Part III
The
Capuchins had a special light in which they see the harsh realities of life.
They are very realistic. The capuchin crypts or ossiaries vouch for the fact
that they find something remarkably aesthetical in the skeletal remains of the
bygone. It is no descration, but the art of attaching only due importance to
what is mortal. Would we make a work of art from the skeletal remains of
somebody we know? It depends on what we are up to. The dead teaches the living: to a despot it
can be a lesson of coercion and deterrence, to a mortician it can be the
sensibilities associated with death, to a pathologist it can be factors
culminating on the death and for an ascetic it is the worth of death. The
residues of life are hence didactical in monastic tradition. In the movie Samsara,
a venerable Buddhist monk shows parchments of erotic drawings to a novice
and then holds them in front of a lamp with a nod of complacency and there
appears a different layer of drawing underneath which depicts the skeletal
nature of the erstwhile entwined bodies. Every discipline is an act of economy
of the body, notes Foucault. When one sees the body in terms of its
momentariness, one is more inclined to live every moment fully, knowing that
the time flows, the air flows, the beauty flows, life flows, bladder flows and
bowels flow and we cannot afford to waste any of them. Add to it a sense of
transcendence an then you have at hand the first lessons of asceticism. Ascetic
life as I know it, is delightful because it sees life in death and not like any
other macabre philosophies which see death in life.
to be contd...
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