In Engaging in the Bodhisattvas’ Deeds, Shantideva also discusses the filthy nature of the body at length. There, too, you should understand he was teaching an antidote to sexual desire to an audience of monks.
Attachment to the body arises dependent on conceiving the body of the person you find attractive to be clean and pure, when in fact it is filled with filth. When you feel attachment arising, contemplate the unclean nature of the body as described in the verses below. This will counteract your incorrect conceptions about the body and make your view more realistic. Whether male or female, from head to toe there is not one bit of the body that is clean. We can see this is true because we have to continually clean our body. If the body were clean, we wouldn’t need to constantly wash it.
What follows is a clear explanation of reasons not to be attached to a woman’s body. Attachment to a man’s body is to be dealt with in exactly the same way, with exactly the same reasons.
149.Her mouth is a vessel of impurity,
with putrid saliva and gunk between her teeth.
Her nose is a pot of snot, phlegm, and mucus,
and her eyes contain eye-slime and tears.
150.Her torso is a container of excrement,
holding urine, the lungs, liver, and such.
The confused do not see that a woman is such;
thus, they lust after her body.
Attachment Is Inappropriate Because the Body Is Unclean in Nature
The mouth is not clean — it is filled with saliva that has a sour, rancid taste. There is scum and leftover food around the teeth. We are all the same, aren’t we? Our mouth is a container full of unclean substances.
In the nose are snot, phlegm, and mucus. The eyes have their own special kind of dirt that congeals around the edges of the eyelids and in the corners of the eyes. If you put your finger in your ear and wiggle it, you’ll see all the dirt and earwax that is in there. The torso is full of filth as well — urine, bile, and organs that, when seen, we find disgusting. There’s no need to mention the filth that comes out of the anus. In short, filth leaks from all bodily orifices. The body is like a bag filled to the brim with filth and tied up at the top — a full garbage bag that is soft and smooth to the touch, but when it is pierced, disgusting substances ooze out.
Meditation on the body being unclean is one of the principal meditations involved in the establishment of mindfulness of the body. Together with establishing mindfulness of feelings being duhkha in nature, the mind being impermanent, and phenomena being selfless, mindfulness of the body is part of the four establishments of mindfulness, a practice done by those on the hearer, solitary realizer, and bodhisattva paths.
151.Like unknowing persons, who have become
attached to an ornamented vessel filled with filth,
ignorant and confused worldly beings
are attached to women.
152.If the world is greatly attached
to the putrid objects that are bodies
that should cause non-attachment,
how then can it be led to non-attachment?
One Attached to Sexually Attractive Bodies Cannot Be Free of Attachment
Someone may become attached to a beautiful vessel studded with jewels, not knowing that it is filled with excrement. Similarly, out of ignorance people become attached to the bodies of others, even though inside they are completely foul.
We are greatly attached to the putrid body that should evoke non-attachment in us. As long as we are attached to such a bag of fetid crud, how can we be free of attachment? When we consider the undesirable consequences of attachment — how it keeps us bound in cyclic existence and causes us problems in this life as well — our inability to free ourselves from it is frightening.
153.Just as filth-loving pigs are greatly attached
to heaps of feces and urine,
so too are desirous people greatly attached
to heaps of feces and urine, like filth-loving pigs.
154.Foolish persons imagine
that this city [of bugs] that is the body,
with cavities that are sources of filth,
is something conducive to pleasure.
Foolish People Superimpose Beauty and Cleanliness on the Body
The foolish impute beauty on the body and are attached to it, although in fact it is feculent. Similarly, pigs perceive human excrement, urine, and vomit as delicious and are attached to them. Flies see the phlegm we spit on the ground as wonderful food. While we see these substances as foul, we superimpose cleanliness and beauty on the body that is their source.
This unclean body is verminous, like a great metropolis bustling with thousands of different parasites, worms, and microbes that happily reside inside it. Why be attached to one of the holes in it, deceiving ourselves that it is attractive and desirable?
155.When you yourself see the impurities
of excrement, urine, and such,
how can the body, being composed of them,
be something pleasant for you?
156.It is produced by a seed of impure essence,
an admixture of ovum and semen.
How can the lustful be attached to it
when they know its nature is impure?
157.One who lies with this filthy mass,
covered with skin moistened by those fluids,
is doing nothing more than
lying on top of a woman’s bladder.
Refuting Attachment to the Body of a Sexually Attractive Person
The body is produced from causes — the ovum and semen of our parents — which are unclean and filthy in nature. How can we think that this body that grows from these causes is pure? Attachment perversely superimposes cleanliness and beauty upon the body that is unclean and repulsive, even though when we examine the body, it is clear that it is composed of filth. When people have sex together, one sack filled with filth is connecting to another sack filled with filth, with a thin bit of skin separating them.
158.Whether it be beautiful or ugly,
whether it be young or old,
the body of a woman is filthy,
so to what special quality could you be attached?
