Framing the Body

There’s a famous photographer who takes drone shots of areas of industrial waste—places that have been destroyed by mining or manufacturing. He manages to make them look beautiful by the way he frames them.

Similarly, several years back, there was a photographer who went into an old folks’ home, got some of the old folks to pose naked. All the photographer took was pictures of expanses of wrinkled skin. And again, the wrinkles were interesting. They made nice patterns. You could see them as beautiful.

The lesson being that beauty depends on how you frame things.

You can photograph those same industrial sites in a way that makes them look really ugly. You can bring out the poisonous aspect of mining.

The same with old people. You can photograph them in ways that make them look really ugly.

It’s for this reason that your sense of beauty is pretty arbitrary. This is one of the reasons why we contemplate the body: to see that our ideas of how beautiful the body is or how desirable a body is, are very, very arbitrary. The perceptions of beauty or not beauty are not the real problem. The real problem is the desire to see beauty in areas that will cause a lot of trouble.

You notice, when the forest ajaans talk about contemplating the body, part of the contemplation, of course, is thinking about the different parts of the body.

If you’re lusting for a body or you’re proud of your body, which part are you proud of? Which part are you lusting for? Contemplate this for a while and you realize the problem is not the body, it’s the pride, it’s the lust—the desire for pride, the desire for lust. That’s an important lesson.

But then the ajaans also put the issue into context. Think about all the issues surrounding having a body. When you die, as long as you haven’t had a good training in getting past your desire to have a beautiful body, you’re going to look for a beautiful body to inhabit or one that looks good enough to go into.

But think of all the issues that come along with that as soon as you’re born. Where will you be born? In a safe place where people love you and take care of you? Or a place where people are being bombed, vaporized?

Are you going to be living in a place where your needs are easily met or a place where it’s going to be hard to meet your needs?

And how about the people you’re going to be living with? Will they love you and care for you, or abandon you? There are so many issues involved in having a body: the need to feed, the need for pleasure, having to depend on other people, who find it exasperating, having to depend on people who are actually cruel. You can be born in a tribe where they have no other way of finding their livelihood but by killing.

All these things can happen simply by taking on a body.

So, the issue is not just whether the body is attractive or not. It’s: Why do you desire a body to begin with? Once there’s the desire, you have the ability to frame things in any way to make them attractive, to justify them, to satisfy your desires. But do you really want to side with those desires?

This is what this contemplation is all about. Ajaan MahaBoowa talks about how he contemplated the unattractiveness of the body for many years. It got so that as soon as he saw any body, he could take it apart in his mind. He began to wonder: Was lust gone?

He realized there hadn’t been a moment where there had been an insight that had decisively put lust aside. He decided he couldn’t trust what he’d attained.

So, he tried the opposite tack. He thought of a very beautiful body clinging to his as he walked around, as he sat, as he lay down. He tried to see what reaction there would be.

For the first three days there was no reaction at all. But finally, on the fourth day, there was a slight movement in his mind that he’d like it. He realized lust was not gone.

So, what was he going to do now? He decided to test that perception. Why is it that you can look at a body one way and it’s attractive, and you look at it another way and it’s not attractive? What causes the mind to go for the attraction? Of course, it’s the desire. You’re using these perceptions to lure yourself, to lure the committee of your mind to go along with that desire for the body.

Now, because we’re attracted to human bodies not only for the body itself but also for their ability to provide us with an entry point into the human world, you have to ask yourself, with regard to whatever you think you could gain by having a body: What is it in the human world that you lust for, that you desire? Is it really worth it? We keep coming back, coming back, coming back. Yet how much satisfaction is there?

I had a student one time who, one evening in his meditation, started remembering back ten lifetimes. At the end of each lifetime, he had a strong feeling of, “What suffering! What suffering!” Yet, in spite of the suffering, we keep coming back.

Think of King Koravya in conversation with the monk Ven. Ratthapala. Ratthapala’s pointing out to him the truths of aging, illness and death.

When he was young, he was strong. But now he’s old. He means to put his foot one place and it goes someplace else: aging.

Illness: When he’s in pain, even though he’s a king, he can’t order his courtiers or subjects to share out the pain so that he feels less pain. He’s without protection there.

Death: He may amass fortunes, but then he has to leave them when he goes.

So, he’s been thinking about these things.

Yet then Ratthapala asks him, “Suppose there were a kingdom off to the east, and a reliable person came to say that with your army you could conquer that kingdom and have all of its wealth. Would you go for it?”

Here he is, 80 years old, contemplating aging, illness, and death, and yet he’d still go for it. “Sure. Why not?”

How about a kingdom to the south? To the north? To the west? How about on the other side of the ocean? “Of course,” in every case.

This shows how blind we are. We keep coming back to things that cause suffering. That’s because we haven’t found anything better.

This is one of the reasons why we meditate: to find that something better. Which is why you’re not really through with lust, you’re not really through with the desires to have a human body or to enter into the human world, until you reach non-return. You have to have some experience of the deathless to cut through these things totally.

But you can prepare yourself beforehand by looking at your desires and seeing how foolish they are. Psychologists talk about poisoning your fantasies. So, whether your fantasies about the human body have to do with the body itself or the with pleasures you can find by having a body or holding on to somebody else’s body, think about where the allure is and then see if you can poison that image to dissolve the allure.

One way is to think about having somebody else and yet they despise you. Or they’re untrue to you. Or you gain something that actually destroys you.

Or just think about the body itself. You signed on to this contract, but the body never signed on to any contract. It’s going to do what it’s going to do. If it wants to get sick, it doesn’t ask permission. Suddenly this body that you thought you could use to gain all sorts of things becomes a huge burden. Just keeping it functioning is all you can manage. It doesn’t give you room for anything else.

So, think about the body and learn to frame your issues properly. Body contemplation, as I said, is not just a matter of taking the body apart. It also involves thinking about all the issues that go with having a body, having to look after a body. And then it turns on you and becomes a huge weight.

Poison the fantasies. But at the same time, you have to provide yourself with something better inside the mind.

This is why the Buddha recommends that when you’re doing body contemplation, you also have breath meditation in reserve. When things get depressing or you feel frustrated, you have a good place to go inside. When you use the body in that way, you get some genuine benefit out of it.

The Buddha doesn’t say the body is all bad. After all, the problem is not with the body. It’s these desires that we have that are willing to pull us in all sorts of directions. If you learn how to use the body properly as an object of meditation, as a place to find some rest and well-being as you just stay with the breath, then you can take advantage of what you’ve got by using it for a higher purpose.