溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
How Shall I See This Body?
If this body is beautifully adorned yet sickens and crumbles — do I clutch it with attachment, or see it as it is?
Behold this painted image, a body built up of wounds.
The Dhammapada's question — see this body as it is — sits within the lineage of how to meet the body's impermanence. Buddhism made the contemplation that sets down attachment to the body a path of liberation, and the Stoic and medieval Christian memento mori likewise gazed at the body's transience to gain wisdom. This lineage finds freedom in the honest facing of impermanence. But an opposite lineage existed. Greek sculpture and Renaissance art carved the body's beauty as an ideal, and modernity made grooming, preserving, and displaying the body the center of life. Is the body's impermanence to be faced and released, or held onto as beauty? The lineage split.
The more an age ceaselessly grooms and displays the body's image, the more this question — can I see this body as it is? — asks after the border between clinging and care.
The Buddha bids us see the beautifully adorned body as it is: built of wounds, full of sickness, crumbling, withering in age and scattering in the end.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
The Buddha bids us see the beautifully adorned body as it is: built of wounds, full of sickness, crumbling, withering in age and scattering in the end. I read this not as a call to loathe the body but as a teaching to set down the attachment that mistakes the body for something eternal and solid. From the place of seeing the body's impermanence as it is, freedom instead arrives. Do I clutch this body as if it would not age, would not fall apart? Can I see it as it is? I stand before this question too.
✍️Your Answer
The lineage of the ancients ends here. Now it is your turn before the question. There is no right answer — only how you, today, would answer.
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This is not a museum of answers but a lineage of questions. All sources are public-domain texts; the lineage and reflection are 100% original ONGO content.