Whether someone’s body is beautiful or ugly, young or old, what about it is worthy of attachment? Because the inside of the body is camouflaged by a layer of skin, some bodies appear beautiful to the naive. But inside, all bodies are composed of the same filthy substances. Since this is the case, how can you discriminate and lust after some and not others? Look at each organ or part of the body and examine if there is something worthy of attachment there. Seen in this way, it doesn’t make sense to talk about beautiful and ugly bodies when all are equally dirty and lacking in beauty.
True-grasping mistakenly apprehends an object such as the body as truly existent, and attachment arises based on that. The object mistakenly appears beautiful and clean to the mind of attachment, and that mind incorrectly apprehends it to be beautiful and pure. Attachment to the body is a wrong consciousness. There is nothing in the body to be attached to, and nothing about it to justify seeing it as attractive. Rather, see the body as it really is — unclean and ugly — and give up attachment to it.
159.It is not right to yearn for a pile of excrement,
even if it has a nice color or is very fresh or nicely shaped;
likewise, one should not yearn
for a woman’s body.
160.While the nature of this rotting corpse,
with its putrid core covered with skin,
looks extremely terrible,
why [do the lustful] not see it?
161.“The skin is not impure;
it is just like a soft cloth.”
Like a leather bag filled with a turd,
how could it be clean?
Does is make sense to be attached to a nicely colored, beautifully shaped, fresh heap of excrement? The shape and color of the body are actually no different from this. In addition, the body’s nature is like a rotting corps
e — given the passage of time, the person you now find attractive will die and the body will then in fact become a rotting, wet, messy, and putrid corpse.
When unclean organs and tissue are covered with skin, we project beauty and cleanliness on the body. In fact, it is like a bag of skin filled with a turd. If our minds were able to see that the body is unbearably disgusting, we would never lust after another person. Whatever way we look at it, attachment to the body is always inappropriate. How is it that we do not see this?
162.While a vase filled with excrement might glitter,
it is still objectionable.
The body, whose nature is unclean, is filled with filth;
why isn’t it objectionable?
163.If you object to excrement,
why not object to this body
that takes pure perfume, garlands, food, and drink
and turns them into filth?
Rather than lusting after that which is not worthy of lust, we should see the body as foul. A beautiful jeweled vase full of feces is nothing to praise. Similarly, the body is nothing to extol and marvel at but rather is deserving of antipathy. If we found the excrement or entrails now stored in the body outside on the floor, we would be repulsed and immediately turn away in disgust.
We eat and drink all kinds of things that start out as appetizing, but the next morning they are feces and urine. Our very own body causes this transformation. No matter how clean and delicious food and drink may look at first, from the moment our body takes possession of them, it transforms them into nauseating substances. Therefore, the body is disgusting and not worthy of attachment.
164.A pile of excrement is objectionable,
whether it comes from you or someone else.
Why not then object to these filthy bodies,
whether [they are] your own or someone else’s?
165.Your own body is just as filthy
as the body of a woman.
So doesn’t it make sense to be unattached
to both the external and the internal?
Your Own Body Is Also Unclean
The filthy substances inside your own body and the bodies of others are equally disgusting. Rather than think your own body is pure simply because it’s yours, see that all bodies are equally foul. None of them are worthy of attachment.
If we came across some vomit from a person’s stomach, would it matter whose vomit it was? Not at all — we would want to get rid of that disgusting mess as soon as possible. Vomit is vomit, and ours is just as repulsive as the vomit of the person we love and the person we dislike. Since our body and the bodies of others are equally unclean, shouldn’t we regard our body as a sack of filth?
166.Even though you daily rinse off
the discharge from your “nine wounds,”
if you still do not realize that the body is impure,
then what is the point of explaining this to you?
People wear jewelry and apply cosmetics and fragrances to their bodies to inflame others’ desire. The seeming attractiveness they bestow is artificial and not in the least characteristic of the body itself. It is not at all appropriate to be taken in by a lovely smell and beautiful colors, thus allowing lust to fill the mind.
Nagarjuna says to the king, “The dirty nature of our body is visible to direct perception. Every day you see that this body constantly drips filth from its nine orifices, and you have to clean your body daily. Knowing this from your own experience, why don’t you realize that the body is impure? If you can’t see something as visibly obvious as this, what is the use of explaining it to you?”
Someone says, “It doesn’t make much difference whether we know or don’t know that the body is unclean.” This is not true, because by apprehending that which is unclean as clean, we create a lot of destructive karma. Stop for a moment and consider everything that is involved when you sexually desire someone. You do so many things to get the object of your desire; many of these activities are motivated by attachment, anger, jealousy, arrogance, and confusion, and thus you create destructive karmas.
Previously we discussed the four distorted conceptions that apprehend as clean, pleasant, permanent, and self what is actually filthy, unsatisfactory in nature, impermanent, and lacking true existence, respectively. Due to these wrong conceptions, afflictions arise and we engage in various destructive actions. Practicing the four establishments of mindfulness that are antidotes to the four distorted conceptions will increase our mental clarity and wisdom.
