“Around four billion years stand between our time and that distant aeon of life’s emergence. A number of that magnitude is hard for the human mind to comprehend. Its vastness seems to diminish the force of pointing to our common ancestry with all the living things on Earth. Closer to home are the one hundred billion nerve cells or neurons that make up the human brain. All are the progeny of a small fold of cells that emerged when we were embryos of about four weeks. Inside each one of them, in its protein and DNA, we can find a family resemblance to the genes and enzymes of all the other living cells on Earth. We harbor the past everywhere within our bodies. To the cells inside us the chemical composition of the somatic environment plays a role reminiscent of the ocean environment where the earliest cells resided. Three billion years ago bacteria swam in the warm shallows of the Earth’s primeval seas. Among their descendants today are the bacteria dwelling within our bodies, without which we could not live, while other remnants of their progeny, such as mitochondria and mobile cilia, exist inside our modern cells.”
– Evan Thompson, Mind in Life. p.91
Not everything in the Nikāyas is wise today, though it may been so, in the time of the historical Buddha. There are things said there that don’t support a healthy human attitude today. I’m thinking specifically of the body-hating tendency. We can’t know with any certainty, what the historical Buddha’s view of the body was, but if the Nikāyas are any indication, his attitude it not to be recommended for a modern person (lay or monastic, I believe.) His attitude to the body is extreme, and violent, and ill-informed from our present, scientific point of view.
The cavity of the head is filled with the brain; but the fool, because of his ignorance, regards it as a fine thing; (199)
When the body lies dead, swollen and livid, cast away in the cemetery, the relatives do not care for it. (200)
Dogs, jackals, wolves, worms, crows and vultures and other living creatures eat it. (201)
In the world, the monk who is wise, listening to the Buddha’s word, fully comprehends the body and sees it in its true perspective. (202)
– The Sutta-Nipata: A New Translation. Translated by Saddhatissa
In the Vakkali Sutta which I quoted from yesterday, the body is referred to as a “corrupt,” or as ‘foetid’ (pūti). I looked in the Pali-English Dictionary for a word reflecting a more balanced attitude, but there was none. If I had to translate that passage, I’d have to say something like ‘decaying,’ to even get in the ballpark of ‘balanced’; but a critic would rightly say I was playing down the dismissal of the body as ‘putrid.’ The Nikāya Buddha says, “Enough, Vakkali, what is there for you to see in this putrid body?”
I wouldn’t hang around with a teacher like this, in these times. Not only because of his distorted view of the body, but because he has missed the point underneath the sick Vakkali’s wish to come and see him: “For quite some time, dear Sir, I have wanted to set eyes on the flourishing one.” – “Enough, Vakkali, what is there for you to see in this putrid body?” In modern terms, in this incident the Nikāya Buddha doesn’t hold the transference very well.
But such comparisons are odious, as the English poets say. Instead of the usual holding of the Nikāya Buddha as infallible, I would be now using modern standards to judge this figure of the past, one who could not have had our modern consciousness, for the obvious reason that such consciousness as we have now had not developed at that stage. He has the imperfections of his time – how could it be otherwise? Just as we have the short-comings of our own time; which will be known hence, no doubt.
There is, on the other hand, much wisdom, in the approach to the body in the Nikāyas, which we can use to our benefit. For instance, the recognition that the body has its down-side; that whatever we think it is – beautiful, for example – it is otherwise, merely because no dependently-arisen appearance can have only one dimension. For instance, a person sees another who they think is beautiful, handsome, desirable, attractive, and so on. However, that body is also vulnerable to change unto sickness, ageing and death.
The admirer, also, knows nothing about the immediate bodily health of the other. They may have a cancer which they themselves know nothing about! The mind’s-eye of the beholder (unless they have trained themselves in dispassion), when it sees the beautiful one, does not take into account the reality of the vulnerabilities of bodies. To the untrained eye, there is just physical beauty. We can take that warning on board.
To go deeply into our relationship with the body, we have to somehow hold both these things. Both statements can stand: a body may be seen to be beautiful – from a perspective. And, at the same time, that same body can be seen to be not-beautiful – from a perspective. So, my point – without going further into a very deep topic – is that extreme, body-hating views are no more enlightened that the views of the infatuated, untrained mind.
Thankfully, I don’t need the Buddha of the Nikāyas to be a perfect hero. I think that is an ideal – one that humans seem devoted to, but from which we suffer. Indeed, one of my awakenings into more freedom in the study of these suttas, came when I recognised that the Buddha of the Nikāyas was portrayed as a patriarchal, warrior stud. He’s a ‘bull of a man.’ (See John Powers. A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism). Furthermore, in their attempt to make him superhuman, the compilers of the Nikāyas gave us physical descriptions which are ridiculous, even grotesque. As he is described in the Discourse on the Physical Characteristics (Digha-Nikāya, II1-144-145), he is said to have:
“…flat feet; a thousand-spoked wheel pattern (cakra) on the soles of his feet and palms of his hands; hands that reached down to his knees without him bending over; webbed fingers and toes; soft and tender hands and feet; skin so smooth and delicate that no dust or dirt could settle on it; golden-colored skin; a prominent cranial lump on top of his head (usnisa); a curl of white hair in the middle of his forehead that when unwound reached to his elbows (urna); a straight torso; legs like an antelope’s; a torso and jaw like a lion’s; eyelashes like a cow’s; hairs that grew one to each pore and curled to the right; a long and wide tongue; and a penis hidden by a sheath.”
– John Powers. A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism (p. 9).
Now, of course, it’s easy to make fun of this. I am honouring that these texts are repositories of cultures long-gone, at the same time as conveying some very powerful concepts which can carry our experience forward.
And, there are incidents that show the Nikāya Buddha as very human. The picture of his last days, for instance, are realistic. The Nikāya Buddha of my mythos probably died, not from a poison meal, as the story has it, but from a mesenteric ischemia, leading to an infarction. That is, his guts gave up on him, purely out of old age. How human is that! (There’s a readable paper on the likelihood, here.)
There really needn’t be an issue for a mature practitioner, though; because, if we look at the kind of approach toward experience that is recommended in, and cultivated through, the Nikāyas – the actual practice of meditation, mindfulness, compassion and inquiry – in that, there is no room for body-hating. Did the body-hating monks introduce that stuff later? Maybe. I suggest that we might never know, unless textual analysis proves it so, in decades to come. On the other hand, maybe the historical Buddha was anti-body in some contexts, but neutral in others. (Remember ‘lines of development’?) However, he is positive about the role of the body in mindfulness – that we can be certain of.
The core thing is: What parts of this body of wisdom texts resonate with you? What, in these teachings, can carry you forward in your life? Paying attention to how they live in your body, and whether or not your life goes deeper according to your deepest values – that’s a guide.
But, as for an ideal human to believe in, that’d be a stretch, to find her or him anywhere. Personally, I think we have an ethical duty to all, to not fool ourselves, where possible.