Meanwhile, back in Exploring Religious Ethics land, some friendly thoughts from Santideva at the charnel-ground:Although it does not move, you are terrified of a skeleton when it is seen like this. Why have you no fear of it when it moves as if animated by a vampire?
They produce both spit and shit from the single source of food. You do not want the shit from it. Why are you so fond of drinking spit?
If you have no passion for what is foul, why do you embrace another, a cage of bones bound by sinew, smeared with slime and flesh?
You have plenty of filth of your own! Satisfy yourself with that! Glutton for crap! Forget her, that other pouch of filth!
Aside from the delicate lotus, born in muck, opening up in the rays of a cloudless sun, what is the pleasure in a cage of crap for a mind addicted to filth?
Apparently you were horrified when you saw a few corpses in the charnel ground. Yet you delight in your village, which is a charnel-ground thronging with moving corpses.
Bodhicaryavatara 8:48-49, 52-53, 70
trans. Kate Crosby & Andrew Skilton (OUP, 2008), 92-93
Image from a Kusozu scroll
trans. Kate Crosby & Andrew Skilton (OUP, 2008), 92-93
Image from a Kusozu scroll
