Meditations on Impermanence
An Experience of Daniel Kent

I attended the autopsy almost two months after I had been ordained at a small temple in Southern Sri Lanka.  At the ceremony, I gave up my name and was given a new one, Venerable Amerikave Nanda.  Amerikave designated my place of birth and Nanda, meaning "joy," was my proper name.

                        This filthy body stinks outright
                        Like ordure, like a privy's site;
                        This body, men that have insight,
                        Condemn, as object of a fool's delight.

                        A tumor, where nine holes abide
                        Wrapped in a coat of clammy hide
                        And trickling filth on every side,
                        Polluting the air with stenches far and wide.

                        If it perchance should come about
                        That what is inside it came out,
                        Surely a man would need a knout
                        With which to put the crows and dogs to rout'.
From the Visuddhimagga
Translated by Bhikkhu Naamoli

My father used to tell me about how flimsy cars really are.  Even though they may seem strong and solid, they become like paper when they collide with something at high speeds.  The human body is the same way.  Although it seems strong and healthy, only an inch separates it from death.  I thought about my Dad and his cars as I watched the morgue workers remove the skin and internal organs from the corpse of the old man.  One moment it looked like he was asleep and the next his abdomen and chest were open, spilling organs and fluids all over the table.  This was my last day as a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk and I thought it fitting, before putting to rest my monastic alter ego and rejoining lay society, that I witness the fragility and transience of human life.

    I attended the autopsy almost two months after I had been ordained at a small temple in Southern Sri Lanka.  At the ceremony, I gave up my name and was given a new one, Venerable Amerikave Nanda.  Amerikave designated my place of birth and Nanda, meaning "joy," was my proper name.  I did not ordain in order to meditate and obtain release from Samsara, but rather as an educational exercise to learn more about monastic practices.  Although that may seem a rather strange reason to put on the robes, actually education, rather than Nirvana, is one of the most common goals of monks all over South and Southeast Asia.  Children will ordain at as early as eight years old and receive food, education and moral training that might otherwise not have been unavailable to them in their families.

My goal was to gain insight into the lives of the monks, who live within society and earn their livings with their mouths; eating the offerings brought by lay followers and preaching the Doctrine.  As wearers of the saffron robes and representatives of the legacy of the Buddha, monks are known as "Incomparable fields of merit," and thus serve as objects for the gifts and good deeds of lay people.  Seated meditation for the most part does not figure into this way of life.  As a monk, I attended funerals, alms givings and other activities meant to produce merit for the participants and their deceased family members.  I attended a high school for teenaged monks and learned many of the verses, which are chanted before the Buddha-alter.

    While I had been living the life of a temple-monk, I was also in contact with a few monks, mostly westerners, who lived in forest hermitages and practiced austere forms of meditation.  I met one such monk, a 50-year-old Englishman, named Rahula, when I visited his small island hermitage on the south coast of Sri Lanka.   Rahula is a tall, gangly man, who struggles to speak slowly and mindfully, though his natural inclination is to speak like an auctioneer selling pork futures.  Rahula was ordained ten years ago with the permission of his wife, on the condition that he return after five years.  Now it has been ten years and Rahula says that it seems like it has been less than ten weeks and he couldn't imagine returning to lay life.  It was Rahula, who first told me about the meditation on impermanence, which monks perform from time to time at the Colombo morgue.  The practice is meant to confront oneself with the reality of life and death and to develop equanimity.

     Although he doesn't go very often anymore, Rahula used to practice impermanence meditation quite frequently.  He told me of a temple he had stayed at in Thailand, where the head monk, a westerner, was famous for his strict austerity.  One day when one of the monks at the temple died, the head monk had everyone in the temple take turns spending the night meditating in the same room as the corpse.  After 30 days the corpse became completely rotten and infested with insects.  As time passed, the maggots ate away the corpse's lips leaving a horrendous grin.  On the last day maggots flowed from the mouth of the corpse like a fountain.  As a postscript to the story, Rahula told me that a year later, that same head monk, ran off with a Thai girl and now has a little daughter.  Thinking that
observing such meditations would both give me insight into the lives of meditating monks and be a fitting end to my monastic career as well, I asked Rahula to take me the next time he went.

    When I told the monks back at my home temple that I would soon be going to meditate at the morgue, they were disgusted.  "Why would you want to do that?" they asked.  I told them that I wanted to observe a different kind of monastic tradition and that have grown up in the antiseptic society of America, I was also curious to face death for myself.    "Do what you want," they said "but make sure to wash your robes before you come back to the temple!"

     So it was that, I found myself accompanying Rahula and a young Sinhala monk to the Colombo morgue on this April morning.  The Sinhala monk was only 19 and like me, had never been to an autopsy before.  He was very excited and as we walked to the morgue, he turned to me and said, "Look our bodies of filth!  I am going to imagine that the corpse that they are cutting up is my own."  I told him that I would be happy if I just didn't faint and walked ahead to speak with Rahula.

