Identity and Experience_Hamilton_1996

The attitude towards the body
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axiomatically ariie from passions and desires, are produced by the
saM5rahWzandha and do not originate from the body, the nipakkhandha. This
understanding of the body's role does not suggest that a negative attitude
towards it is appropriate. From the teaching given in the Sutta @aka, it
would seem that the attitude towards the body should be neither negative
nor positive: one is to have a purely analytical attitude towards one's body.
In view of this doctrinal position, why do we also find canonical
statements which appear to refer to the body negatively? Why is there the
apparent paradox mentioned above? Before addressing the specific
quotations to which I referred above, I will suggest a few possible general
reasons for the presence in the canon of what appear to be negative
references towards the body.
The first and most obvious reason is the Brahmanical and Sramana
milieu in which Buddhist teachings were first promulgated. Some of these
traditions taught that the body and its secretions were polluting, and many
advocated physical asceticism and the mortification of the body. The
practice of overtly subjugating the body to physical duress, combined with
the view that it is polluting, indicate that the body was considered to have a
negative effect on one's chances of salvation. In the Pali canon itself, apart
from a very few exceptions, the Buddha taught that extreme physical
asceticism and self-denial were unnecessary. Indeed, they were potentially
as misleading as indulgence: what is required is the Middle Way. The texts
tell us that the Buddha himself, while still the bodhkatta Gotama, spent six
years as a wandering ascetic, subjecting his body to extremes of heat, cold,
hunger, thirst, and so on. It was not until he realised the futility of such
behaviour from the soteriological point of view, and relinquished it, that he
was able to become Enlightened.30 If, however, the negative view was
widespread, then it is likely that some of the people who were converted to
the teaching of the Buddha were influenced by this earlier attitude.
Second, Buddhist teachings allow room for what one might call a
'healthily negative' attitude towards the body. This is represented by the
Buddha's reaction to his observation of the human body as it is when old,
diseased and dead before he went forth from home, mentioqed above. And
its relevance is to the impersonality which lies at the heart of the Buddha's
teaching. Insight into this impersonality is liberating knowledge itself, and
ignorance of it is what binds us to sa?nscTric existence. If one has a slightly
sceptical, or detached, attitude towards one's body, one is less likely falsely
to identify with it.
That having been said, we do tend to identify with our bodies. And this
leads us to the third possible reason for negative statements about the body
in the Sutta R-taka. Faced with the Buddha's teaching that we are to realise
that all things are impermanent, unsatisfactory and impersonal, one might
instinctively apply this teaching to the body rather than to mental processes,
at least initially. Our experience is of a mind which is ever-changing,