When you read advertisements that claim to teach fluent, foreign language in two weeks, do you believe them?  How about a book that says you can lose 30 pounds in 7 days?  Sometimes we go to the doctor with a serious illness caused by years of a bad habit, and he tells us that after taking X medicine or going through surgery X, we’ll be fine.  Sometimes we hear philosophers and psychologists tell us to indulge ourselves, to have a busy sex life, and that this will cure our desire to understand our world and cure our deepest sorrows.

But here in the East we still have some strange people, people that many people hate.  For some reason there are teachers who say that to learn a foreign language you’ll need to study long hours before being able to use it.  There are still dusty books on the shelf by obscure writers claiming that to lose weight, one needs to eat less and excersize.  And yet still there are old doctors that make children cry and adults wince, dousing their patients with bitter tonics, sticking them with needles and viciously twisting them around, then giving crazy advice like, “don’t eat meat, don’t smoke, don’t drink and don’t have sex.”  And finally there’s the monks who work in philosophy and psychology, that have lost and unhappy souls come to their feet.  And what benevolence do they show?  They say “renounce pleasures of the flesh, do the hard thing, challenge yourself”.

Why do these hated people persist?  Because they are telling the truth.  The truth hurts like the soreness of a muscle that will grow stronger.  Their books are dusty now, but become classics later.  The people turn away from them, shaking their heads today, yet bow to their feet when they are older.  The truth-tellers are the most hated people in the world.  The truth is the most vituperated and reviled object on the internet today.  It takes courage to speak it, and constitution to accept it.  And here we are telling you the truth – that sex indulgence is destructive, and that renunciation is healthy.  And how can you be sure we are telling you the truth?  Precisely because it isn’t what you want to hear.