wife, and lived a household life as a virtuous and attractive woman. And in due time she conceived, but she knew it not.
Now in that city they proclaimed a feast. All the dwellers in the city kept the feast, and the city was decked like a city of the gods. But she, up to the time when the feast was at its height, neither anointed herself nor dressed, but went about in her every-day clothes. Then her husband said to her, —
"My dear! all the city is devoted to the feast; yet you adorn yourself not."
"The body, Sir, is but filled with its thirty-two constituent parts. What profit can there be in adorning it? For this body has no divine, no angelic attributes: it is not made of gold, or gems, or yellow sandal-wood; it springs not from the womb of lotus-flowers, white or red; it is not filled with the nectar-balm of holiness. But verily it is born in corruption: it springs from father and mother: its attributes are the decomposition, the wearing away, the dissolution, the destruction, of that which is impermanent! It is produced by excitement; it is the cause of pains, the subject of mournings, a lodging-place for all diseases. It is the receptacle for the action of Karma; foul within, without it is ever discharging: its end is death: and its goal is the charnel-house, — there, in the sight of all the world, to be the dwelling-place of worms and creeping things!"[1]
- ↑ The thirty-two constituent parts will be found enumerated in the Khuddaka Pāṭha, p. 3, and most of them are mentioned in the following verses, which are not attributed to the 'attractive' young wife, and which sound wooden enough after her spirited outburst. Possibly they are a quotation by this commentator of some monkish rhymes he thinks appropriate to the occasion. The whole of the conversation is omitted in the Dhammapada commentary. Bound together by bones and sinews, O'erspread with flesh and integument, The body is hidden 'neath its skin, — It seems not as it really is!
