CW: discussion of eating disorders, weight loss behaviors, effects of colonization, religion/religious fasting
1573 words, ~12 minutes
At this point in my journey, I find more insights into understanding my experience through non-Western frameworks. In a respectful way, the Buddha could be considered an early icon for the eating disorder experience. (He’s iconic in many other ways, but this is one of them, potentially.) This piece started as a short caption on my private account, but there’s so much to think about, that I might as well expand on it. I had doubts about putting this take “out there,” but I read somewhere that life is short, so don’t hoard your imperfect ideas to yourself, because someone else can pick them up and complete them.
A man named Siddhartha Gautama was considered the founder of Buddhism. He lived a privileged, sheltered life until he left the palace and witnessed human suffering for the first time. Siddhartha began searching for an escape from the cycle of samsara (aka perpetual dis-ease throughout reincarnations) and chose an austere and ascetic life. He practiced extreme fasting for 6 years, which was common among the religions of the day, and became very weak and ill. He realized that he couldn’t focus on meditating and meeting his spiritual goals through the harsh physical discipline, concluded that he gained nothing from the practice, and began his recovery glow-up. It was only after he recovered his strength (through a Middle Way, a path between indulgence and self-mortification) that he achieved enlightenment and nirvana as the Buddha, or “Awakened One.”
It reads like a fable or myth, but the difference between literal and metaphorical interpretations did not always exist, and the deeper interpretation of the story was probably intended to be more important than the facts when it was passed down. With that in mind, the themes of seeking liberation from cycles of suffering, and balancing one’s physical and spiritual needs along the journey of growth both feel very real to me. I walked my own path of examining my privilege, reckoning with the problem of pain, and rejecting some of the common beliefs in the era I live in. Many times, I reflect on whether religion is the answer, the problem, or a distraction from those things. (Reader, what do you think?)
Anyway, I digress. The ancient practice of fasting, observed across many traditions, is especially noteworthy because of the way it has morphed into the present. “Diet and wellness culture,” for lack of a better term, could very well be described as a modern religion. Or, if not a religion unto itself, at least it’s a religious practice under the cultural values we have adopted, those being capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. According to the Prothero Model of Religion, a religion will answer four questions.
- What is the problem? (Fatness, Blackness, femininity, and unruly bodily desires.)
- What is the solution? (Proximity to thinness and whiteness. Weight loss and disordered eating behaviors. Medical eugenics.)
- Techniques to solve the problem? (Diet, fitness, and weight loss industry.)
- Who has solved it? (See popular media representation, advertising, and public health messaging.)
To take this further, we should examine the semantics of how we talk about diet and religion. Food groups and ingredients are given moral adjectives, such as good, bad, dirty, and guilty. Ever heard of purity culture? People are taught to make atonement for their food sins by “burning” it off (like microdoses of hellfire) and renewing their vows to devote themselves to the diet each calendar year. Some will kneel at toilet bowl shrines for their rituals of repentance, and “purge” themselves clean. Some devouts will make vision boards and prayers to manifest thinness, and many will regularly offer their bodies (and hopes) on a scale for judgment. Fasting and denial of bodily needs in pursuit of “health,” or righteousness, are the common religion of the day, and folks who practice it well are worthy of praise and merit. Need I say more?
Maybe I will. I’ve always had a more ascetic personality, sometimes to a fault. When searching for historical precedents in my own stages of early recovery, I came across the “fasting saints” from the Middle Age in Europe. These were religious women who imitated the suffering of Jesus to achieve sainthood through self-starvation, or anorexia mirabilis (Latin for miraculous loss of appetite). There’s also the “adapted-to-flee-famine hypothesis” evolutionary theory for anorexia nervosa, which “proposes that AN is caused by ancient adaptations selected when migration was indeed the best solution to local famine.”
I’m not convinced that eating disorders are entirely a modern phenomenon, because they have been socially constructed in various ways across history, and they have worsened due to a culture of isolation, individualism, and cultural erasure. In the present day, we have the DSM-5, which isn’t the most inclusive or nuanced guide to all the socially “deviant”* ways humans relate to food. (*Many behaviors are culturally sanctioned, so is it really deviant? Deviance is socially constructed, anyways.) These days, I find myself rejecting the recovery/relapse binary, with an understanding that I will always have a neurodivergent relationship with eating.
In my case, I never loved food in the first place, and under the painful weight of this system of ruptured relationships, my instinct was to hunger strike. The world made it so easy to practice this harsh form of physical discipline, but I kept coming to the same realization that the Buddha did.
I may have wanted liberation and an end to human suffering, but “ascetics who underwent periods of fasting, [and] subsequently resumed eating to regain their strength, were just gathering together again what they had earlier left behind.” So how (and who) was this helping, exactly? Whether due to spiritual or biopsychosocial fate, I would leave myself behind and gather my strength to advance a few more steps, only to fall apart again. If “recovery” is some kind of rebirth, this was the samsara I found myself in – a constantly shifting body, a will to survive, a yearning for repair in a wheel without end.
(With that being said, my particular set of experiences doesn’t set me apart from the millions of other people who have histories of disordered eating – all suffering is valid, and doesn’t require an arbitrary BMI, symptomatology, or chronicity to be true. By not comparing traumas, we give everyone a chance to get support and healing.)
I don’t claim to have achieved enlightenment, but when looking at statues of the Fasting Bodhisattva,** I feel glimmers of self-recognition. Instead of being quick to pathologize that form, I think about why my “disorder” wanted to take on a similar appearance, instead of what was considered culturally desirable. I wonder why nearness to death felt like holiness and wholeness for both of us.
**CW: links to Fasting Buddha/Hungry Buddha statue images for reference, by current location, which could be disturbing due to their emaciated appearance. Mainly, the location of origin is Pakistan (the ancient region of Gandhara). Lahore Museum, Met Museum, Bodhgaya, British Museum (Japan)
In many parts of the United States, death is taboo, and grief is sectored for private spaces when people seemingly disappear. But our sanitization of mortality also dismisses the depth of life. I don’t fully understand why, but I have always resisted turning away. I face the things that are hard to look at, even if my eyes are full of tears. From the time of my youth, I began a habit of regularly contemplating death. A “requiem” – my online moniker this past decade, nearly half of my time – means “a Mass for the dead.” And drawing from the more difficult times in my life, I could say that I have also experienced life in a dying body.
The intention here is not to be morbid. Traditionally, it is believed that the Buddha was born thousands of times before taking on his final form. And actually, there are thousands of lives and thousands of deaths that encompass who I am today. Just going back ten generations (2^10), 1024 people had to exist for me to arrive in this body. This body, this here flesh… Since becoming an adult, I have been learning how to live in my body, specifically, how to be embodied, and how to remove the white male gaze from my own eyes.
I think that the beauty of this story is that when Siddhartha Gautama reached the state of enlightenment, he spent 45 more years of his life teaching the dharma so that others could experience freedom from suffering too.
Among those of us who hunger and thirst for justice and peace, we believe that until every last person is free, our work is not yet finished. I could expect that I have at least 45 more years, but none of that is guaranteed.
So, during my time here, my body is my home, both haunted and holy. At a baseline, I know to keep nourished in order to do the spiritual work of building a future worth living in, and not just for myself. As the bhavacakra cycles on and the world keeps turning in literal flames, I hope that the center won’t hold. I look forward to an end to suffering and a chance for all of us to get free. ▪️
If you’re interested in more in this vein of inquiry, Nalgona Positivity Pride is currently doing a series on Religious Trauma, Eating Disorders, and Christian Patriarchy.
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Sun Requiem 