Toh 206The Mahāyāna Sūtra “Pure Sustenance of Food”

Summary

While the Buddha is staying at the Bamboo Grove with a diverse retinue,
the monk Maudgalyāyana asks him about some unusual beings he saw during an alms
round. The Buddha informs Maudgalyāyana that these beings are starving spirits.
The Buddha gives a discourse explaining how these starving spirits were once
humans yet committed misdeeds related to food that led them to their current
dismal state. The misdeeds connected with food described by the Buddha present a
picture of food-related prohibitions for the monastic saṅgha, such as failing to
eat only a single meal a day, improperly partaking of meals, carrying away
leftovers, and other forms of abusing food offerings. Food-related ethics are
also given for lay people, mainly concerning how to prepare food for the saṅgha
in a hygienic manner.

Acknowledgements

Translated, edited, and finalized by the Subhashita Translation Group.
The translation was produced by Lowell Cook, who also wrote the introduction.
Benjamin Ewing edited the translation against the Tibetan and revised the
introduction.

The translation was completed under the patronage and supervision of
84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.

Introduction

The sūtra Pure Sustenance of Food
begins with Maudgalyāyana asking the Buddha about some unusual beings he saw
while on an alms round. After describing their bizarre features, such as
their enormous stomachs and needle-thin throats, the Buddha informs
Maudgalyāyana that these beings are, in fact, starving spirits. The Buddha
gives a discourse explaining how these starving spirits were once humans but
attained this dismal state by committing misdeeds related to food. He uses
their example as an opportunity to describe the misdeeds and meritorious
actions related to food, along with their results. The first half of the
discourse concerns the saṅgha and monastic rules surrounding food—eating
only a single meal a day, how to participate in meals, how to treat leftovers,
and the way to receive offerings—that are fundamental to the Vinaya, the
Buddhist monastic code. The second half of the discourse concerns food
hygiene and is specifically directed to the laypeople who handle the
saṅgha’s food. To illustrate these strictures around food for both the
monastic and lay audiences, the Buddha describes the workings of karma with
vivid, sometimes graphic, imagery. These descriptions include positive
results, such as being blessed and protected by the entire pantheon of gods,
as well as negative results, such as being reborn as starving spirits who
consume the contents of toilets.

The provenance of Pure Sustenance of
Food is far from certain. While the notions of purity and
pollution presented in the sūtra would appear to be rooted in an Indic
worldview, and the narrative connection between Maudgalyāyana and starving
spirits is common in Indic Buddhist literature, the sūtra is bereft of
the expected Sanskrit title and lacks the traditional colophon naming its
Indian and Tibetan translators. Thus, there is the possibility that this
sūtra is a “gray text,” one that is neither purely Indic in origin nor fully
Tibetan apocrypha. Rather than a translation in the strict sense of the term, it may have been derived from Indic material in a Tibetan setting. The
sūtra is not listed in the Denkarma (Tib. ldan/lhan
dkar ma) or the Phangthangma (Tib. ’phang thang ma) catalogs, the two surviving indexes from the
Imperial Period (629–841 ce). This dearth of
information makes it impossible to date the translation of Pure Sustenance of Food or otherwise determine its
status in the Tibetan canon. There is no known Sanskrit witness of the
sūtra, nor does there appear to be a Chinese translation.

This English translation was produced based on the edition preserved
in the Degé Kangyur, which was informed by references to the Comparative
Edition Kangyur (Tib. dpe bsdur ma) and the
version of the translation in the Stok Palace Kangyur. Pure Sustenance of Food has not previously been translated into
any Western languages, nor has it received any scholarly treatment.

The Translation

The Mahāyāna Sūtra

Pure Sustenance of Food

Homage
to all buddhas and bodhisattvas.

Thus did I hear at one time. The Blessed One was staying in the
Bamboo Grove, accompanied by a great saṅgha of twelve hundred fifty monks, as well as
other monks and nuns, laymen and laywomen, the eight classes of beings, and
many bodhisattvas.

The great Maudgalyāyana rose from his seat, bowed to the Blessed
One, and said, “Blessed One, once when I went to town for alms, I noticed
tens of thousands of people on the way. Their heads were as big as mountains
and their bellies the size of Mount Sumeru, yet their throats were as thin
as needles. When they moved back and forth, they emitted a sound like the
rumbling of five hundred chariots and spewed intolerable acrid smoke
everywhere. Who are they and where do they come from? Please tell us,
Blessed One.”

