About This Teaching
Unwashed hair turns greasy within days, and a hair falling into food makes it seem dirty. Ajahn Dtun offers this as an everyday way to contemplate the body when concentration is not yet strong; the skin, too, becomes greasy and soils clothes without bathing. Seeing sick or aged people, or dead animals, one reflects that one's own body is made of the same elements and must meet aging, sickness and death. While caring for the body, one can recall head hair, nails, teeth and skin.
To see this clearly in the mind, though, a foundation of concentration is needed, giving rise to mindfulness and wisdom; then one can analyse the body into its thirty-two parts and see its nature more deeply.
He recalls being seventeen or eighteen and passing a dead dog by the road for days, watching it decompose and reflecting that it was meat, sinews, blood and bones like his own body. Around the same age, with a headache and fever, he asked why he could not command his body to recover, and understood that the body is not the mind.