    While Rahula and I walked together we chatted to pass the time and to ease my nervousness.  I asked him about the difference between monks viewing an autopsy and the lay people, who performed them everyday.  He thought about it a bit and asked me if I had ever heard the old English saying "The breadth of a thread separates the fool from the Wiseman."  I nodded and he continued by saying that monks look on the bodies trying to see them as they are with Upekkha (equanimity.)   The monk sees the body as it is and maintains awareness.  The doctor at the autopsy on the other hand develops indifference.  The doctor over time begins to see the body not as a body, but as a thing.  It's rather like the difference between a person who putshis Walkman on and zones out the moment he or she boards a bus and the traveler who sits on the bus with awareness and without judgment.

    When we arrived at the Morgue, which was actually just a long concrete building with a tile roof, we wordlessly passed a group of people sitting in the front room and went back into a little open courtyard with benches and a pond full of gold fish.   It would have been quite pretty if not for the smell of chemicals and decay in the air.  It is not a smell that I can describe.  However, now that I have smelled it once, I smell it wherever I go.  The smell lies beneath the smell of rotting food, decaying vegetation and perspiration.  It is always around us, lurking quietly beneath all of the everyday smells that we are accustomed to.  Rahula tells me that today we are lucky, "On some days, there is an overflow of bodies and they have them piled up on the floor and on the benches."

    Waiting to be called to watch the autopsy, we talked about many things.The Sinhala monk went to look over at the fish and told me that any one of those fish could be reborn as a person and every one of us could be reborn as a fish.  I went over to look at the fish and as I did, I remembered a scene from a Jeremy Irons movie, where a man goes to a market and is occasioned to contemplate his own mortality by the sight of the still-beating heart of a fish that has been sliced open.

    Walking over to where Rahula sat, I asked him what he thought that we would see in the autopsy room.  Rahula shrugged and told me about how one of the monks at the temple, who had always struggled with his lustful feelings, had gone to the morgue and watched a pretty 14-year-old girl being cut up. He said that the Cutters sliced off the girls face, revealing the red tissue underneath.  It was very shocking for this monk to see the contrast between the girl's face and what was beneath.  Rahula then turned to me, smiled and said "You just remember how close you are to all that gore the next time some young thing is sitting on your face!"  Laughing, Rahula then told me that he has never seen a woman dissected before, "for some reason, I only get men.  You get what you need to see, I guess."  I had never really thought about the meditation on impermanence as a palliative for excessive lust before, but as Rahula continued speaking, it became clear that that indeed was the major motivation behind many practitioners. You see what you need to see, I guess.

    As we talked, the smell continued to assault our senses.  It came and went, ebbing and subsiding like the tide.  Just when you thought that you were used to it, a door would open in the back and it would wash over us, permeating our robes and sinking into our pores.  I didn't want to even open my mouth and became very conscious about what I touched.  The Sinhala monk put down a handkerchief when he sat down in an attempt to protect himself from the stench.  Just when I was beginning to hope that there were to be no autopsies that day so that we would be able to leave and escape the stench, a man came out of one of the rooms in the back hallway and motioned for us to follow him.

    The autopsy room was like an artificially lit cave.  It was definitely not a sterile environment where all doctors are dressed in scrubs and expensive air conditioning systems and coolers soften the odor.  It was more like a slaughterhouse.  The dark tile floors were slightly wet and sticky and the walls, though once white, had turned gray with age and mildew.  In the center of the room was a dark stone table with a human-shaped indentation in it.  There was a drain in the table located just underneath the head of the concave human form.  Shortly as we monks made chit-chat and tried to ignore the smell, two men brought out a stretcher with the body of an old man on it and placed the body face up in the indentation on the table.

    The old man was very thin and frail and looked ancient.  When the Doctor told us that he was only 65, Rahula commented that he must have led a very hard life.  He had a broken left arm and his eyes were black.  The Cutter, pointed at the sling and leaf poultice, joking: "Sri Lankan Medicine." Apparently the man had died last Sunday, 5 days before.

    A word here about the workers in the morgue, who I call "Cutters," they were not doctors, but unskilled laborers whose tools are the scalpel and the bone saw.  Dressed in black rubber aprons and boots, they cut up the bodies so that a Doctor could later come, look through the internal organs and decide on an official cause of death.  As the Cutters worked, they smoked cigarettes, bringing their gore-soaked gloves to their mouths again and again so as to take draughts of smoke.   The Cutters reminded me of the septic tank cleaner, employed by my landlord.   In Sri Lanka oftentimes, when a septic tank becomes clogged, small-statured men would be hired to dive down into the filth and clean the pipes.  The pay is good, about five or six dollars a day, so there is never a problem finding someone to do it.   Before diving into the tank, the men traditionally drink a bottle of coconut whiskey in order to numb their sense of disgust.  One day, my landlord sent a man to work on his tank and became concerned after the man, didn't return after two hours.  Going to check on him, my landlord found him asleep in the muck with his head propped inches away from the surface by his shit-covered hand.  Looking back on that, my landlord wondered how we humans, who were capable of such a base existence could ever aspire to any enlightenment.  I suppose that I would say that these jobs are excellent parables for life itself.  We humans do such horrible, disgusting things and, in our ignorance, think that we are happy.