Each establishment of mindfulness correlates with subduing a different distorted conception. Mindfulness of the body overcomes thinking what is filthy is clean; mindfulness of feelings frees us from thinking what is unpleasant is happiness; mindfulness of the mind overcomes grasping what is impermanent as permanent; and mindfulness of phenomena counteracts believing what lacks a self to have one. The antidotes to these four misconceptions involve understanding the four aspects of the truth of duhkha — impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, emptiness, and selflessness. These are among the first topics the Buddha taught in his first discourse on the four truths of the aryas, which indicates how important it is to realize them.
In brief, the mind that apprehends the body as unclean is a valid mind, and the mind that apprehends it as clean is not. Even a buddha sees what is clean as clean and what is unclean as unclean. Although things do not exist from their own side, conventionally we can still differentiate clean and unclean. Someone may say, “Feces and other filth are not dirty in themselves. That is just a conception that you made up.” If that is so, would that person eat feces and drink urine, blood, and lymph for dinner? On a conventional level, people from all cultures consider excrement, urine, and other discharges from the body unclean.
Another person may say, “But flies consider our feces clean and eat it, and pigs will eat our vomit, so not all sentient beings consider bodily excretions foul. It is just due to our mental fabrications that we see these substances as filthy.” As human beings, we posit things as clean and unclean in relation to how they are seen in the human realm. Similarly, we posit what is edible in relation to ourselves. Although termites think a piece of wood is delicious, we human beings do not consider it food.
That person may then say, “But high tantric yogis can eat feces and urine.” When a skilled practitioner who has realized emptiness actually transforms filthy substances into inner offering, they become clean nectar. This situation is very different from that of ordinary beings.
167.Some compose romantic poetry
about this filthy body —
O, what shamelessness! What idiocy!
How worthy of people’s contempt!
168.In this [world], sentient beings,
obscured by the darkness of unknowing,
quarrel about what they lust for,
like dogs fighting over filth.
Romantic Poetry Is Laughable
Some people compose romantic poetry, praising the body of the person they are attracted to as being like the sun, the moon, or a lotus. They admiringly say it is fragrant, beautiful to behold, blissful, and smooth to the touch. These poems superimpose qualities on the body and their purpose clearly isn’t to be liberated from cyclic existence. If we think that these poems accurately portray the nature of the body, we are really foolish. The wise consider such poems laughable.
Obscured by the darkness of not knowing that the actual nature of the body is foul, most living beings are attached to their own and others’ bodies. Filled with jealousy and lust, they fight to gain the pleasure they seek from others’ bodies. In India, many stray dogs gather in the street and fight over the most disgusting-looking tidbits of refuse. Just like that, human beings fight over our own disgusting, unclean bodies and the bodies of others.
169.If you scratch an itch, it feels good,
but it feels even better not to have an itch at all.
So too, one is happy in obtaining worldly desires,
but there is greater happiness in
having no desires at all.
Refuting the Attachment Is the Cause of Happiness
Eczema is a skin disease that makes your skin itch terribly. While scratching it provides some small pleasure, people who are free of eczema altogether are happier. Similarly, those who drink and use drugs derive some modicum of pleasure from them, but people who don’t take these are happier. They have more comfort in their body, more peace of mind, and are not troubled by the nagging desire to get high.
Ordinary people think their attachment and desire for others’ attractive bodies is happiness and consider sexual intercourse to be the greatest pleasure. While they may experience some slight happiness from it, it is not ultimate happiness. If it were genuinely fulfilling, people would not have to have it again and again. In fact, there is even more happiness in not having sexual desire — those who are completely free of attachment, such as the arhats, have the most happiness.
170.When you analyze things in this fashion,
even if you are not yet freed from desires,
you will cease lusting after women
through the gradual decrease of your desire.
The Result of Meditating on the Unclean Nature of the Body
By meditating on the foul nature of the body, you will know the body for what it is — foul. After your meditation sessions, it may still appear beautiful to you due to the power of your attachment to it. But as you repeatedly engage in this practice, your attachment will gradually lessen, and your wisdom will increase. Over time your lust will diminish, bringing you more peace and relaxation.
The more you are able to subdue romantic attachment and sexual lust, the easier it will be to practice the three higher trainings. If you don’t meditate on the foulness of the body, you will continue on as before and will experience many obstacles in your practice of the three higher trainings.
Similarly, we should think about the body’s impure nature to counteract attachment to our own body. The purpose of this meditation is not to hate our bodies — to do so is neither realistic nor useful. We must take care of this body because it is the basis of our precious human life, which enables us to practice Dharma and progress on the path. We can keep our body healthy without considering it, or others’ bodies, as pure or worthy of attachment.
Practical Ethics and Profound Emptiness Page 21