The Destiny of the Body

Chapter II

The Seeking and the Escapist Urge

"All philosophies start in the contemplation of death."

(Schopenhauer)

Metaphysics arises from man's desire to know, in a world of change and transitoriness, just where he is journeying; it arises whenever man seeks 'to map the Universe and to plot his position within it'.¹

Indeed, "the one question which through all its complexities is the sum of philosophy and to which all human enquiry comes round in the end, is the problem of ourselves, — why we are here and what we are, and what is behind and before and around us, and what we are to do with ourselves, our inner significances and our outer environment".²

It has been said that 'an ant is never stricken with amazement, nor does a star consider itself a nonentity'.³ But a 'divine discontent' has seized man who occupies such 'a strange position in the great realm of being'.⁴ Eternal is his seeking for the meaning of existence, the meaning of life and the meaning of death, the meaning of himself and that of the universe. He wonders what he is: "An outcast of the universal order? an outlaw, a freak of nature ? a shred of yam dropped from nature's loom, which has since been strangely twisted by the way?"⁵

Man has been characterized as a subject in quest of a predicate: "He wonders whether, at the bottom, life is not like the face of the sun-dial, outliving all shadows that rotate upon its surface. Is life nothing but a medley of facts, unrelated to one another; chaos camouflaged by illusion?"⁶

Indeed, it is this 'perception of a certain illusoriness, a sense of the vanity of cosmic existence and individual being' that is in a way 'the starting-point of the spiritual urge'⁷ — at least for the

¹ Ian Ramsay, Prospect for Metaphysics, p. 153.

²Sri Aurobindo, The Problem of Rebirth (1952), p. 43.

^{3 4 5 6} A. J. Heschel, "The Concept of Man in Jewish Thought" in The Concept of Man (Eds. S. Radhakrishnan and P. T. Raju), p. 114.

⁷ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga (Centenary Edition), p. 24.

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great majority to whom the greater experience of Truth does not come 'spontaneously without being forced to it by the strong or overwhelming, the afflicting and detaching sense of the Shadow'¹ permeating the whole fabric of manifested existence.

Was not Gautama, the prince of Kapilavastu, awakened to a consciousness of anguish and sorrow by the universal sight of disease, old age, death and other miseries, to which man in his embodied existence is subject? Gautama considered within himself the ineluctable facts of disease, decay and death until he determined to escape them. His nibbida, 'disgust', for bodily existence culminated in his pabbaja — that is, 'going forth' from the life of the world to the life of spirituality — that was to lead him ultimately to Buddhahood, bodhi, the state of Enlightenment.

But what is the verdict of this Enlightenment and other allied states ? It is contended by most men of the Spirit that the essential character of all manifestation is transitoriness and suffering, anityam asukham, or so long at least as there is a physical world. And if this is so, "the desire of birth, the will to manifest or create has to be regarded as the original sin and withdrawal from birth or manifestation as the sole possible way of salvation".²

As a matter of fact, all those who have in their spiritual venture sought to grow and rise in consciousness and transcend the obscurations of the unregenerate earth-nature, have found to their discomfiture that bodily existence, in general, and the body in particular are 'the soul's great difficulty, its continual stumbling-block and rock of offence'. Therefore it is that "the eager seeker of spiritual fulfilment has hurled his ban against the body and his world-disgust selects this world-principle above all other things as an especial object of loathing. The body is the obscure burden that he cannot bear; its obstinate material grossness is the obsession that drives him for deliverance to the life of the ascetic. To get rid of it he has even gone so far as to deny its existence and the reality of the material universe. Most of the religions have put their curse upon Matter and have made the refusal or the resigned temporary endurance of the physical life the test of religious truth and of spirituality".³

The traditional spiritual seeker has found the earth a rather impossible place for any spiritual being; earth-nature appears to him

^{1 2} Letters on Yoga, p. 24.

³ The Life Divine, p. 232.

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in Vivekananda's simile as 'the dog's tail which, every time you straighten it, goes back to its original curl'¹. Hence, the only aim for a sane seeker should be — not to make any futile attempt at embodying or manifesting a higher consciousness here upon earth — but rather to escape from life, to get away from earth into some other higher world like Goloka, Brahmaloka, Shiva-loka, or perhaps to seek mukti and mokṣa in some supreme Absolute.

