Attachment to the Body
July 14, 2021

Take a couple of good long deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention there, rather than on the tactile sensation of the air coming in and out through the nose.

When the Buddha talks about the in-and-out breath, he classifies it as part of the wind-property in the body and not as a tactile sensation. So get to know how the energy is flowing through the body: where you feel it as it comes in, where you feel it as it goes out. Place your attention there.

And allow it to be comfortable. Don’t force the breath too much. Just ask yourself, what kind of breathing would feel good right now? Longer? Shorter? Deeper? More shallow? You can just pose that question in the mind and see how the body responds. You’re trying to establish a good relationship here between the mind and the body so that you can settle down with a sense of ease and well-being.

You’re going to be watching the mind more than anything else, but first you have to watch the body, get used to the different kinds of breathing, and then be aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out.

The next step is to try to calm what the Buddha calls “bodily fabrication,” in other words, the in-and-out breath. He uses a technical term here. He could have said simply, “calm the in-and-out breathing,” but he wants you to think in terms of fabrication, what the mind is doing to shape the breath, because that’s going to be the big lesson of the meditation: the mind’s role in shaping things. It plays a more radical role in that way than you might think.

And a good place to get to know it is right here. The mind will have an influence on how the breathing goes in the body, and oftentimes the way you breathe will be a reflection of what’s going on in the mind. Sometimes it’s your early warning signal. A little something has arisen in the mind, it’s not yet clear in your awareness, but it already has an impact on the breath. If you learn how to be sensitive to the breathing, sensitive to the energies in the body, you can pick that up and notice what’s going on in the mind. That way, you can nip a lot of things in the bud.

The Buddha goes on to have you meditate, focused on the breath, inducing a sense of rapture, a sense of pleasure, getting sensitive to mental fabrication, in other words, your feelings and perceptions: the perceptions you hold in mind as you visualize the breath to yourself, as you visualize the breath moving through the body, and then the feelings of ease that you’re trying to give rise to. Here again, a technical term: “mental fabrication.” He wants you to see how these things have an impact on the mind and how you can try to calm that impact.

This is where you can start leaving your home base if you want and deal with some other things. As Ajaan Lee says, the breath is like a home for the mind. Other meditation topics are like its foraging places, places where you go when you need something and you get it, find it, bring it back. The breath is where you come to for a sense of well-being. It’s your default mode. But simply watching the breath, even though it can teach you an awful lot of things, can’t deal with all the problems of the mind. It can give you some symptom-relief, say, for ill will, or some symptom-relief for lust.

In other words, these unskillful mind states come in and they tense up the breath energy in the body. Well, you can relax the breath energy so that they’re not quite so oppressive, don’t seem so insistent, so powerful. But that doesn’t get to the reason why you’re attracted to them. Why do these particular mental fabrications, say, have such a power over the mind? How are you going to calm that influence? Not just by the way you breathe, but by understanding them.

One of the big issues, of course, is your attachment to the body. Here’s the irony of all this. We’re staying with the body, staying with the breath, but at the same time we have to learn how to detach ourselves from it. After all, we’re not going to be here together forever. There will have to be a separation. And as we were saying this afternoon, a lot of us feel that without the body we wouldn’t be anywhere. So you can imagine when it’s no longer possible to stay here, the amount of desperation the mind will feel at that point, and in its desperation it’ll grab at anything.

This is why, even though craving is what leads to another rebirth, we often go to places where nobody in their right mind would want to go. It’s because we’re desperate. So we learn how to contemplate the body in such a way that we’re not desperate over the fact that we have to leave it. We prepare the mind ahead of time.

As in that list of the 32 parts of the body we chanted just now: It’s useful for asking yourself, which part of the body is you? Which part is really yours? Did you design these things? Did you design the skin? Did you design the liver? Did you design the small intestines? You just grabbed on to something that was there, a potential that was there in somebody’s womb, and as it grew you began to gain a sense of what you could do with it. You got really reliant on it. It’s a lot like someone who’s captured a slave and has gotten really dependent on the slave. You have to realize that for your well-being you have to learn to give the slave some freedom, because eventually the slave will take its freedom, and if you’re prepared you won’t be desperate.

This is where analyzing the body into elements is also useful. You’ve got earth, water, wind, fire. Get used to how you experience these things: Earth is solidity. Water is coolness. Wind is the energy. Fire is the warmth.

