Our Obesity Proves the Buddha’s Point

The Buddha was the son of a very rich, powerful man. His father ensured that the Buddha’s childhood was as pampered as it could be at the time. The Buddha abandoned those comforts to go find the solution to human suffering, or old age, sickness, and death, as the common phrase has it.

Despite his great wealth, we know that the Buddha did not enjoy many of the comforts that we take for granted. He likely did not have indoor plumbing or hot water from a tap. No air conditioning in a hot country. No refrigeration. Certainly no phone at all, much less a cell phone. No computers.

Most likely, if you are reading this, you have all of those amenities. May it be so. May you not suffer, but you likely still have your disappointments. All human lives do. Okay, maybe not the Kardashians, except for the disappointment of being a Kardashian, which I guess they don’t feel, since it’s all they’ve ever known.

The down side to our prosperity is that we have many more obese people than existed at the time of the Buddha, or so we have to assume.

But we are all still subject to old age, sickness, and death. Some people live long lives with relatively little sickness, but they still get the old age and death parts. We’re all going to die eventually. Except that one way to describe complete awakening is to realize the…