Theragāthā — Versos dos Monges Anciãos — 10.5 — Kappa

1Filled with different kinds of dirt,
a great producer of dung,
like a stagnant cesspool,
a big boil, a bad wound,

2full of pus and blood,
sunk in a toilet-pit,
trickling with fluids,
this rotting body always oozes.

3Bound by sixty tendons,
coated with a fleshy coating,
clothed in a jacket of skin,
this rotting body is worthless.

4Held together by a skeleton of bones,
and bound by sinews;
it assumes postures
due to a complex of many things.

5We set out in the certainty of death,
in the presence of the King of Death;
and having discarded the body right here,
a person goes where he likes.

6Shrouded by ignorance,
tied by the four ties,
this body is sinking in the flood,
caught in the net of the underlying tendencies.

7Yoked to the five hindrances,
afflicted by thought,
stuck to the root of craving,
hidden by delusion:

8that is how the body goes on,
propelled by the mechanism of deeds.
But existence ends in perishing;
separated, the body perishes.

9Those blind, ordinary people
who think of this body as theirs,
swell the horrors of the charnel ground,
taking hold of future lives.

10The undefiled who shun this body
like a serpent smeared with dung,
having expelled the root of rebirth,
will be fully quenched.