Unattractive

As Ajaan Fuang used to say, the breath is the basis of our skill here, and concentration focused on the breath is the safest of all the concentration practices.

It’s the one where you can see most clearly the stages of jhana as the mind settles down. You can see the different kinds of fabrication: bodily, verbal, mental. Bodily, being the breath itself. Verbal being directed thought and evaluation—the way you talk to yourself. Mental being perceptions—the images and words you use to give meaning to things, identify them. And then feelings—feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Those are all easiest to see as you’re focused on the breath.

You’re bringing knowledge to an area where usually there’s a lot of ignorance. And it’s an area that’s very important: It’s how we shape our experience. There are a lot of reasons why, in Ajaan Lee’s phrase, the breath is our home base.

But as he also says, you don’t stay at home all the time. Sometimes you have to forage around for food. In other words, it’s good to know other meditation methods as well. For some people, it’s hard to focus on the breath, at least in the beginning. They have to do something else to get the mind to settle down.

You can think thoughts of goodwill to put the mind in a good nice warm state, and then the breath flows more easily.

Sometimes you have to deal with thoughts of lust, which is why we have the contemplation of the body, or as the Buddha says, the contemplation of the unattractive.

It’s good to realize it’s not just the body that’s unattractive. Here again, Ajaan Lee points out that there are a lot of mind states that are also unattractive—pride, lust. As we think about the body and what’s attractive about the body, what’s attractive about getting involved in somebody else physically, we have to learn to see that it’s pretty stupid. That’s Ajaan Suwat’s translation for avijjā. It’s not just ignorance, it’s stupidity.

So, it’s not just the body that we’re going to be talking about when we talk about the unattractive. We’re also talking about aspects of the mind, mind states, that want to make lust and pride around the body attractive.

After all, it’s pretty easy to see the body’s unattractiveness. Everything that comes out of the body is smelly. I know of a woman who complained that her children came out of her body, and there’s nothing smelly about her children. Well, at the moment they came out, the smell was really strong, and they were not at all clean. They had to be cleaned before they could be presentable.

If you could imagine the body going apart, taking just the skin off the outside, you’d run away. Or take the parts individually, one by one, put them on the floor, still covered with blood: Again, you couldn’t stand to be around them. The sight, the smell, would just be too much to take. We can develop all these fantasies around getting attracted to somebody else, getting them attracted to us. But you have to ask yourself, why? What’s it all about?

There’s a lot of self-delusion in lust. A lot of people think that when they’re lustful, they’re attractive. Others like to think they’re pretty clever.

I’ve told you the story about the time when I was teaching in Indiana at a university there. A friend of mine who was a professor of comparative religion had asked me to come and talk to one of his classes. He told me afterwards that the class discussed what it was like to talk to a Buddhist monk. One young woman, who sat in the front of the room, very attractive, said she was surprised at how intelligent this monk was. She had always assumed that monks were subhuman—the idea being that they were just too dumb to be successful at their lust.

So, what is this pride that goes along with lust, this self-image that you’re attractive enough to make somebody else feel attracted to you?

There are other things that go on in fantasies of this sort as well. Sometimes lust is bound up in thoughts of revenge. You fantasize about getting somebody who’s treated you poorly. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in lust. You should learn to see it as stupid. That way, when thoughts come in like that, you’re more likely not to fall for them.

That’s the whole point. You’re falling for your defilements. Or, in Ajaan Mun’s phrase, you’re their laughingstock. All they have to do is paint a little picture, and you go running after them. Then they deny you what you want. Yet even if you do get what you think you want, it’s not going to satisfy you. So, why go for it? Why aggravate these thoughts?

You want to dig deeper and deeper.

So, it’s not just an issue of the unattractiveness of the body. That is important, because the more clearly you have a strong sense of the unattractiveness of the body, the easier it is to see how stupid these other thoughts are. They’re getting all worked up over what? A liver? Intestines? The contents of the intestines? The eyeballs? It’s just not worth it. You can see how ridiculous it is. Then it’s a lot easier to put it aside.

So, there’s a tendency that we have to resist contemplation of the body, thinking that the Buddha is basically bad-mouthing something that’s perfectly okay.

Well, the body, of course, is okay. But often what we want to make out of it is the wrong thing. Remember, there’s an unhealthy negative, body image. There’s a healthy negative, body image; an unhealthy positive body image; and a healthy positive body image.

And you want to get rid of both sides of the unhealthy.

An unhealthy negative body image is when you see that your body is ugly, but other people’s bodies are beautiful, and you feel that it lessens you.

A healthy negative body image is when you realize we’re all in the same boat here. If we took out our livers, we took out our intestines, there’d be no point in having a contest as to whose was the prettiest. We’re all equal in this way. That helps to cut through the lust, the pride, and all the other unhealthy emotions that go around lust.

As for an unhealthy positive body image, you see that you’re beautiful, you’re good-looking, and you think that it gives you special rights over other people. The world treats you better, and you feel that you deserve to be treated better. That sets you up for a fall.

There was a TV interview whose transcript I was reading one time between a French actress and a French actor. The actor was saying that ugly women are harder to seduce than good-looking women because they don’t take you seriously. They know you’re being ridiculous. Whereas if you think you’re attractive and other people find you attractive, you’re willing to fall for whatever they have to say—any indication that they find you attractive, too. That’s a dangerous positive image.

A healthy positive image is that the body is useful for the practice. This is why we eat. This is why we contemplate food while we’re eating: not for the sake of beautification, not for the sake of putting on bulk, not just to play, but to keep the body going so that we can practice.

So, because we want to focus on that aspect of the body—its usefulness in the practice—we have to focus on its unattractive side to discourage the unattractive and stupid mind states we build up around it—both our bodies and other people’s bodies.

So include this kind of contemplation in your arsenal. It’s going to be a necessary part of protecting yourself, whether you need it before you settle down with the breath or once you’ve settled down with the breath and find the mind wandering away in the wrong direction. Have it ready. It’s for your protection. It’s for your true well-being.

Sometimes people think that the Buddha is being a killjoy, denying the pleasures of the body. He doesn’t deny the pleasures, he just says they’re stupid when compared to the happiness that can come when the mind is really trained. He wants you to use the body in the right way—to help you with your concentration, to help you with the practice of generosity and virtue.

He’s taking your happiness seriously. He’s more concerned for your true happiness than you are. So learn from him. It’ll be for your own good.