We are souls in a human body. Our base identity is that we are a spark of the Divine Light, a shard of the Universal Soul. When the soul is enveloped in a human body with emotions and gunas, it develops desires and performs actions. These actions lead to further desires and attachments. In the desire to experience all that the world has to offer, the soul which is enveloped in the human frame forgets its original identity and begins to believe it is the body. Attachment to the body and considering the body to be our primary identity, we enter into cycles of pain and attachment due to the impermanence of the body and its beauty.
It is essential to maintain our body. We must eat nourishing food, exercise, keep our bodies clean and neatly dressed. Nowadays the focus is more on the appearances, for the sake of appreciation and not for the sake of health. When our body is young and healthy it is beautiful. As we grow older, the beauty fades, the strength of the body decreases and sickness and disease take over the body. The body and its beauty are short lived. We spend our entire life time focussing on our body and not our soul. In the end, the soul leaves the body and the body is burnt or buried under the ground. When we understand the mortality of the body and the immortality of the soul, we develop detachment to the body and its desires and this helps us in attaining self realisation. There is a story in the life of Buddha which illustrates this truth:
Buddha’s foster mother was Gotami. Her daughter was Princess Janapada Kalyani. She was very beautiful and hence nicknamed Rupananda. She was engaged to be married to Prince Nanda, a cousin of Buddha. One day it dawned on her that most of her family had renounced home and become monks. Siddhartha, her elder brother, who could have become a Universal Monarch, had become Buddha. Her mother Gotami had become a monk. Rahul the son of her elder brother and Prince Nanda too had become monks. Now she was all alone in the palace. She also became a monk because of her attachment to her family and not out of conviction of the path.
Rupananda had heard about the talks given by Buddha from the other monks. Buddha often spoke of the impermanency of the body. She was afraid to meet Buddha as she thought he would disapprove of her good looks. But the others in the monastery always praised Buddha and his uplifting talks. So one day she decided to go with the other monks to hear the lecture of Buddha.
When Buddha saw her, he understood that Rupananda was extremely attached to her beauty and body. He wanted to help her break that attachment. With his Siddhis or supernatural powers, he created a vision of a very beautiful girl of sixteen who sat next to him. Only Rupananda could see her. When she saw the perfection of beauty and body of the girl, she felt like an old crow seated next to a swan. As she was watching the girl, the girl began to age. She became an adult, then a middle aged woman, then an old lady and finally a very old lady. Rupananda observed the gradual loss of strength and beauty in the body of the girl as she grew old and aged. She understood the continuous process of change and decay. Meanwhile, the figure next to Buddha had become extremely old. The old woman could no longer control her body function and was rolling on the ground. Finally she died and her body got bloated and blood, pus and maggots oozed out from her body. Rupananda understood the truth of the impermanence of body and beauty and the true nature of the body. She learnt further under the guidance of Buddha and attained nirvana.
We see everyone grow old, fall sick and die around us. Yet we live in the fallacy that we will be young, strong and beautiful till the end. When reality dawns on us, it is too late. Our body or mind does not respond to the spiritual practices and we die in pain and ignorance to be reborn again and again in the endless cycles of birth and death. We must let go of the attachment to the body and move on to the immortality of the Soul and God. The SitaRam mantra, meditation and teachings of the Guru help us in realising the true nature of our body and soul.
