CHAPTER TWO "Like a Boil with Nine Openings": Buddhist Constructions of the Body and Their South Asian Milieu The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" The Ambiguous Status of Cremation- Ground Meditation The practice of contemplat ing corpses in the cremation ground is not for everyone. The Buddha, according to tra- dition, made the contemp lation of foulness (asubhabha - vana) opt ional for member s of the sangha after its unsuper- vised practice led many memb ers of the early community to commit suicide. In the SarJJyutta Nikaya's pithy version of the story, the Buddha taught the monks to contemp late the fouln ess of corpses in the cremation ground and then went away for a fortnight of solitary meditation. When he returned, he noticed that the sangha had considerably di- minished in his absence, and so he asked his personal at- tendant Ananda what had tran spired in his absence. The monks, Ananda explained, had mastered the meditation on the foul, but with their insight came disastrous conse- quences: As to this body, they fretted about it, felt shame and loathin g for it, and wanted to kill them selves. As many as ten monks did so in a single day; even twenty, thirty of them killed themselves in a single day! Would the Blessed One please teach some other method, so that the order of monk s might be estab- lished in knowledge?1