Then you’ve got space. I think I’ve told you the story of Yom Thaem, one of Ajaan Fuang’s students. She was meditating one night and a voice came into her meditation and said, “You’re going to die tonight.” She was the kind of person who was able to say to herself, “If I’m going to die, I might as well die meditating.” So she stayed in meditation. And she did have a sense that her body was falling apart. In fact, there was no place in the body where she could focus without pain. No matter how much she tried to work with the breath, it just wasn’t working. She said it was like a house on fire: Every room you went into was burning.

What to do? She thought of space. That’s another element. So she focused on space as her object. If the body was going to go, it was going to go, but she could hang out in space.

It turned out she didn’t die that night, but she learned a good lesson. If you really get to know the sensations of the body as you experience it, you can find a safe place to hide out. This is assuming that you haven’t gotten any deeper insights.

But you can also use the 32 parts of the body as your topic of contemplation. Think of each of the parts and then ask yourself, “Where is that part right now?” Then ask yourself, “Is there anything of any essence there? Could that part survive on its own?” No. “Is it useful for anything?” Yes. “But does it have any essence?” No. “Is it the same as the mind? Is the brain the same as the mind? Is the tongue the same as the mind? The liver? The spleen?” No.

The mind is something else. The mind knows. The image you have is an object of the mind. The sensation you have in the body, that’s an object of the mind. These objects of awareness are not the same thing as the awareness. See if you can make that distinction.

Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about what an important milestone in his practice it was when he was able to separate mind, body, and feeling. He was dealing with some intense pain, but he began to realize that although there’s pain in the body, the pain and the body are not the same thing. The body is the four elements, the pain is something else, and the awareness of both of those is something else again. He was able to make those distinctions clearly. That’s what enabled the awareness to be there on its own. It didn’t even have to take space as an object, it just had awareness as its own object.

He began to realize that even though he depended on the body for so long, the awareness didn’t need the body. When you can see that clearly, that does a lot to reduce your desperation when the time comes that you have to leave the body once and for all.

This is a lot of the practice. It’s strange that in modern Buddhism they like to take issues of aging, illness and death and put them off on the side, saying, “Those are specifically for old people or sick people but the real practice is someplace else.” But for the Buddha they were the big issues. This is why as a young man he went off to practice to begin with. We owe the Dhamma to the fact of aging, illness and death, and to his desire to overcome them, to triumph over them. All of his teachings take their meaning from them. The first noble truth: Suffering is aging, illness, death. Dependent co-arising explains how we give rise to aging, illness, and death, and how we can stop doing that. We focus on the present moment because work needs to be done here in training the mind so that when death comes we will have done our work. Or if death comes before that point, at least we’ll realize we haven’t wasted our time.

So death lies at the center of all the Buddha’s teachings. When we’re contemplating the body, it’s to prepare us for the moment of death. When we’re working with the breath, even though the breath will leave us at that point, the fact that we’ve been working with the breath will have taught us a lot about the processes of fabrication in the mind so that we’re not deceived by them, so that they don’t make us desperate. After all, there will be perceptions and feelings: They’ll be screaming at you at that point. But if you can reduce their impact on the mind by seeing that they’re separate from the awareness, then you can handle aging, illness, and death a lot more calmly and with a lot more skill.

So learn how to use these teachings properly. The Buddha’s very clear about what their real purpose is. We take them, though, and we push them off in other directions, but that way we don’t get the most use out of them. When you realize that you can prepare properly for death, one of the things you find is that there is something that’s deathless, something that doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, doesn’t die. It can be touched right here where you’re experiencing the body right now. That’s why the Buddha says it’s touched by the body or with the body, but it’s not a tactile sensation. It’s a different type of touching. But it does exist, and it is the end of suffering.

And if you can’t find it now while you’re wandering around doing your daily chores, it is possible, the Buddha said, to find it at death. Which means that you want to train your mind so that it’s ready to keep on doing the work even as death approaches. Even when the body is falling apart, you still want to be able to do your practice.

So learn how not to get waylaid by pains here and there or being tired here and there. The work of meditation is something that will carry you all the way through, so learn how to master it. Don’t let yourself be satisfied with just a so-so job. Try to do the job really well. After all, when death comes, you want to handle that really well, too. You don’t want to handle it just so-so. So give your best to the practice right now.