    First off, the Cutter, sawed through the man's sling, revealing an arm that had been pretty seriously broken.  The arm wiggled just below the shoulder as if it had an extra joint.  The Cutter then explained that the man had died of a heart problem.  He then placed his scalpel below the corpse's pelvis and cut so quickly that I almost missed it.  In one quick slice he opened a gash from the man's waist to his throat, revealing the white fatty tissue underneath.  After a few quick pulls the skin slid right off the rib cage and the intestines seemed to jump out of the body.   It was really surprising for me to see just how little tissue holds our intestines in.  With one small cut they could fall right out of our bodies.  While looking at the corpse, it seemed just like any other animal being slaughtered.  The red and white flesh clinging to the bones looked no different from what one would see in any butcher shop.  Once again the smell hung in the air as a constant reminder that we were not watching a cow being butchered, but a man.

    After using the bone saw to open up the rib cage, the Cutter immediately emptied the body of all of its internal organs leaving an empty husk.  He then filled the husk full of water, prompting Rahula to say that he thought of this water-filled husk as a true blood bath.  They then turned the corpse on its side, emptying all of the water into the drain, which now seemed like some kind of grotesque pillow. After the corpse had been taken away, the Cutters began slicing up the internal organs: the stomach, the liver, the gall bladder, the intestines. I always thought that doctors kept all of the organs in the body, when they performed an autopsy, but in retrospect I suppose it is much easier to work if one simply takes the organs out and dices them.  Surgery would be very easy if the doctor could remove all of the organs and then put them back in without killing the patient.

    As we watched the procedure, a doctor entered the room and began to make conversation with Rahula.  First he asked Rahula, whether he was a Buddhist or not, to which the saffron robe-clad Rahula answered, "Yes."  The Doctor then introduced himself as a Catholic and asked him about why he had become a monk.   Before Rahula could really answer, the Doctor was called to the table, but before leaving us, he pointed at the body and said, "Just look at that.  Looking at how complicated and perfect the human body is, don't you feel that there must be a creator?"  When the Doctor was out of earshot, Rahula turned to me and said "Actually, looking at that pile of filth on the table helps me to understand the impermanent, insubstantial nature of the world."   Again, one sees what one needs to see.

    Watching the operation was really not too much of a shock for me. Perhaps I have been desensitized over the years by the gore splattering over the screens of so many bad horror films.  The smell, on the other hand, was something completely new.  I watched the entire operation with few problems. I even watched the Cutter open up the man's stomach, revealing the green stomach acid.  However, once the body was gone and the men began to clean up, a door opened in the back and a powerful smell came out of nowhere.  My left ear suddenly went deaf and the world began to get dark.  I immediately knew that I needed to leave the room and did.  I rushed to the bench in the waiting room, leaned against the wall and lost consciousness.  The next thing I remember, I was being shaken by the Sinhala Monk, who accompanied us to the autopsy.  He asked me if I wanted water.  My ear was still clogged and I was very disoriented, but I was able with great effort to say yes, in Sinhala.  I simply washed my mouth out with the water, as I felt uncomfortable about actually consuming anything in the morgue.  When Rahula came out to check on me, I turned white and began sweating profusely.  It took about 5 minutes for me to really recover enough to begin the walk back to the temple.   As we walked back to the temple, I had trouble keeping up with the other monks.   Rahula was concerned that I might feel ashamed that I had passed out, but I didn't.   In fact, in some ways I am glad that I lost consciousness.  After looking death in its blackened eyes, I faced my own temporary death, making the whole experience much more personal.

    When we arrived back at the Colombo temple, I washed my hands and face vigorously and went to the noon alms giving.  While I was washing my hands, an old American monk came up to me and started a conversation.  When I told him that I was disrobing that day, his simply responded, "Yes, Sri Lankan girls are pretty. I'm too old for that now, though," and walked away.  I didn't really have anything to say to that.  After the alms giving, I had a confrontation with a 25-year-old novice, living at the temple.  When I told him that I was disrobing, he became angry and said "The Lord Buddha once said that a disrobed monk is like a Dead Man," and turned away from me.  Unlike Thailand, Sri Lanka does not have a tradition of temporary ordination and my case was very peculiar.  According to popular belief, if someone were to ordain as a monk, seven generations of relatives on both your mother's and father's side would go to heaven.  If that monk were then to disrobe, the relatives would then be sent retroactively to hell.  Although these days many monks disrobe and thus these beliefs have softened somewhat, there is still a slight stigma attached disrobed monks.  Although there is no denying that the young monk's words made me very angry, I contemplated them as I sat on the bus back to my home temple.   I felt that disrobing was indeed very much like dying.  In a short time, the monk, Amerikave Nanda, will cease to exist leaving only Daniel Kent.  Whether it is the same Daniel that took the 10 precepts 2 months ago or not is a different question.   From a Buddhist perspective, every moment we arise anew and pass away.  There was no Nanda and there is no Daniel.  We just use these names for identification.   Years down the road, who will be lying on an autopsy table, Daniel or Nanda?   In the end it makes no difference, the Cutters won't care, nor will the monks.