There may be some disturbing images in this video, so watch out.
There’s an old Japanese story where this
monk named Genpin visits the home of a grand counselor,
and he sees the counselor’s wife.
She is 125 pounds and 5-foot-FINE.
Now monks are supposed to stay soft in the face of desire, but at this moment,
Genpin experiences a hardship.
The counselor notices the monk being uneasy and asks what’s up, to which the monk says,
“Counselor, I must admit that I am severely down bad, for your wife.”
The counselor trusts and respects Genpin, so he sends his wife to the monk’s room.
When she enters, Genpin doesn’t touch her, doesn’t even approach her.
He only stares at her, imagining her body dead and decaying.
The image of her decomposing body is like water on his fiery desires.
After 2 hours, he exits the room with his head high and his pp dry.
All in a day’s work.
The counselor hears of what happened and is even more impressed by this monk.
Later, Genpin achieves enlightenment, because he
realizes the truth that the body is temporary.
A beautiful body will always end up ugly in death.
It’s nonsense to indulge in the temporary desires of the flesh.
If you think about it, your body is pretty gross.
There’s poop, piss, spit, and also gross things.
One old Buddhist text called the body an infected
wound that never healed, a boil with 9 openings
ejecting nasty fluids.
Why so much hate for the human body?
Buddhists thought the mortal world was impure, and so were the things in it.
Your goal was to get on the enlightenment train outta there.
For Pure Land Buddhists, the largest sect of Buddhism, if you really understood
the impurity of this world, you would gain greater
faith in Amida Buddha, who would lead you
to his Pure Land paradise, because he’s lonely.
One way to gain this deep understanding of the world was to have a bit of a ponder on
the impurity of the human body.
And the best way to see how disgusting the body was,
was to watch a dead body decompose,
or eat at a Taco Bell and wait 5 hours.
Since Taco Bell didn’t exist, people chose the former.
This practice of meditating over a corpse was popular in Japan from the
1200s to the 1800s.
The idea came from old Buddhist texts in India and China.
Its earliest use in Japan was to keep monks
from turning to that dark side called desire,
that sinful secret called secks,
that voluptuous vice called vejaina.
There were stories intended to slap the desire out of you.
In one story, a governor’s wife dies, but he’s so in love
that he can’t bring himself to bury her.
So he does what all loving husbands do:
he leaves her corpse on his bed.
One day, he’s lying there snuggling with his ex-human, and he kisses her lips.
The smell of death and decay hits him like a dump truck,
and the crash knocks him back to reality, oops there goes gravity.
The governor realizes the emptiness of his attachment to his wife,
and finally buries her.
Deep religious feelings overcome him and he goes to a temple to become a monk.
His wife’s rotting body brought him closer to enlightenment
because he understood the impurity of humans.
It fits this Buddhist idea of impermanence.
Nothing is permanent.
Beauty is temporary, life is temporary.
A woman’s life was a perfect example of impermanence.
She’s beautiful when young, but her beauty fades as the years pass by.
Then she dies, and her beauty really fades.
Monks hated their penis, that’s why they were tempted to beat it everyday.
But that was behavior unbecoming of monks, so they brainstormed all kinds of ways to
get monks off the booby train.
Some claimed that secksual desire was the same as necrophilia,
because at the end of the day, the body was no different from a corpse.
Since women’s bodies triggered the desires of monks, naturally they had to attack it.
They said it was better for your pp to enter
the mouth of a snake than to enter a woman,
which sounds weird but don’t knock it til you try it.
Life as a monk was difficult.
You had to seek answers to the universe’s important questions like why are we here,
what does it mean to be enlightened, what does a boob feel like?
And this was why they needed corpse meditation.
There were supposed to be 9 stages of decay after death.
Some monks looked at paintings of decaying corpses,
and some looked at actual decaying corpses.
How did one get access to corpses?
Luckily, poor people existed, and they died often.
Burial was actually not that popular until after the 1400s,
especially among the poor.
So monks went cemetery hopping on the weekends
to look at dead bodies and meditate on them.
“Ah, how the image of the maggots in her eye socket withers my pp.”
For monks who didn’t have the time to visit a cemetery,
they were very busy sitting around,
they would look at paintings instead.
These paintings were called kusōzu 九相圖,
or images of the nine stages of a decaying corpse.
A monk would burn each stage into his mind.
Some texts claimed that there were different
types of secksual desires, and that each stage
cured one type of desire.
Sometimes the stages and the order differed
depending on who you asked,
but here are the basic stages.
Here, the lady is still alive and beautiful,
writing her death poem, probably suffering
from some terminal disease like cancer or living in classical Japan.
Stage 1. Newly dead.
The lady dies, people around her cry.
Her face is pale and her beauty is starting to fade.
Stage 2. Swelling.
The gasses build up in her body, swelling it.
Her rosy face has turned dark, her hair’s all withered, her limbs have hardened.
She’s not looking too good, but you know, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Maybe she’s attractive on the inside.
Nope, her organs are s--t.
Stage 3. Leaking blood.
Blood oozes from her insides, the impurity of her body comes to the surface.
Bones broken, muscles ruptured.
But her face still doesn’t look that bad.
Stage 4--Oh my Buddha.
Decomposition.
The monks are really becoming more enlightened now.
She looks quite surprised to see her organs spilling out.
At this stage, the stench can travel large distances.
Stage 5. Discoloration and desiccation.
Now she’s been in the sun a while, she’s turning black and blue.
The dangers of not wearing sunscreen.
Her flesh doesn’t look like it’s been moisturized in a while, it’s falling off,
and her bones are showing.
A hearty feast for maggots and flies.
Stage 6. Eaten by animals.
Time for the birds and dogs to have lunch.
Stage 7. Skeleton.
Stage 8. Dismemberment.
She’s a mess. Just a pile of bones, hair, and nails.
Stage 9. Turned to dust.
Some of these paintings were so accurate that
the artists must have sat right next to a
real corpse and drawn it over the 9 stages.
Say you’re a monk, and you’re walking minding your own business,
and suddenly you see a pretty lady across the street,
and now your monk staff is filled with holy power.
What do you do?
When the needs of the flesh arose, monks probably
ran to a death painting to push it back down.
These paintings were usually of a beautiful woman dying,
showing that even an attractive woman turned ugly eventually.
The hope was that the next time a monk saw a
good looking woman, he would feel disgusted.
Monks couldn’t afford to feel any desire.
If you give your desires an inch, they’ll take the whole dick.
And it wasn’t just monks.
Even nuns meditated on how disgusting their own bodies were.
But what’s interesting is,
while it’s true that women were often seen as less than men--
women were often disqualified from enlightenment--
through these death paintings of attractive women,
you could say that it was women
who taught men about their own impurity and led men to enlightenment.
So there was also a sense that women were a bit closer to the divine.
There were even stories of beautiful women who
scolded men about their desires,
and taught them the errors of their ways.
But why did people think women couldn’t reach enlightenment?
Nuns fought against this idea, click here to learn about that.
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Wolfsong, Paige, Shivansh Harish, and Lucie Mobbs.
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