A Fool for Sensuality

People sometimes complain about the chant that we have of the 32 parts of the body. “Why do we have to focus on that?” they say. “Don’t we have enough negative images of our own body to begin with?” Well, the short answer is that even if we have negative images of our body, we’re still fools for sensuality. A brief glance, a possible subliminal shape in an advertisement, can get us to do all kinds of stupid things. And that’s while we’re still alive and healthy.

Can you imagine what it’s going to be like when you’re sick for a long time and dying? You’ve been deprived of pleasures because your body hurts so much, it’s so weak. And as you’re dying, the opportunity for a sensual pleasure comes up: a beautiful body, a beautiful scene. You’ll go for it if you haven’t been trained, because your mind at that point is especially weak and especially hungry.

So you’ve got to train it while you’re still strong not to fall for these things. You have to ask yourself, “What is it about the body that attracts you? Where’s the allure? Which part? And that part is connected to what?” It’s connected to all the other organs of the body. The only reason you can see it as attractive is because you mentally block all the connections. You develop tunnel vision around it.

So we’re simply asking you to broaden your scope, to see that the allure is connected to a lot of things that are very unalluring, and they’re all bound up together. You can’t separate them out.

So it’s not like we’re bad-mouthing the body or trying to say untrue things about it. As Ajaan Suwat would always say, “What in that list of those 32 parts of the body is untrue?” We have all those things, and they’re all unclean. They’re all covered with blood, lymph, whatever else you’ve got in the body. And then there’s the smell. If you don’t bathe the body, after a while you don’t even want to be near yourself.

Years back, I happened to visit a health station in rural Thailand, and I arrived right after someone had given birth. The stench was all over the place. This is how we come. And then, when we go, the body and its smell are even worse.

So you want to change your knee-jerk reactions to images like this, because it’s the images that have a huge power over you. As I was saying this morning, when you think of the different parts of the body and you go down the list — hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh — try to have a feeling in your body for where those parts are. But the image is also going to be important, because we live by images. When we die, we die by images. We go to new births by images. And we’re a fool for those images. That’s what we’ve got to retrain.

Now, the issue is not just the images. They’re just the beginning of the analysis. But still, for a lot of people, this stage is hard. So work on it. Get so that you can have a knee-jerk reaction that sees the ugly side of the body. As soon as you notice something that seems attractive, you begin to connect it with other unattractive parts.

As for the part of the mind that objects to this practice, ask it, “Why do you object? What do you want out of this body? If you were to die, and an image of a body appeared to you, would you want to just go for it? Because of a glance, because of a certain line in the body, a certain shape, would you want to be a fool at that point?” Well, no. So there’s no reason to object to this kind of analysis.

It can get so that you get disgusted with your body, but we’re not asking you to go that far. Which is why the Buddha said that when unskillful mind states arise in the course of this analysis, go back to the breath. Breathe in a way that’s refreshing. Breathe in a way that gives pleasure. Breathe in a way that gladdens the mind. What you want is to be able to take an objective view of your fantasies, an objective view of the images that come into your mind. Step back from them. That’s all that’s asked.

Realize that those images are lying to you. All those tricks that advertisers have — putting subliminal shapes in their pictures — come from observing how your mind works. So keep going over and over and over this.

Ajaan Fuang had a student one time whose practice was to contemplate the body at least once a day. She would create a mental image of her body, and then take it apart into its various parts. One day, as she was doing this, another image of her body appeared right next to the first one. So she took that apart. And then even before she had finished the second one, a third one appeared. Then a fourth, a fifth. She said it was like fish lined up on a counter ready to fry, ready to grill.

Imagine the sense of tedium she felt. But as Ajaan Fuang said to her when she complained about this, “Well, yes, we are here to see the tedium of saṃsāra, but don’t focus on the tedium of the practice. The tedium of the practice is much less tedious than actually having to go through the suffering that comes when you fall for these things.”

So be willing to do it again and again until it becomes quite automatic. You look at somebody attractive and you can see immediately that they have their unattractive side as well. Even when there’s nobody else around, when an image of the body comes to the mind, you can immediately, as your knee-jerk reaction, look for the unattractive side. That enables you to pull back and say, “Well, what is it that makes you want to see it as attractive?”

There are the fantasies, the narratives, the idea of being loved by somebody else, the idea of your loving someone else. How reliable is all that? Love is so easy to destroy. Sometimes just a word or two, sometimes just an action or two, can destroy it. The allure of these things may be just the sense of your identity within the fantasy, your power within the fantasy—or your power to create fantasies: That also has its allure.

I think I’ve told you the story about the time I gave a talk to a group of college kids in Indiana. A friend of mine was a professor of comparative religion there, and he invited me to talk to the class. After the class, he asked them, “What was it like? What were their impressions of talking to a monk?” One of the women in the class, who was a cheerleader, said, “Well, I’d thought monks were subhuman, that they just didn’t have the intelligence to enjoy sensuality.”

There’s a certain pride that goes with the ability to generate sensual images. It’s foolish pride. You want to see the foolishness of all this.

Some people say that the big problem is the sense of “I,” so you should go straight for that. Well, no, before you go straight for that, ask yourself, “What does that ‘I’ serve? What does your sense of ‘me’ serve? What does my sense of ‘my power’ serve?” Often it serves your sensual fantasies. But then look at how unreliable they are. So look at what you’re trying to serve here, why you would have a sense of “I” to begin with. It comes down to this.

You know the story of Bāhiya, the ascetic who came to see the Buddha. The Buddha said, “In the seen is only the seen. In the heard is only the heard. Practice that way.” Bāhiya immediately saw that the problem was passion. Our sense of “I” is in service of our passions. Our passions are often so blind, so foolish. So before you tackle the sense of “I,” tackle your passions first. After all, the Buddha said that sensual desire is the fetter that gets cut before the fetter of “I am.”

So work on your sensual desire. See the value of not falling for your fantasies. See the value of not being a fool for sensuality. Realize that you’re releasing yourself from a huge bond, a huge mass of delusions. And you start out by focusing on this analysis of the body. This enables you to track out where the other strands of these delusions are that have you so tied down in the narratives, in the fantasies, in your role in the fantasies, in the crazy desires you have around sensuality.

Think of King Pasenadi. He had his queens. He was deluded enough to want them to love him more than they loved themselves. Yet if Queen Mallikā in that famous scene had said that she loved him more than she loved herself, how could he have really believed her? Sensuality is all a tangle of lies and uncertainties. Yet that’s where we want to find our pleasures.

Try to see the foolishness of all this. It’s a huge waste of time and it’s a problem that can’t be neglected. You can’t jump over it to do something more sophisticated and more subtle, because a lot of the more subtle and sophisticated things are there in service of this.

Learn how to investigate your attraction to sensuality, take it apart, so that you get to the point where you’re no longer the fool for sensuality that you have been for so long.