Buddhist monk. Check.
Blessed food. Check.
Delicious. Check.
Jill and I have decided it is time to start becoming more healthy and we’ve decided to try being vegetarian at this time.
It actually started on New Year’s Day, even though it wasn’t a new year’s resolution, and it seems to have been quite easy so far.
Strangely enough, we decided this before we went to a the Thekchen Choling Buddhist temple on New Year’s Day to hear the chanting that they perform for the new lunar month. But that is blog post for another day.
Being that Buddhists don’t eat any type of animal, and I then read the wonderful book, Direct Expressions written by their Lama Thubten Namdrol Dorje, and agreed with his viewpoints on health, treating other creatures with respect, and not wanting to hurt others, and therefore not wanting to hurt myself, and it just all fell into place.
I’ve done stints of being a vegetarian for up to 6 months, and have found, when I set my mind to it, it is actually quite easy.
One of the reasons is that I was in a pretty horrific car crash when I was 4 years old and have no sense of smell because of my head injury. I also believe that my sense of taste is probably at about 50% of what most people can experience.
The silver lining is that I’m not tempted by smells of food as I walk by stores and restaurants, and therefore, find the ability to follow through on this change easier than most people since they are usually tempted and it is harder to ignore those senses.
One of the restaurants we went to on our vacation to Malaysia was Lily’s Vegetarian Restaurant. It was only 2 blocks from our hotel, The Sunway Georgetown, and it was fantastic.
We tried the local Penang style food, even though they had vegetarian fried chicken, which looked amazing, and were blown away.
Everything was fresh, delicious, with just the right amount of spices. We also had soursop juice and lime juice for our drinks. Jill has become addicted to lime juice and I’ve become addicted to soursop. We have no idea how we will deal with the withdrawal symptoms when we return to Beijing in just a few days!
All I can say is if we can find vegetarian food in Beijing that is at all similar to the food we’ve found here in Malaysia, we will not have a problem staying vegetarian and being much more healthy in the upcoming year.
ps. If you’d like to read Direct Expressions, by Lama Thubten Namdrol Dorje, he has put it online in the form of a PDF. I highly recommend it as it is a wonderful read and he has a fantastic sense of humor and humility.
Here is a direct link to his book: http://english.thekchencholing.org/wp-content/uploads/direct_expression_eng.pdf