Good morning, everyone.  This is Dharma Espresso for Sunday.     There is a wonderful teaching from the Buddha.  He said that we usually get poisoned from three poisons.  What are they?  They are greed, anger and confusion, or ignorance.   There is hardly any Vietnamese Buddhist who does not know these three words: greed, anger and confusion.  These three words carry deep meaning.  Greed, anger and confusion are three states of the mind. If we look into our inner energy, we wonder what kind of food we eat that nurture these three states.  We have three equivalent kinds of food that are very popular.   First is greed. Greed is a bottomless pit, and often goes together with addiction. The most addictive food is sweet food--sugar. The chemical sugar called high fructose corn syrup is terrible. It enters our body very easily, but creates many toxins in our cells and ruins them. Therefore, when we eat foods sweetened with chemical sugar, we get poisoned. Drinking Coca Cola or sodas made with chemical sugar is like drinking poison. So, we should not eat or drink things that make us get addicted. Sweet stuff is the top cause of addiction for people that Americans often call "sweet tooth", those who crave for sweet foods. It is actually a greed. So first, we should quit eating foods with processed or chemical sugars. Then we should gradually quit other kinds of sugar because they all create greed and terrible toxins in our body.    The second poison is anger, an emotion that we cannot control. It bursts out quickly. We get mad, we sulk, we do all kinds of negative things. Do you know what kind of food helps nurture anger and resentment? It is meat. The blood of living beings is horrible. When we eat living beings' meat, we owe them blood debts. Then, it is very difficult to control our stomach. Therefore, we should not eat meat, especially seniors, because it contains a lot of toxins, not good for our health. Not only beef and pork are full of toxins, but fish too, nowadays. Fish is full of mercury, so we should avoid it. Finally, eggs, especially industrial eggs, are not good for our health and have caused us a lot of diseases. Recently, scientists have proved that cancer cells thrive on animal protein. If we think deeply, we can see that meat toxins are connected to anger, to resentment. Therefore, first we should gradually reduce our meat consumption, and eventually eat only vegetarian foods.   I suggest that you follow three steps in becoming a vegetarian. First, you eat one vegetarian meal a day. For breakfast, eat nothing with cow milk or animal protein. Next, eat two vegetarian meals a day, like for breakfast and lunch. Then finally, eat vegetarian food for all three meals, becoming a beautiful vegetarian.   One man told me, "Dear Thay, it's very easy for me to be a beautiful vegetarian, eating three meals a day." His wife said, "How can he say that, Thay! He wouldn't even eat one vegetarian meal a day! He wouldn't touch the veggie dishes that I served!" Her husband replied, "Dear Thay, I eat seven meals a day, so it's easy to eat three veggie meals!" But dear friends, being a beautiful vegetarian is being a full-time vegetarian. Whatever we put in our mouth should be plant-based. Being a vegetarian means eating only plant-based foods. However, we have to be careful because they can include many processed chemicals. I will talk about this topic another time. You should first remember that greed is connected to foods that we get addicted to--sweet stuff. Secondly, anger is connected to meat, blood debt, which maintains our cycle of violence. Therefore, we should stop the violent cycle by being vegetarian.   

Third and last is confusion.  There are food stuffs that make us easily confused.  It is also called foolishness, stupidity, or ignorance.  Alcoholic drinks can lead us to this state of confusion.  Like being drunk.  It can also lead us astray to do crazy things. When we buy canned food and read the ingredients on the label, we get puzzled because they list so many chemicals that we don’t know if they are good or bad.  So eventually, we end up buying whatever looks pretty.  We don’t bother to read the ingredients anymore.  As Vietnamese Americans, many of us don’t understand those words anyway. So being confused in food means buying processed foods with all kinds of chemicals and going through many stages of processing; hence, pure ingredients are no longer there.  Nowadays, many kinds of food are genetically altered, right when they were still seeds in their DNAs.  This kind of confusion in food makes us lose our reasoning and cannot follow what is written on the labels.  We should eat food that still retains its original wholesomeness and taste. We should eat vegetables, fruits and whole grains.  They are simple, but they improve our life and prevent us from eating toxins.  Most of chemical-laden foods, just by smelling them is enough to get sick.   

So, you see how the three poisons of greed, anger, and confusion are connected to foods and drinks.  They cause us to become addicted, confused and get stuck in a vicious cycle.   


I hope you have a very good Sunday morning today.  Thank you for listening. 

Master Heng Chang

(Translated and transcribed by Compassionate Service Society)