What’s the point in making the body run when the mind… (Cont.)

TODAY, YOU MAY BE living in a comfortable house, having modern furniture, using the softest of bed linen, owning cars worth hundreds of thousands, wearing the very finest clothes, and sporting gold and silver to illumine your person. But there’s no denying that, at one stage in the past, we were all huddled up in foetal position inside a balloon-esque cavity, hemmed in by as foul a matter as pus, blood, fat, faeces, urine, entrails, vomit, and digested and undigested food. We had lived there, having made so unpleasant and revolting a uterine chamber ‘mine,’ clinging to it and refusing to part with it. In bygone ages, how we must have regarded millions of such wombs as ‘ours’! Worse still, we, who have willingly endured untold suffering by crawling back into so many wombs, even now seek to produce from your womb another such offspring whose suffering will be as copious. So long as you have this aspiration, other than becoming babies who make the womb ‘mine’ and mothers and fathers who make the babies ‘mine,’ never can you escape from the round of rebirths (saŋsāra).

No sooner had the baby sprung from your loins than you and your husband decided on a name, surname, and initials, and obtained a birth certificate. Why this birth certificate? Afraid, lest you lose this child, lest somebody else claim it. So you legally register it in the government registry, thinking you’d go to court and claim ownership should there be a problem. Yet you do not consider where this child came from. Perhaps, in its previous life, this child belonged to another religion, another race. It may have been someone who lived as a vagrant, or someone persecuted as an outcast. It could well have been an animal, or a peta-ghost, or a yakka, or perhaps a deva, or even a brahma. It is entirely possible that a being who had lived thus, upon its passing, was conceived in the womb. This child may even have been your own mother, father, or a relative in the previous birth. Yet you are blithely unaware that what you thus cradle in your arms was your mother or father in a past birth, or a person of another religion or race, or a creature identified in the manifest reality as a peta-ghost or deva. Such is the tenacity and brazenness of clinging (upādāna), whose stark nudity we cover with the diaphanous robe that is attachment (tanhā).

Think thus: Suppose you were a [Sinhala] army officer serving in military operations during the civil war years. You’d be fighting in the war for the sake of the country, race, religion, or merely as an occupation. People would die at your hands. Let’s say those who died were misguided separatists of Tamil ethnicity. You would feel genuine compassion, a pang of sympathy for them; you would pity their parents and kin. At such a moment, even as a concatenation of such thoughts was passing through your mind, suppose you also died on the battlefield. 

In a death of this kind, there’s every likelihood that you be conceived again in a human womb. Due to the aforesaid clinging (upādāna) formed in you, you’d get conceived in the womb of a Tamil mother and see the light of day as a newborn. Within the proprieties of present mores, you would now be a Tamil child with a Tamil name and surname, in a Tamil family in a Northern township. Growing up in that Northern town and having reached the age of ten, this child, as a child soldier in the separatist rebel outfit, would be fighting against the government forces [in an ironic role reversal]. See what a delusion! Within a span of eleven years, you performed two roles as a Sinhala army officer and a Tamil rebel fighter.

This role would not end here; purely due to a clinging, it would roll on into ‘becoming’ (bhava) again and again. Vainglorious as you may be in the present life, boasting that you are a Sinhala Buddhist, you may have belonged to another religion or race in the previous life. After this life, again you could take rebirth in a womb of a different race and religion. Still, we conceive of what we are clinging to as ‘I am.’

Now it should be plain to you that in this journey we have made, dying and taking rebirth over and over again through countless eons since time immemorial, you have indeed been a blood relation to every single human, animal, peta-ghost, denizen of niraya, deva, and brahma in this world. Being identified as multifarious [life forms] in the manifest reality belies the fact that everyone has been but your blood kin. Yet the world is still waging wars across sectarian divides. They do not know that the war is not on the battlefield. 

Yet they think the war is on the battlefield; though it is in the human mind imbued with ignorance that the war exists, where the seeds of war germinate. It is in the mind that the war starts. Caused by what? Caused by the clinging (upādāna), arising due to craving (tanhā). So if anyone thinks the wars of the world can be prevented, that is but a grave fallacy. Wars cannot be prevented, nor can they be ended. They could, however, be temporarily quelled by superior force. Even that would be temporary.

Wars can be stopped not by killing people nor by killing the ideologies but only by killing the ignorance in people. Where ignorance is killed, therein originates ‘knowing’ (vijjā); in other words, wisdom. Wisdom is the ultimate triumph in the world’s greatest war. For the victor of this triumph though, there will be no popping of champagne in his honor, no celebratory dinners, hoisting of national flags, lighting of firecrackers, or gun salutes. Why? ―For he is one who has ended the war. Never again will he, by making a form (rūpa) ‘mine,’ become attached to it or resent it. He won’t [so much as] squabble over a form, much less wage war. He knows empirically through insight that a form is a thing of impermanence. He has already completely obliterated not just the theatre of war but the weapons, the munitions factories, and the army as well. Not with any weaponry but with the single instrument called mindfulness did he destroy all this. He won this victory not by capturing more and more territory but by letting go.

