Reducing Attention to the Physical Body in Order to Eliminate Self-View (ātma-dṛṣṭi)

Whether one can eliminate the self-view and realize the first fruit up to the fourth fruit depends on whether that person's view of the body and self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi) are slight or severe. A person with a slight view of the body seldom cares about or attends to how the physical body is, does not spend much thought on deliberately caring for the body, is not overly anxious about the body's safety, and has little sense of fear. Such a person, because of not being too attached to the physical body and the five aggregates (pañcaskandha), can easily eliminate the self-view and realize the fruits. Because they do not care much about the physical body and the five aggregates, there are few mental hindrances, making it easy to attain meditative concentration (samādhi); the contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) of the five aggregates can proceed ever deeper, and with contemplative practice being effective, eliminating the self-view becomes easier.

Practitioners of the past had deep roots of goodness and merit. Living in a world where material life was underdeveloped, they were not controlled by material desires, had fewer cravings, did not covet pleasure and entertainment, and did not squander their merit (puṇya) without cause, so they could make continuous progress single-mindedly on the path. People today are different: they crave comfort and an easy life too much, their minds are obscured by all kinds of desires, their karmic obstructions are not only dissolved very slowly but actually increase, and it is very hard for them to make any progress on the path.

The arhats of the past were able to practice austerities (dhūta) because they had no view of the body or self-view, and had eliminated self-grasping; in their minds there was no fear for the safety of a "self," and they did not care about the environment surrounding the physical body, wanting only to extinguish all mental formations (citta-saṃskāra) in order to attain nirvāṇa without remainder (anupadhiśeṣa-nirvāṇa). Modern people, by contrast, care deeply about the physical body—various forms of nutrition, maintenance, and health preservation—yet due to karmic obstructions, not many people seem to have kept their bodies in particularly good condition; instead they have increased the view of the body, so breakthroughs in practice are very hard to achieve. Meticulous care for the physical body turns out in the end to be not worth the cost—gaining little and losing much, not knowing which is light and which is heavy. All of this is due to the influence of the modern living environment, compounded by insufficient roots of goodness and merit, which leads people to blindly and carelessly squander their own merit.

Therefore, if you wish to eliminate self-view and self-grasping as quickly as possible, do not constantly dwell on your own physical body and five aggregates, do not take too much care of yourself; try to look lightly upon yourself and your living environment, and devote your mind to the path. At the same time, be careful not to squander your merit without cause. Merit is extremely important for cultivating the path—even if you had the merit of all the great bodhisattvas, you should not casually expend it. Only by accumulating merit bit by bit can you ultimately achieve the Buddha's merit.