Psalms of the Brethren CCXXXVII: Kappa

Filled full with divers things impure,
Great congeries of excrement,
Like stale and stagnant pool of slime,
Like a great cancer, like a sore,

Filled full of serum and of blood,
As ’t were from dung-heap issuing,
Dropping with fluid — ever thus
The body leaks, a carrion thing.

By sixty tendons kept in place,
And smeared with plaster of the flesh,
By dermis armed and cuticle —
In carrion carcase lies small gain.

By bony framework rendered firm,
By sinew-threads together knit,
The which, as they in concert work,
Effect our postures manifold;

Faring world without end to death,
E’en to the King of Mortals’ realm: —
If it be even here cast off,
A man may go where’er he will.

The body cloaked in ignorance,
Entrammelled by the fourfold tie,
The body flood-engulfed and drowned,
In net of latent bias caught,

To the five Hindrances a slave,
By restless play of mind obsessed,
By pregnant craving ever dogged,
In trammels of illusion swathed: —

Lo! such a thing this body is,
Carried about on Karma’s car,
To manifold becoming doomed,
Now to success, to failure then.

And they who say of it ‘’Tis mine!’ —
Poor foolish blinded many-folk —
They swell the dreadful field of death,
Grasping rebirth again, again.

They who this body seek to shun,
As they would serpent smeared with slime,
They, vomiting becoming’s root,
Shall make an end, sane and immune.