Theragāthā 237

Verses of the Senior Monks 10.5

The Book of the Tens

Chapter One

Kappa

1 Filled with different kinds of dirt,

a great producer of dung,

like a stagnant cesspool,

a big boil, a bad wound,

2 full of pus and blood,

sunk in a toilet-pit,

trickling with fluids,

this rotting body always oozes.

3 Bound by sixty tendons,

coated with a fleshy coating,

clothed in a jacket of skin,

this rotting body is worthless.

4 Held together by a skeleton of bones,

and bound by sinews;

it assumes postures

due to a complex of many things.

5 We set out in the certainty of death,

in the presence of the King of Death;

and having discarded the body right here,

a person goes where he likes.

6 Shrouded by ignorance,

tied by the four ties,

this body is sinking in the flood,

caught in the net of the underlying tendencies.

7 Yoked to the five hindrances,

afflicted by thought,

stuck to the root of craving,

hidden by delusion:

8 that is how the body goes on,

propelled by the mechanism of deeds.

But existence ends in perishing;

separated, the body perishes.

9 Those blind, ordinary people

who think of this body as theirs,

swell the horrors of the charnel ground,

taking hold of future lives.

10 The undefiled who shun this body

like a serpent smeared with dung,

having expelled the root of rebirth,

will be fully quenched.