Edgar, Negative.
I suggest a reading of Ch'an Master Sheng's autobiography. When he taught us, he would often urge us to eat "properly" in our daily lives as we practice. But he added that he "does not believe in the principles of nutrition". That was always very interesting to me, but I never questioned him in detail about what he believed (or followed) instead. I was already a vegetarian before I met him. On the veracity of his story of his cultivating the "Taiwan wild mountain potato", I had no reason to doubt him. He mentioned that this potato is different from what we call potatoes in the West. And I suspect it is not related to our Solanaceous plants, which I think are only indigenous to S. Amer., and not Asia. So the leaves of his plants may have been differently nutritious, indeed!, compared with those of our Deadly Nightshades. In fact, it is a type of Yam. I must assume that he also had Tea; maybe he did not mention it because it's like an Englishman taking tea "for granted" as a commodity, except more so!, for a Chinese! ;-) But, ...he taught us on Retreat to drink plain hot water, and we had urns of it: I personally called this "Sheng Yen Tea". So, maybe he did not have any tea at all during his 6-year retreat. It's possible that he may have found Ginseng root on the mountain, however, too. He mentions the Yam potato leaves several times in his auto-bio, and in fact, there is an entire chapter (Chapt. 11) there, called "Wild Potato Leaves"... . For your reading, here is the reference to Sheng Yen's best-known autobiography in English. The book is quite clear about his diet on the mountain: Sheng Yen; FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW; THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHINESE BUDDHIST MONK, 2008, Doubleday. You can also see the Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Footprints-Snow-Autobiography-Chinese-Buddhist/dp/B003JTHRT6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1353436592&sr=8-3&keywords=footprints+in+the+snow Best, --Joe > Edgar Owen <edgarowen@...> wrote: > > I suggest you use the same investigative intelligence you used to debunk the > hurricane Sandy photos to debunk your teacher's story. > > No human being could live on only wild potato leaves and rice for 6 years. > That's quite obvious. ------------------------------------ Current Book Discussion: any Zen book that you recently have read or are reading! Talk about it today!Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Zen_Forum/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Zen_Forum/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
