When chanted

Recited as a reflection on the body, commonly in the evening service and as a support for meditation on its constituent parts.

Historical background

This is one of the oldest and most widely used reflections in the tradition, and the Thai chanting books print it in a fixed shape: a preamble that frames the body as a bounded, impure whole, followed by the enumeration of its thirty-two parts. The parts are chanted as a bare list, each with its Thai gloss beneath.

This completes the enumeration begun in the previous paste. The list runs from the liver through the solid organs, then through the twelve liquids, and ends with the brain in the skull — the part that some older recensions omit, giving thirty-one, and that the Thai books consistently include.

The chant then returns to its opening. The same four lines that framed the body before the list are repeated after it, with เอวะมะยัง, thus is this, in place of อะยัง โข, this indeed. The reflection is therefore circular by design: the survey is stated, the evidence is given, and the survey is stated again, now with the list standing behind it.

Meaning and purpose

The preamble establishes the boundaries of what is to be examined before naming anything within them. This body of mine, from the soles of the feet upward, from the crown of the hair downward, bounded all round by skin. The two directions are given so that nothing is left outside the survey, and the skin is named not as a covering but as a limit — that which encloses what follows.

Only then does the judgement come: full of impurities of various kinds. The Thai keeps this in the plainest possible terms, ของไม่สะอาด, things not clean. Nothing is said about the body's ugliness in the abstract; the claim is about contents, and the list that follows is the evidence.

The enumeration itself carries no adjectives. Head hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidney — each named and no more. The reflection works by inventory rather than by rhetoric, and the practitioner is left to draw the conclusion from the list itself. The register of the Thai preserves this restraint exactly: เบื้องบนแต่พื้นเท้าขึ้นมา, an older construction than modern Thai would use, and no more emphatic than the Pali it renders.

The second half of the list turns from what is solid to what is fluid. Bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, spittle, mucus, joint-fluid, urine. Twelve of the thirty-two parts are liquids, and the Thai marks each with น้ำ, water — น้ำดี, น้ำเหงื่อ, น้ำตา — so that the chanted list has an audible rhythm of its own in Thai that the Pali does not have.

The last item is set apart by its construction. Where every other part is named in a single word, the brain is given as มัตถะเก มัตถะลุงคัง, the brain in the skull, with its location stated. The Thai expands this further to เยื่อมันสมองในกะโหลกศีรษะ. It is the innermost and least accessible of the parts, and the chant ends its inventory there.

The closing recapitulation adds one word to what was said at the start: อย่างนี้, thus, in just this way. The body was described as full of impurities before the list was given; it is described so again afterwards, and the second statement rests on the first having been demonstrated part by part. Nothing new is asserted. The reflection simply asks that the same sentence be heard differently the second time.

The chant

As the book prints it: page 217 and page 218 →

page 218