The spiritual history of man abounds in views, expressed in different terms, epitomizing this conception of metaphysical dualism that puts into sharpest antithesis the soul and the body, God and the world, the spiritual and the material parts of man. Examples are legion testifying to this widely prevalent attitude of denial and disparagement of body and bodily existence. To cite en passant just a few of them:

(i) In Buddhist tradition:² The Buddhist philosophy of life may be said to be based on the dual axiom, sabbam aniccam, sabbam dukkham ('All is impermanent, all is suffering'). And the Buddhist attitude towards the body has been summed up as follows:

(a)the body, whether of men or of higher beings, can never be the abode of anything but evil;

(b)a final deliverance from all bodily life, present and to come, is the greatest of all blessings, the highest of all boons and the loftiest of all aims (Monier Williams, Buddhism).

Indeed, 'the body is the sphere of suffering'; it is also 'the origin of suffering' (Milinda-pañha). Suffering, subjectively, is desire, tanhā; objectively, suffering lies in embodiment and matter. Consequently the human body is looked upon as a contemptible thing. The idea of nibbida, 'disgust', with the body is set forth in Gautama's 'burning fire sermon' delivered on a hill, Gayāsīsa, near Gaya. And the Vijayā Sutta is reflection on the worthlessness of the human body.

The body is regarded as an 'impure thing and foul, pūtikāya. It is likened to a wound, a sore. The body is the 'old worn-out skin of a snake' (Sutta Nipāta): It is a 'dressed-up lump, covered with wounds...wasted...full of sickness...a heap of corruption

¹ Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 117.

² J. H. Bateson, "Buddhist Attitude towards Body" in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. II.

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(Dhammapada). All evil passions proceed from the body (Sutta Nipāta). There is no pain like the body (Dhammapada).

A complete release from suffering is possible only by emancipation from body and matter; hence, the summum bonum of Buddhism and the constant endeavour and ultimate hope of the Buddhist is the absolute escape from corporeal existence.

(ii)In Jaina tradition¹: The suffering individual, for the Jaina, is a jīva or a living, conscious substance called the soul. This soul is inherently perfect, possessing infinite potentiality within; but due to its association with body and matter it has lost its shining glories and is subject to all kinds of miseries.

Bondage (bandha), in Jain philosophy, comes therefore to mean the soul's association with matter. This bondage is twofold: (a) the primary and internal cause of bondage for the soul is its passions and bad dispositions (bhāva): bhāva-bandha; and, as its secondary effect, (b) the material bondage (dravya-bandha) of the soul, that is, the influx of matter (āsrava) into the soul and the latter's actual association with a material body.

Liberation (mokṣa) must then mean for the Jaina the complete dissociation of the soul from matter. This can be attained by stopping the influx of new matter into the soul (the process called samvara) as well as by complete elimination (nirjarā) of the matter with which the soul has already become mingled.

(iii)In Judaism2: A. J. Heschel contests the supposition that Judaism is a world-view of unalloyed optimism. Except for the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, the rest of the Bible, as he remarks, does not cease to refer to the sorrow, sins and evil of this world. When the prophets look 'unto the earth', they behold 'distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish' (Isaiah 8:22).

According to Jewish tradition, "the design of the Creator was for a world that was to be good, very good; but then something happened, to which Jewish tradition alludes in many ways, and the picture of the world profoundly changed"3; so much so that "there is one line that expresses the mood of the Jewish man throughout

¹ S. C. Chatterjee and D. M. Datta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy.

² A. J. Heschel in The Concept of Man (Eds. S. Radhakrishnan and P. T. Raju)

3 A. J. Heschel, op. cit.

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the ages: 'the earth is given into the hand of the wicked' (Job 9:24)".¹

This world is thus often compared to 'night'; it is even called 'the world of falsehood'. It is a "prelude, a vestibule,.a place of preparation, of initiation, of apprenticeship to a future life, where the guests prepare to enter tricitinium, or the banquet hall"².

