Body as Sensuality, Body as Form

We sometimes people wonder why we have the chant on the 32 parts of the body. Of course, their wondering is not just curiosity. It’s also complaining, “Why are we bad-mouthing the body?”

But as Ajaan Suwat once said, “Is anything in that chant untrue? Are we saying that it has a liver when it doesn’t have a liver, that it has intestines, that it has excrement when it doesn’t have those things?” Of course it has those things. And there’s nothing really wrong with the fact that it has those things.

What’s wrong is our attitude toward the body. We want something else out of it. It’s a big center for our sensual fantasies. You get attracted to your own body, then that attraction goes to other bodies. That’s what you fixate on.

But now here we are, practicing meditation. We’re focusing on the breath inside the body. We’re relating to the body in a very different way.

As we relate to it as an object of sensuality, that’s on the level of sensuality: our fascination with thinking about sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations we like to have. That pulls the mind down.

Now we’re trying to lift the mind up by relating to the body as we feel it from within: the body as we sense it, the pleasures of form—the breath element filling the body, flowing smoothly; our awareness filling the body, feeling unrestricted.

Relating to the body in this way is useful. It gives the mind a place to settle down where it can see itself clearly. The pleasures of concentration are much less detrimental to the mind than the pleasures of sensuality.

So we’re trying to make a clear distinction: the body, not as an object of sensuality, but as an object of concentration. We relate to it in very different ways.

You can’t have them both at the same time. As the Buddha said, you have to be secluded from sensuality in order to get the mind into the first jhāna. So whatever thoughts would go in the direction of sensuality, you have to learn how to cut them off.

The body is a good place to cut them off because your pleasures of the world outside come through your eyes, your ears, your nose, your tongue, the contact with the body. This is sensuality central.

You want to realize that if you relate to it in a sensual way, there’s going to be a lot of disappointment, because your images of the body tend to be very selective. The parts that you find attractive, you focus on those. The parts that are unattractive, you try to hide.

Here we bring out those parts to talk about, to think about. If you complain, it’s a sign that you want to go back to your dreams, your fantasies.

But if you want to establish a beneficial relationship with your body, you have to get rid of your unhealthy positive images of the body and replace them with a healthy positive image. To do that, you have to start with a healthy negative image of the body.

Just think of all the different parts you have in there. In the Canon, they list thirty-one. The commentaries have added the brain to the list. And there are other parts that are not mentioned in either text.

Like the eyes. Just think of what your eyes would be like if we wandered around without eyelids, just staring at each other all the time. Pretty creepy. Well, they’re right there, just covered up a little bit.

Go down the list. Ajaan Mun recommends that you go down the list of the first five. See if any of those strike you as being incongruous when you really think about them.

Take your skin, for example. When it’s on your body, it looks okay. When you think of taking it off, think of it just lying in strips on the floor, it’d be pretty disgusting. Anything in the body that you might take out and put on the floor would be disgusting. Yet when it’s inside the body, it’s okay. That’s a sign that we’re biased.

That sensual bias is something we have to get past, because otherwise it’s going to eat away at our concentration, our healthy relationship to the body as we relate to the breath, feeling the breath throughout the body, settling down inside the sense of the form of the body.

That’s where we want to go, because from there you can start seeing very clearly how the mind deals with form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—the things that allow you to get liberated from all of this.

Otherwise, you’re just coming back as a slave. Being a slave to concentration is not all that bad, but we tend more to be slaves to our sensual thoughts around the body. Those can really pull you down. They give rise to all kinds of greed, aversion, delusion, and attachment—fierce addictions.

And as we leave this body, we want another one. This is one of the reasons we do this contemplation, to realize it’s not so good to come back in a body, at least not a human body. The Brahmās have their bodies, but they relate to them, again, in the sense of the form. If you need a body, that’s the kind of relationship you want to have.

Otherwise, out of desperation, you just land on any body. It happens again and again and again. As the Buddha said, the number of people who come back as human beings or as devas are like the dirt under his fingernail. The ones who come back in the lower realms, through sensuality, are like all the dirt in the world. It’s a scary thought. And it’s because of their attachment to the body.

So we have to see that it’s not all that attractive. Whatever way of contemplating the body allows you to focus on the drawbacks, use it.

You can focus on the diseases that are there.

Recently, a number of my friends from my youth have been dying or going to the hospital. And guess what? What did they do to their bodies that made them die? It was just the fact that they took on a body at birth.

Ajaan Funn makes this point in a very distinctive way. There’s a passage in the Canon that lists all the different kinds of diseases there are. You have eyes, well, there are diseases for the eyes. You have ears, there are diseases for the ears. All the different organs in the body have their diseases.

He says it’s not so much that the eyes get diseases, the eyes are a disease. In other words, the potential for disease is waiting inside there. No matter how attractive the body is, no matter how strong, the potential for disease is there in each part of the body.

Like a dentist I knew one time: He said that when he removed a tooth from somebody, he would keep it apart. After a day or two, he would find little tiny worms eating up the tooth. Where did the worms come from? They were in the tooth. The potential for them was in the tooth, just waiting for the saliva to go away. The saliva had been protecting the tooth from those things. When the saliva goes away, the worms have their chance.

So there are diseases all over your body, all through your body. When you get another body, you’ll have more diseases again. Do you want that? When will you tell yourself you’ve had enough?

The problem is not so much with the body, though, it’s with our attitude toward it. The proper attitude is that we use it as a tool on the path. It allows us to practice generosity. It allows us to practice the precepts. It gives us a good object for meditation so that we can develop the discernment to get us past these wrong attitudes. Having the pleasure of concentration allows you to get a bit more distance on your sensual pleasures.

Without the pleasure of concentration, the Buddha said, no matter how much you see the drawbacks of sensuality, you’re going to go back to sensuality. But when you have the pleasure of concentration as an alternative, you’re more willing to look at the drawbacks of your attitudes toward the body.

The problem is that you want more out of the body than it can provide. You want things that it just can’t provide at all.

That’s why we have this contemplation. As I said, we’re not bad-mouthing the body. We’re just calling attention to the fact that we have lots of delusions around it. By undoing those delusions, we learn how to relate to the body in a way that really is useful, that’s conducive to freedom—not to the repeated slavery that we’ve been experiencing for who knows how long.