“Five kammaṭṭhāna.”
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“When we are ordained, we are switching our way of life from that of a layman to that of a bhikkhu. A bhikkhu means someone who sees the danger in the realms of rebirth. A bhikkhu endeavors to escape from this round of rebirth because birth is suffering. Once you are born you have to get sick, get old and die and you will have to be separated from everything that you have, everybody that you know. So, from the view of Theravada Buddhism, taking birth is not a good thing.
Taking birth is like a curse. We are cursed to get old, to get sick and to die, so being a bhikkhu is to strive for extinction from the cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death. The practice that will help us to make the escape from samsara, the rounds of births and deaths is the practice of the triple training which is called: sīla, samādhi and paññā. Before we can practise sīla, samādhi and paññā, we first have to study. We have to learn what sīla is, what samādhi is, and what paññā is. This process is called magga pariyatti Dhamma. Pariyatti means the study of the teaching of the Lord Buddha.
If you don’t study, you will not know exactly how to practise correctly. You will first need to study with a teacher. According to the Monastic rule, a newly ordained monk has to live with a teacher for five years. He cannot live alone as it will be more harmful than beneficial, because he doesn’t know yet the proper way of keeping the sīla, the proper way of conducting himself as a monk and he doesn’t know what is the right kind of samādhi and how to develop paññā or wisdom.
So, this is what a newly ordained monk should do. He has to seek a teacher and it is usually the Upajjaya or the person who ordained him, who is supposed to be his principal teacher. During the ordination, he has taught you the five kammaṭṭhāna.
Do you remember you have to recite: kesa, loma, nakha, danta, taco? These are the five parts of the body, called the five kammaṭṭhāna. These are very important objects for developing wisdom. Because we are attached to our body and so in order to be able to be detached from the body, we have to study the true nature of the body by studying the body which comprises the first five parts: hair of the head, hair of the body, skin, nail and the teeth.
Besides these five parts there are another 27 parts. In all we call it the 32 parts of the body. This is what the body is. If we carefully study these 32 parts we will come to the conclusion that there is nobody in these 32 parts. They are just organs, parts of the body. We, as we call ourselves, come from the mind, which has come to possess this body.
Due to the lack of proper knowledge, we have been fed with the wrong knowledge. We have been fed with the knowledge that this body is ‘us’, is ‘ourselves’, so when anything happens to the body, we think that it also happens to us, but in reality, it only happens to the body, to the 32 parts, like aging, sickness and death. It only happens to the body. It doesn’t happen to us who possess this body.
So, this is what we want to teach ourselves to see clearly: that the body is not ourselves, we are not the body. We are only the possessor of the body. We are the one who know, who think. This is ‘us’. We are the ones who tell the body what to do.
For example, before you can move the body, your mind has to direct and tell the body what to do. Before you can get up, you have to think first that ‘I am going to get up’, then you tell the body to move. The one who tells the body to move is not the body. The mind doesn’t die with the body. It doesn’t get old or get sick with the body. So, this is what the teacher will teach so that you can eliminate this delusion in your mind. The delusion is that which tells you to look at the body as yourself.”
“Singapore via skype, Aug 9, 2015.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
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