(595) vegetarian diet

First of all I must state that I love vegetables. One vacation I spent almost a month with a North American white family who happened to be Hindus and they were on a milk-egg-vegetarian diet. It was a most healthy and delicious diet.

In Silver City, I met with a special need child whose father had been a hard core Buddhist in his youth. He actually spent a year in Bangkok as a novice monk. According to him, a few weeks after he went on non-egg vegan diet he started seeing spirits. They were told that the spirits were spiritual guides. A few months later he started donning the saffron color habit. With that "uniform", he could communicate with his guides, mainly at night.

After this man married and have a few children, his wife joined a church. At first there was a lot of friction between him and his wife over their religious differences. Then his baby was sick and almost died. He was very touched with the care, love and practical help given by his wife's church friends. Slowly he came round to accept her church. It took years before he would take part in his wife's Life group activities. As a volunteer to his child's therapy, I was invited to join his Life Group's special functions with receptions. I happened to be present when this quiet and unassuming man took the floor to explain that vegetarian diet is more than just a healthy way of eating, it has religious implications. He urged his friends to not give up meat. He suggested one meal on Wednesday of fish and one meal on Saturday of chicken. He personally believe that to be completely without meat is to give the devil a foot hold.

Here I must share how my cousin found "Tao" (The way) within a Taiwanese Buddhist sect and gradually ate more and more vegetables. Sad to say, her retirement as a Lower Court Judge gave her plenty of time as a speaker for this religion. She need not study any scripture, but by daily meditations and going into trance, she was used as an instrument to preach the sermons. She was involved in some pyramid schemes and gotten into loads of debts. She lost a house, hundreds of thousands of her personal money, her mother and her unmarried brother's life savings. After borrowing big amounts of money left and right, she was unable to repay her relatives, friends and former colleagues. After a year or two she stopped attending her Buddhist sect. Lately she started eating meat again and seemed a lot more alert and is more herself. When she went around borrowing money and telling people sob stories, she was such an accomplished liar and an excellent actress who could cry as if her whole family just died in an accident. As a well wisher, I certainly hope that she would return to her intelligent, sane and stable self.