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　　Learning to adapt myself to a very strict and conservative monastic lifestyle included learning to eat food that I didn”t particularly like. Villagers would bring nice little curries with chicken, curries with fish, curries with frog. But in those days, Ajahn Chah would dump them all into a big basin and mix it up. It was horrible. Or the nuns would glean things from the forest for us to eat, things like tree leaves. I remember writing my mother, "I”m living on tree leaves." She wrote back a letter of great concern.

　　At first, I couldn”t eat the food. It made me sick to even look at it. Fortunately, it was mango season, and there were big trays of mangoes. I managed to live on mangoes and sticky rice for an entire month, but after the mango season ended I kept getting thinner and thinner. Finally, I started learning how to eat the food. It is surprising how well we can adapt. I began to think, If I can learn to eat this food, I can live anywhere on this planet. Food couldn”t possibly be any worse than this.

　　Sometimes all the monks would ride into town in the back of a big truck. We would then walk through town on an almsround with Ajahn Chah. This was a grand experience, the whole population lining the main street. People had all kinds of nice dishes ready and would offer them into our almsbowls. When the bowls were filled up, a man would come around and we”d pour the food out into his big basket and continue on. When we got back to the monastery, we could choose what we wanted to eat from whatever was left in our almsbowl. This was such a rare occasion that it made us go really crazy in our minds. Once, a woman put a nice little cake into my almsbowl, and later as I dumped out all the rest of the food into the man”s basket, I tried to hold onto the cake. I didn”t want him to know what I was doing, so all kinds of devious thoughts came to mind. It was amazing to see the anxiety and the effort I put into holding onto this little cake. I”d become obsessed with it.

　　I also found myself obsessed with sweets. We live a celibate life, so any kind of sexual activity is forbidden. That limits the pleasure we can have. We can also eat only one meal a day, oftentimes without any really delicious food. But we are allowed sugar and honey as medicine, if it is offered. One time, Ajahn Chah gave me a bag of sugar. I was so happy. I thought, I”ll just take a little taste. I opened the bag, scooped out a teaspoonful, and put in it my mouth.

　　Within fifteen minutes I had consumed the whole bag.

　　I couldn”t stop myself. Sometimes I would dream about sweets: I”d go to a pastry shop, sit down at a table and order delicious looking pastries. Just as I was about to eat one, I”d wake up.

　　The mind plays a lot of tricks. When you are living a life in which you can”t simply fulfill your wishes and do what you want, strange feelings and incredible forms of obsessive greed can arise over things that had never really seemed a problem before. When I had been a layman, my greed was spread over a wide range of things, but in monastic life it was all focused on sugar and sweets. Here I was, an ordained monk trying to lead a spiritual life, acting like a hungry ghost, dreaming about sugar. Another American monk even had his mother send big boxes of sweets and chocolate cakes.

　　Because the greed was so focused, I could easily contemplate it. Learning to reflect on these desires, these obsessions of the mind, is very important. It”s here that we often need the precepts to stop us from following our habits or whatever is easiest to do. Precepts help us to see our impulses, how we follow them, and the results. The restraint and restriction of the precepts give us a sense of stopping. With reflective awareness, we begin to notice how strong the mind”s impuls…

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