An Atheist Explores the Dhammapada Part 12: A Life is a Terrible Thing to Waste (11 Old Age/Jaravagga)

Dhammapada Part Eleven: Old Age (Jaravagga)

A Life is a Terrible Thing to Waste.

“Behold this body — a painted image, a mass of heaped up sores, infirm, full of hankering — of which nothing is lasting or stable!”

Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Dhammapada).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Dhammapada, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/3IbwtwE

For the online Dhammapada that I use, see here https://bit.ly/3IgCiJr

And now:

Dhammapada Part Eleven: Old Age (Jaravagga)

There are echoes of Ecclesiastes and the “Preacher”’s lamentations that all is vanity. The body grows old and wears out, leaving “dove-colored bones […] like gourds that lie scattered about in autumn”. Why bother doing anything, if “this city (body) is built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood; within are decay and death, pride and jealousy”?

The answer, of course, is to seek enlightenment, to become free from desire and attachment, to attain “the destruction of craving”. A first-person narrator intrudes here, saying how they have sought, in vain, for the “builder of the house of life”, doomed to be stuck in the samsara. But “the Dhamma of the Good does not age”, and so following it stops a person being like a bull, growing in bulk but not wisdom, or “old cranes in the pond without fish”, or “worn out arrows (shot from) a bow”.

I’d have to check (it’s always hard to recall exactly doing these sections a day at a time), but I think this is the first mention in the Dhammapada of leaving the eternal cycle of rebirth, the samsara, an idea oft-repeated when we looked at the Bhagavad Gita (Edit: Yes, it is the first time this gets mentioned). What we also see here is the disdain for the physical body, which I’d guess underlies that practice in some variants of Buddhism where monks have to spend some time living among corpses on the charnel grounds, to learn the fallibility of flesh. I also found a short Buddhist verse that basically recites thirty-two elements of the body, including such things as bile and phlegm, presumably once again to build antipathy for the body.

Personally I think one could use a bit more equanimity. The body is the body, and (as a fundamental materialist), the mind is purely the operational output of the physical brain. There is no separate spirit, consciousness, awareness, soul etc. absent a functioning central nervous system. There’s nothing wrong with exercising abstract thinking, compassion and so on, but one should consider the physical existence, our only existence, as a potential blessing, not a curse. Even those lacking various functional parts of the body can still achieve wonders by their mere human capacity; don’t belittle that.

And so I find myself at odds with the sentiments expressed in this chapter. I’d also take it further, with my questioning of the nature of detachment from earlier chapters. Is it, really, a good thing to attempt to do away with all earthly things, to distance oneself from likes and dislikes, and to disdain the physical as a mere waiting room on the way to nirvana? If everybody did that, then what? There would be no society, no progress, very little interaction, no culture, nothing, really. I suspect, and hope, that what I’m giving here is an extreme version of what the Dhammapada espouses, and that we’ll see a bit more acknowledgement that, actually, we are alive in this life now, so actually use the damn thing.