body, Indian Buddhists developed a uniquely Buddhist
form of meditation on the body, which is praised in
Buddhist scripture as the sine qua non of salvation.
Called “mindfulness of the body,” this contemplative
technique entails breaking the body down into its
thirty-two constituent parts, including internal organs
such as the heart, the liver, the spleen, and the kidneys.
The anatomical analysis in this cultivation of mind-
fulness of the body is so detailed that some scholars
credit members of the early Buddhist monastic order
(SAN ̇GHA) with a decisive role in the development of
ancient Indian anatomical theory. Kenneth Zysk has
argued that concern with ritual impurity limited the
extent to which other (namely Brahmanical or proto-
Hindu) religious specialists could serve as healers and
carry out empirical studies based on dissection. Re-
strictions concerning the handling of bodily wastes
from persons of different social classes and the disposal
of dead bodies limited what Brahmanical caregivers
could offer in the way of medical care and empirical
research. With their relative, but certainly not absolute,
indifference to Brahmanical purity strictures, members
of the Buddhist san ̇gha acquired a great deal of em-
pirical knowledge of bodily processes and led the way
in medical advances.
The ambiguity of the body
If Zysk is correct in asserting that Buddhist monastic
communities in India were less hindered by constraints
concerning the handling of bodily wastes and dead
bodies, this is not to say that members of the Buddhist
san ̇gha regarded the body as intrinsically valuable, nor
that their conceptions of the body were untouched by
concerns about bodily purity and pollution. Cultivat-
ing distaste for the body by noting with disgust the dis-
charges from various apertures of the body constitutes
an initial stage of psychophysical training practiced by
monastics of virtually all Buddhist denominations.
With its orifices producing mucus, earwax, sweat, ex-
crement, and the like, the body is conventionally imag-
ined as a rot-filled pustule, a boil with many openings
leaking pus. For MONKSand NUNSwho are afflicted by
sensual desire and who view bodily pleasures like eat-
ing, bathing, self-adornment, and sexual activity as in-
herently pleasing, developing a sense of aversion
toward the body by visualizing it as a foul pustule or
by contemplating corpses in various stages of putre-
faction is recommended as an antidote to sensuality.
And if the generic human body is comparable to a
leaky bag of filth, the female body is regarded as even
more disgusting. This perception is perhaps due to the
fact that it has an additional aperture lacking in males,
an aperture prone to emitting periodic quantities of
blood (Faure, p. 57). In any case, literary representa-
tions of meditations of the loathsomeness of the body
tend to be overwhelmingly androcentric. Such narra-
tives, embedded in hagiographies of various denomi-
nations, are filled with scenes of dying and diseased
women observed by male spectators. Female specta-
tors who appear in such narratives are depicted in ways
that conform to the andocentric orientation of the
genre. Male bodies almost never function as objects of
contemplation for women in these narratives. Instead,
women contemplating the foulness of the body observe
their own aging bodies or those of other women. While
Buddhist discourse holds all bodies to be impermanent
and subject to disease, such hagiographies suggest
there is nothing so effective as a female body to make
this basic truth concrete.
As unsettling as many of these accounts may be, one
should not assume that Buddhists are phobic about the
body. The aversion such accounts induce is not an end
in itself but a remedy for pleasure-seeking. Ultimately
the outlook meditators seek is neither attraction nor
revulsion but indifference. Contemplation of the foul-
ness of the body is sometimes described as a “bitter
medicine” that may be terminated once greed for bod-
ily pleasures has been overcome. After having served
its purpose as a counteractive practice, disgust for the
body should ideally give way to a more neutral atti-
tude. Moreover, in comparison with the bodies of non-
humans, the human body is a blessing. Buddhists
across Asia recognize that human birth is rare, and
many Buddhists regard human embodiment as an es-
sential prerequisite for achieving awakening. Although
human bodies may be of a gross material nature com-
pared to those of divine beings dwelling in heavenly
realms, humans enjoy occasions for awakening that
gods and goddesses lack by virtue of the very sublime
material conditions in which they live. Rebirth as a god
or goddess is a worthy goal for LAITY, who may not be
in immediate pursuit of awakening, but it holds little
charm for those monks and nuns who do not wish to
defer their awakening by hundreds of years. For them,
embodiment as a human being is a valuable opportu-
nity not to be wasted.
Thus, much depends on the perspective when eval-
uating the status of the human body for Buddhists. If
treated as an intrinsically valuable thing, the body can
obstruct the experience of awakening, preventing one
from seeing things as they really are. But when used
instrumentally as a locus of meditation and insight, theBODY, PERSPECTIVES ON THE