Mark 2:18 · World English Bible
John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, and they came and asked him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don’t fast?”
Fasting is easy; celebrating is difficult. The ascetic gets a reputation, a role, a visible measure of his progress, and the ego that could not grow through wealth grows beautifully through renunciation.
From the Indian Guru reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
AWARENESS
Fasting is easy; celebrating is difficult. The ascetic gets a reputation, a role, a visible measure of his progress, and the ego that could not grow through wealth grows beautifully through renunciation. The question is asked with confidence because those who suffer for their religion cannot bear to see anyone happy in it.
Around a man who has arrived, festivity is natural. Nothing is denied because nothing is clung to; food is eaten when hunger comes and left when it does not. The fast worth keeping is of the mind, an hour in which thought is not fed and grows quiet from hunger.
Indian Guru lens
Where am I quietly proud of what I deny myself, and what is that pride feeding?
When the highest virtue is lost, people start performing virtue and keeping score. The display arrives exactly as the real thing leaves.
After years of starving himself, the Buddha ate, and said neither indulgence nor self-punishment wakes anyone up. The body is not the enemy; the clinging is.
He speaks of the fasting of the mind, not of the body: senses quiet, thought unfed, until only emptiness is listening. The stomach was never the problem.
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Indian Guru