Now you will have understood that the war at home, war in the village, war of the country all start on account of clinging to something. Let go of what has been clung to, and the war will cease. But you don’t like to, for you conceive of the thing clung to as ‘mine;’ conceive of it as ‘permanent.’ What you have clung to, be it the country, race, religion, dignity, occupation, survival, or leadership ― these impermanent phenomena will be the causes of your coming into being.

Lord Buddha sets forth that it is due to craving (tanhā) that clinging (upādāna) comes into existence. This very clinging is what drives you to birth, decay, sickness, and death. Therefore, if you cannot take a pause for a moment from that running, exercising, or trying to make your physique impressive, then, even as you continue to do them, leisurely think upon what this body is. Flesh, sinews, bones, blood, faeces, urine, bowels and intestines, phlegm and snot... Is there anything here to be made impressive? What’s there to make better in these things? There is only putridity; only utter disgust. This deserves abandonment, not improvement. In the morning you would spit out the foul spittle in your mouth, declaring it ‘not mine.’ The eye-discharge in the eye or the excrement and urine accumulated inside the body are disposed of as ‘not mine.’ The wind collected in the alimentary tract is expelled, regarding it as ‘not mine.’ You’d mop the clammy sweat on the body, thinking it ‘not mine.’ Much in the same way, cast off the abiding ignorance-filled perception: “There is a being, a person in me; Must improve his health; Must tauten his muscles,” considering it ‘not mine.’ Break free of the pernicious view that conceives of ‘I am,’ that conceives there is a distinct entity existing in me that can wield some sort of dominion.

Have you no shame? Do you feel no disgust or repugnance at regarding as ‘mine’ a corpse, a carcass that used to be a peta-ghost, a denizen of niraya, a wild animal in the past? And to be referring to it as ‘I’? Aren’t you abashed? If you still don’t feel ashamed, reread this essay over and over. What you’re thus reading is the way to extricate yourself from your form―rūpa; the way to extinguishment. Without being pleased at thinking of this, behold that the pleasure felt is but impermanent. By perceiving as impermanent the mind that arose and passed away, enter the path to extinguishment.

Contemplate in earnest how the body is. Have you ever seen a handsome domestic fowl? Adorned with colourful plumage, the rooster has a form that is pleasing to the eye. This handsome chicken, having been taken to the poultry shop, with all the feathers [of the dead bird] plucked and cleaned, you may have seen it hung on a steel hook or displayed in a glass refrigerator, for sale. It now has only the skin. No beautiful plumage.

Now you behold your own body. Either in imagination or in the flesh, unclothe your body in private. Contemplate your body as if standing before a mirror. Is there any difference between your body and the body of that featherless chicken hanging in the poultry shop? Your body is just like a chicken denuded of feathers. Humiliate your vanity-filled mind with self-abasement. Discomfit the mind. Shatter the conceit. Just as it was the beautiful plumage that made the fowl beauteous, so too it is your clothes, jewellery, and perfume that present you as beautiful. Outside embellishments beautify [your] chickenesque body, pushing you further away from reality, obscuring your vision with the shroud of ignorance.

The marketplace for these means the locus where ignorance is being sold. The merchants of the marketplace would sell ignorance, packaging it, bottling it, laying it in boxes, sticking alluring labels, running TV ads, displaying massive billboards, and flashing neon lights. Why people work jobs in factories and worksites from morning till night is to make money to buy this ignorance. On the one hand, they themselves produce ignorance; on the other, they are the ones buying ignorance. Depending on the state of the haves and have-nots of society, the calibre of this production and purchasing varies. That the world is developing in the field of goods and services means: ignorance is developing; the production and purchasing of ignorance are soaring.

Now you leisurely think, are you also a slave of ignorance? Revered-you, devote the time you spend on running, exercising, or keeping the body in the best of health to insightfully understand this body. The mind, which you cannot lay claim to, which is a complete stranger to you; bring it under your control. Engender mindfulness. Let go of the thought that whispers to you, “run! exercise!” Then running and exercising will no longer be of interest to you. Maintain good health by keeping a tight rein on your taste buds. Be someone with a healthy body while seeing its impermanence. Use the healthy body not to flaunt it in front of the world but to transcend the world. Make your healthy body a vehicle to arrive at the door to the deathless―the extinguishment. Make certain you never become a sprinting cheetah again, nor a monkey giving its body a gruelling workout, nor a peta-ghost doing gymnastics in the sky from having taken rebirth in that form on account of clinging to exercise, workout drills, and suchlike.