued many animal-people. She’s in England. And when she runs, she normally has trouble with her knee already, but because she loves her animal-people so much, she still continues running, and she took the prize. She didn’t rest and runs in a very, very gruesome kind of landscape. It’s not like you’re running on the asphalt kind of street or even on the dirt road. No, no, no. They climb hills, mountains, deserts and whatever – very rough terrain. Even for normal people it was very, very challenging, not to talk about a woman who already has some injury in her knee. We have aired her in a Shining World Award program. And she ate only at 9 o’clock in the evening, once a day – the only meal she ate per day.
So, if you guys copy anybody or copy me and eat once a day, there’s nothing to it. Don’t brag about it. And don’t make people follow you to do the same thing; they might get in trouble if they are not strong enough or if it’s not necessary. And that’s why I told you, “Be sensible.” Even if you eat once a day, you can have fruit juice or vegetable juice. I don’t have – I don’t even have time for all that. You have to prepare, wash vegetables, and then you have to wash the blender afterwards, and all that. Oh God, it’s too much work for me; I don’t really have that much time. The inside work takes up a lot of time.
Even if you have a lot of clothes in your wardrobe – you have a big walk-in wardrobe, for example, because you’re rich, you have so many – even if you want to find something from the clothes, you have to go and find it, to wear something to suit the situation, or the place that you are going to go to. And you have to look in the mirror and all that. Just to talk about a few physical things, it’s so much trouble already. Not to talk about the spiritual power which is hidden in your body. It’s not even right in front of your physical eyes. You have to use the spiritual eyes to search for it, and then you have to concentrate. You can’t just go in, go into samadhi and see things right away. Many things in the daytime, in the workplace, or in your daily life will distract you, often or now and then, during your concentration. It’s not easy to live in this world already – not to talk about looking for something that is beyond the physical world; and not to talk about whether or not you’re strong enough to use it.
Just like, even if you want to fly an airplane… It’s easy for the pilot, because he’s trained for it. But you just jog in and wanting to fly an airplane – it’s not possible. So no pilot, even if he is in love with you, would let you fly the airplane, because you might bring it all down, and kill yourself as well with it.
So don’t blame me if I don’t teach you these things. As I told you also, you have to be very near, next to each other in order to learn that. Because every inch – every millimeter, even – change of position of the feet, of the legs, or of the fingers, or of the placement of the body, gives you a different result. And you don’t always have to sit cross-legged. You have to sometimes lie down with one leg up, one leg down. And with different hand mudras, different hand gestures. So it’s not something I can tell you just by speaking about it; you have to look at it.
So even like the Quan Yin Method, when you do it, I need to send one of my monks or nuns to come to your place to teach you. Or you come to our place when it’s available, when it’s suitable, if you can travel and all that – some people cannot because they are poor, so we have to come to them and teach them. It has to be personal instruction, and checking while they’re doing it. Talking by phone is not enough, it’s not good, even though we can do that. But it’s not possible. It’s not feasible. You might do it wrong. And we can’t correct it there. A spiritual thing is not written. You have to teach it outside of the sutras, outside of the Bible. In the Buddhist tradition, they also say that: It’s outside of the written teaching. It is from heart to heart – it means from soul to soul, actually. So, in this kind of situation, it’s also similar like that. I’m forbidden to write it down, even, because it’s not for everyone to use.
And if you just eat once a day and wear some tattered clothes or pick up some secondhand, fourthhand clothes on the street to wear, it’s also nothing. It doesn’t mean you will become a Buddha or saintly, or have mastership of any kind. You can punish your body forever, but that won’t bring you anything – unless you’re pure in the heart and truly search for enlightenment; unless you truly have a Buddha to teach you the right method of meditation. If you keep doing other meditation methods – as I told you already, breathing and all that – when you sleep, you don’t remember your breathing, so you can’t meditate at that time. You should search for a meditation method that you will be always practicing meditation, 24/7. And I also told you how to meditate during sleep. You know already; I won’t talk anymore about it here. I have told you too many things; I don’t have to repeat again. If you want to learn about all that, look back in those old-time videos.
And even if you try to do that, do not feel proud or boast about it – nothing. Don’t make yourself into some big deal. Because many monks, nuns and practitioners do that in other countries. For example, in India, they don’t even wear anything. They just put ash on their bodies, and they do more penance for themselves, like sitting in the heated Indian summer with fire around them even, or sitting on nails, or hanging by one leg, or hanging with one hand up, or whatever they do. These are extremes. Perhaps they want to really try to reach something. Perhaps they don’t know what else to do.
But that doesn’t mean that you are already a saint or a sage. You may be a rishi or maybe a seer. You might have some magical power by concentrating the mind. But this is only mind power, mind magic. If you harness the mind energy, you will also have something, maybe some strong power within yourself. So if somebody treats you bad or curses you, then they will be in trouble, because your magical power from harnessing the concentrated mind will also bring havoc upon them. But that is not Buddhahood. If you want to be a Buddha, you can practice like that forever, and maybe some eons later, you will – maybe.
But for the real Method of reaching enlightenment and liberation in one lifetime, you have to see the (inner Heavenly) Light, you have to hear the (inner Heavenly) Buddha’s teaching. They call it “Currents” from the Higher Dimension, which is in your body also, but you have to reconnect it with the Universal High-Dimension Power. If not, then you can sit forever, like the student of that Zen Master who kept sitting there, and the Teacher went and showed him that polishing the bricks cannot make them into a mirror. So whatever you want to practice, just continue with the Quan Yin meditation, which is the direct connection with the Universal Power, with Buddha’s Land in all directions, with God’s Heavenly Abode.
