True Modern Karma Stories - Introduction

2. Aphorism - Sickness comes from what we eat

Braise meat fry fish to appease one’s gluttony,

unaware that the animals are mentally unwilling.
The kitchen becomes a slaughterhouse,

cutting open the belly to climb the mountain of knifes.

Frying cooking and all kinds of punishment,

to swallow and eat live are considered a good meal.
Their consciousness stays in your body,

demanding their lives back sooner or later.

Good and evil surely have their rewards;

do not take lightly the sickness that comes from eating.
In no time evil reaches its fullness,

sicknesses fasten your body right into hospital.

Cutting, slicing, splitting and chopping bodies up,

all are kitchen scenes replayed again.
If I knew I would be going to hell today,

how could I allow myself to indulge in gluttony?
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3. Introduction

Everybody is sure to be afflicted with some form of sickness at some point in their life, bringing great suffering to yourself and your family. Whether rich or poor, powerful or ordinary, not many can be freed from the entanglement of sickness. Even as life slips away bit by bit, no amount of money and power can offer any help.

So why do people fall sick?

Other than normal aging, the declining of bodily functions, people believe most sicknesses come from what we eat. Ordinarily people think that eating unclean food makes one sick. If that’s true, what about those homeless people living on the streets, eating food scavenged from the trash others throw away? Whether in the winter or summer, they don’t have enough clothes to protect themselves from cold and heat. Their bodies are bitten by bugs, and even though they eat unclean food, yet have you ever seen these people get diarrhea from it? Or catch a flu or fever? But look at civilized people like us, observing hygiene everywhere, taking about nutrition at every meal; yet we can’t ever leave all the drugs and hospitals behind.

In the 50s, getting pneumonia was considered a major illness. Later with the development of tetracycline, pneumonia became treatable. Then came tuberculosis, but it was also conquered with streptomycin. They were followed by cancer, AIDS and other unknown illnesses, appearing into the world one by one, stupefying all the medical experts around the globe. We also read about other unexplainable diseases in the papers all the time. Even though science is progressing in leaps and bounds, and new expensive medicines are developed quite often, but it could not eradicate all these different diseases. It is as if Heaven is purposely challenging humans to prove how good they are. Don’t you see that it is difficult to get treatment in hospitals nowadays? The medical fees are expensive and it is even harder to find a good doctor.

I understood the true cause of people’s sickness only after reading the Sutras. This was again verified countless times in practical life. To put it simply, the cause of sickness is “greed, anger and ignorance”. To elaborate, the 10 unwholesome actions are the source of every kind of disease. And “sickness comes from what we eat” means to eat what we are not supposed to eat, to say things we are not supposed to say and do things we are not supposed to do. Here I will relate several karma stories on how killing and eating meat leads to sickness for the reference of fellow practitioners.