Lessons In Practical Buddhism - Sirimangalo.Org

get in cars; it’s not a reason to be ashamed.
Sometimes you do have to fit in, and so you shower and you
wash your clothes. But you stop looking at the body as, “Oh,
I’m getting old or thin or flabby.” People look at things in
quite a different way when they haven’t practiced. People
are always telling me: “You look thinner than before,” but
the funny thing is that I get this every month or so. Every
time I see some people, they say, “you look thinner than
before.” I think if I was actually getting thinner, I would have
died by now. So I always say, “oh yes, I feel very light.
That’s good. I’m lighter than before.” So, asubha means
removing the perception of beauty in the body. When you
practice vipassanā, just watching the feet, you’ll start to see
the truth of the body.
The human body should be seen as a bit of a mistake, I think.
This is hard to stomach because we’re thoroughly
entrenched in this mistake, but the human body is not such a
wonderful thing. It’s more wonderful than, say, a worm’s
body or even a dog’s body, but it’s still kind of like someone
built a house and didn’t do a very good job at it. We could
have been built a lot better, no? We could imagine maybe
what an angel looks like. We could add wings or an aura, or
at least straight teeth and perfect eyesight. We could
actually smell like roses and clover; that would be nice.
So when we meditate, we start to realize that the human
body is not so beautiful, and that’s useful for us to let go of
it, because there is nothing intrinsically good about being
human. There is no benefit to this body we have taken up as
“ours”. The only benefit to being born a human is that you
can interact with and learn from other humans like the
Buddha. If we weren’t born human, if we were born as a
worm or an ant or a dog, we couldn’t have the chance to
learn the Buddha’s teachings. This is why the Buddha said
it’s very good to be born a human, but intrinsically there’s
nothing good about it, so as humans we have to come to
realize this and rise above even the human realm.
It’s much better to be born as an angel than as a human.
You can practice meditation much easier. So many angels
became enlightened in the time of the Buddha because they
could sit still in meditation for months on end. But being an
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