“Maudgalyāyana,” replied the Blessed One, “those are starving
spirits. That is the ripening of past misdeeds such as ruining meals or the preparations for meals. It can also
be the ripening of the misdeed of failing to eat only one meal per day
because they consumed a meal offered to someone else.

“The leftovers from meals are not to be given to those who fail to
eat only one meal per day. The polluted leftovers of a patron are to be used
for the saṅgha; it is polluted food but is to be tolerated. Polluted food
made by the saṅgha must be given; otherwise, the saṅgha will incur a
downfall.”

“The Blessed One is correct,” Maudgalyāyana remarked.

The Blessed One continued, “Articles of offering collected in
accordance with the Dharma, no matter who the patron may be, can serve as
the sustenance for those who eat only a single meal.
Those who fail
to eat only one meal will lack for food. Conversely, the ability to eat only
one meal a day is the equivalent of sixty thousand days’ worth of merit, and
it leads to an increase of foodstuffs. Those unable to eat only a single
meal will become starving spirits for six hundred thousand days. How does
that happen? It happens because the donations to them are weighty. It would
be preferable to eat lumps of iron. The food from faithful patrons will not
be easy to digest; they will experience suffering for an extremely long time
and become the entity known as a starving spirit for a million lifetimes.
Exercise extreme caution with all meritorious food offerings.

“If you stash leftovers in your breast pockets or in your sleeve,
you will descend into the hells for five hundred lifetimes, and red-hot
lumps of iron will tumble out of both your left and right armpits. Do not
stash leftovers! Even if you stash as little as a single grain of millet,
you will at least end up in the hell of iron wheels.

“Laypeople should also avoid polluting any of the meritorious food
preparations by tasting them first. They should avoid polluting prepared
food by tasting it. Doing so will render it impotent; it would have been
better not to have made it at all. Why is that? It will displease all the
gods and upset one’s companions. Anyone who tastes such food will become a starving
spirit for fifty thousand lifetimes and experience various forms of
unbearable suffering.

“Whoever seeks merit for the future should apportion the meritorious
food offerings properly, hygienically, and respectfully. They should wash
their hands thoroughly, cover all the warm dishes such as vegetables and the
like, handle them carefully, and not taste them beforehand. Doing so will be
meritorious and please all the gods and gain the favor of all one’s
companions. This will bring about the protection and blessings of all the
gods. This is a statement of fact.

“The ripening of merit is like an echo or a reflection. It is in
this way that starving spirits were initially humans. At an earlier time,
they handled the saṅgha’s clean food with unclean hands, dug their unclean
hands into the saṅgha’s clean food, or mixed unclean food into clean food
and offered it to the saṅgha. Later, they fell to the state of a starving
spirit for five hundred lifetimes, and they constantly consume filth and eat
toilet waste. When they consume toilet waste, the toilet protectors run them
off with iron clubs and disparage the starving spirits as receptacles of
filth. They consume filth such as people’s pus, blood, mucus, snot, and
dirty bathwater. They guard such filth and consume the unclean blood that
drips from women after childbirth.

“After five hundred thousand years, they are reborn in the body of a
dog, pig, insect, or something similar and continuously reek and consume
feces and filth. They experience this sort of suffering for ten million
eons, without any escape. To fully free themselves from this state is
extremely difficult. Their utterly unbearable suffering is all but
indescribable.

“If you touch your penis or vagina and then touch the clean food of
the saṅgha with your unclean hands, introduce filth into the food for the
saṅgha, or allow the saṅgha to partake of unclean food, this sort of misdeed
will ripen as infectious eye diseases that afflict everyone, a misdeed no
one will be aware of. Henceforth, handling the saṅgha’s food hygienically,
using clean hands to carry the containers of the saṅgha’s food, washing
millet with clean hands, and offering clean foods will lead to the
attainment of inconceivable merit.

“Let this be well known and swiftly internalized.”

This completes the “Pure Sustenance
Sūtra.”

Notes

Bibliography

The eight classes are gods, nāgas, yakṣas,
gandharvas, asuras, garuḍas, kinnaras, and mahoragas.

Bamboo Grove
’od ma’i tshal
འོད་མའི་ཚལ།
Veṇuvana
The famous bamboo grove near Rājagṛha where the Buddha regularly stayed and gave teachings.
It was situated on land donated by King Bimbisāra of Magadha and was the first of several landholdings donated
to the Buddhist community during the time of the Buddha.