(iv) In Graeco-Roman Philosophy:3 The Greek philosophy propounded, in the main, a dualistic antithesis between body and soul, matter and spirit. Thus in Philolaus' teaching, the human body was regarded as a house of detention wherein the soul expiates its guilt. Empedocles likewise accepts the doctrine of the soul's fall from its original divine condition into the corporeal state and shares the view that the human body is the disparate integument of the soul. In the Dionysian cult, psychical experiences of men in ecstasy gave rise to the conviction — presently appropriated by the adherents of Orphism — that the body is an intolerable fetter to the soul which can acquire hitherto unsuspected powers of the spirit once it is free from the trammels of the material form.

(a) The Orphic-Pythagorean-Platonic doctrine of the body: the soul, a divine element, uncreated and imperishable, has been immured within the body which acts accordingly as its prison-house or even the grave: soma (body) is indeed the sema (tomb) for the soul.

Thus in Socratic thought, "the soul is a divine stranger inhabiting this world for a brief period, and yearning for death as the release by which it will return to its true home... the philosopher is the man who lives most for the soul and least for the body, so that he can be said to anticipate death and to lead here and now a dying life".⁴

Plato's standpoint in the Phaedo, as also in the Theaetetus and Gorgias, represents "a harsh and rigid dualism: here, the world of illusion and illusive values, beneath which nothing permanent exists; and there, the goods which never fade away".⁵ He

^{1 2} A. J. Heschel, op. cit.

³ W. Capelle, "Body and Asceticism (Greek)" in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. II.

⁴ E. L. Allen, A Guide Book to Western Thought.

⁵W. Capelle, op. cit.

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considered "the body as the ultimate root of all, or at least of innumerable, evils in human life, as an enemy against which the soul must fight, and as an unclean and defiling thing from which she must rid herself as soon and as thoroughly as possible".¹

(b)Stoicism: Posidonius held that the body, that inutilis caro et fluida, receptandis tantum cibis habilis ("flesh useless and flaccid, so apt to be hungry and demanding": rendered from Greek into Latin by Seneca in Ep. 92, 110), is an impediment to the heaven-born soul, the daimon, that pines in her prison-house for a return to her celestial home, the Aether, where alone full knowledge and bliss can be her portion. To deliver the soul as far as possible from the body even in this life — this, then, is the paramount task of mankind.

The Dissertations of Epictetus reveals a curious scorn for the body. According to him, it 'does not belong to us, but is an allo-trion' (alien, foreign). Man is 'a soul carrying a corpse' (cf. Svava-puḥ kuṇapamiva dṛśyate.²)

For Seneca, too, — influenced as he was by the Platonizing bent of Posidonius — the body was a contemptible thing.

Marcus Aurelius, 'the last Roman who sat upon the throne of the Caesars', was also a professed Stoic. But he, too, "speaks repeatedly of the body in tones of passionate scorn. He reprobates it especially as the souree of carnal appetites, and as tending to inveigle the soul".³

(c)Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism: The characteristic feature of the Neo-Pythagorean sect (counting among its adherents Apollonius and others) was absolute dualism. Spirit is the principle of good while the body, like matter in general, is the principle of evil.

In his 'nobly planned and profoundly excogitated system' of Neo-Platonism, Plotinus aimed to get beyond the dualism of the Neo-Pythagoreans on both metaphysical and ethical principles. But through a curious turn of logic he too was led to declare that the 'supersensual' part of man, which was pre-existent and in union with God, has suffered disaster from having entered the body. From the union of soul and body springs all the irrationality

¹ W. Capelle, op. cit.

² "To consider one's body as though it were a decomposed corpse" (Vidya-ranyamuni, Jivanmukti Viveka).

³ W. Capelle, op. cit.

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and depravity of the soul. The great task for man is, therefore, to effectuate 'the complete withdrawal of the soul from the outer world to its own inner life'.

From this summary survey it becomes clear that the human body has been generally regarded as not possessed of any great spiritual possibility. It is rather an obstacle, a heavy weight holding the soul to earthly nature, and thus preventing its ascent either to spiritual fulfilment in the Supreme or to the spiritual dissolution of its individual being.

But why is this universal distrust and denial of the body? Is the spiritual disability of man's physical organisation in the nature of something intrinsic and radical? Or is it not something capable of redemption? We pass on to the consideration of these and allied questions in the light of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

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