The
Body is a bone-frame plastered with fat and skin:
The body's nature:
300 bones, jointed by 180 joints, sewn into a chain by 900 sinews,
plastered over with pieces of flesh, enveloped by inner membrane, fat and
outer
skin,
with 9 openings constantly dribbling and trickling with tears, snot, saliva,
slime, urine
and excrement. Its bowels are inhabited by many fold bacteria, parasites and
worms,
the home of disease, the source of painful states, perpetually oozing from the
nine
orifices like a chronic open boil, and from thousands skin pores the stale sweat
seeps,
with bluebottles and their like buzzing round it, which when untended with tooth
brush,
washing, shaving, bathing, underclothing and dressing up looks just like a
living corpse!
In its natural wild then a body is a stinking nauseating repulsiveness, but by
concealing
its private parts under several cloths, by daubing it with various perfumes and
salves,
by pranking it with jewellery, it is faked up into a state being mistaken as 'I'
& 'mine'!
So men delight in women, and women in men, without perceiving the true nature of
this
body's characteristic foulness, now masked by this adventitious adornment. But
in the
ultimate sense, there is no place on any body even the size of an atom fit to
lust after!
Comically we loove the whole of this 'my precious temple', but when any such
bits of it
as head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, saliva, snot, excrement or urine have
dropped
off the body, then beings will not touch them! Though somewhat absurd, they are
now
ashamed, humiliated & disgusted with exactly the same matter as they adored
before!
But as long as any one of these disgusting things remains inside the body,
though it is
just as repulsive when inside, they take this body as agreeable, desirable,
permanent,
pleasant, & 'my beautiful self', since they are wrapped in the murk of ignorance
and
dyed with unseen and unrecognised affective greed for a physical self...
Vism I 196
More on
this seeing this body
(Kaya)
as it really is: A foul frame of bones & flesch:
kāyagatāsati,
Meditation_On_the_Body,
The_9_Corpse_Meditations,
The_32_Parts,
Evil-smelling_body,
Body_as_only_Form,
Meditation_On_the_Body_Kayagata-Sati,
The_Skeleton,
Body_Contemplation,
Corpse_Meditation,
Immersing_Body_in_Mind
