[TheRaisin]

This is why religions fail as secular institutions. Everything's fine as long as it's purely a matter of faith, but then you get scam artists like this guy trying to gain money (and attention) from people's beliefs, and you have conflicts between science and religion, and everything goes straight to hell (no pun intended). Of course this guy is a scam artist. Of course he's sneaking food and water. Like Rexy says, it's physically impossible to survive more than a few days without water and a few weeks without food-- no matter the amount of training or degree of control. No one was meant to try to emulate Gautama Buddha to the point of starving him or herself to death. In fact, the Buddha himself didn't advocate such extreme bodily punishment-- the Middle Path is all about not going to such extremes. But I guess this is one of the fundamental problems with so many religions. People don't know how to differentiate between religious allegory and historical fact. And this guy is a prime example of how that weakness can be exploited.