The last of the body contemplations
The charnel-ground contemplations are not a separate meditation. They are the last movement of the first foundation of mindfulness — kāyānupassanā, contemplation of the body — in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10, and identically in DN 22). The reader arrives at them having already worked through mindfulness of breathing, of the four postures, of clear comprehension in every activity, of the thirty-one parts of the body, and of the body as four elements. The corpse is where that sequence ends.
The instruction is oddly worded. The monk is told to practise seyyathāpi passeyya — “as though he were to see” — a body thrown aside in a charnel ground. He is not necessarily standing in front of a corpse. He is asked to see one; the sutta is describing an act of imagination disciplined by knowledge of what actually happens to bodies. Nine times the description is given, and nine times it ends the same way, with the sentence that is the whole practice:
What it is for
Two different purposes run through the tradition under two different names, and they are worth keeping apart. Asubha-bhāvanā, the cultivation of the unattractive, is a targeted antidote: in the Visuddhimagga’s scheme of temperaments, Buddhaghosa prescribes it specifically for the person of lustful disposition, as loving-kindness is prescribed for the hateful and analysis for the deluded. It is a medicine calibrated to one disease. Maraṇasati, mindfulness of death, is broader and is about time rather than desire. In AN 6.19 the Buddha asks a group of monks how often they recollect death; one says he hopes to live a day and a night, another a single day, another the length of a single meal — and the Buddha calls them all negligent. Only the monk who practises for as long as it takes to breathe out and breathe in, and who then reflects that death may come in that interval, is said to dwell diligently.
Neither purpose is morbidity. The Pāli word for what the practice is supposed to produce is saṃvega — the shock that turns a person toward practice, closer to urgency than to gloom. The Girimānanda Sutta (AN 10.60) lists the perception of the unattractive among ten perceptions taught to a sick monk to restore him, which tells you something about how the early tradition understood the effect.
The tradition’s own warning
The canon records this practice going badly wrong. In SN 54.9 the Buddha teaches the meditation on the unattractive to a group of monks at Vesālī and then goes into seclusion for a fortnight. When he returns the saṅgha has thinned dramatically: numbers of monks, revolted by their own bodies, had taken their lives or asked others to end them. The Buddha assembles those remaining and teaches mindfulness of breathing instead, calling it “peaceful and sublime,” a dwelling that settles unwholesome states the moment they arise.
Revulsion is not the goal — it is a side effect that has to be metabolised into dispassion (virāga) or the practice has failed. The corpse is meant to loosen a grip, not to install a hatred of the body; a body one hates is a body one is still entangled with. Everything on this page should be read with that correction attached.
The Japanese nine
The paintings beside the text belong to a genre called kusōzu (九相図), “pictures of the nine aspects,” which flourished in Japan from roughly the thirteenth century to the nineteenth. Its list of nine does not come from the Pāli suttas but from Chinese sources — the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra and the Tiantai contemplation manuals — which reached Japan through Tendai and Shingon. The two lists overlap without matching, and this page shows both rather than forcing them together.
The subject of a kusōzu is nearly always a beautiful woman, often a noblewoman or a courtesan, and in some sets she is identified with Ono no Komachi, the ninth-century poet whose beauty was proverbial. This is not incidental. The genre works by first making the viewer want, and museums have on occasion catalogued surviving scrolls alongside erotic art for exactly that reason.
The Charnel Ground
Coming back
The charnel ground is not where the sutta leaves you. Its contemplations occupy about a page, and then the discourse moves on — to feelings, to mind, to phenomena. The corpse was one of the ways it gets a person to stop leaning on the body, and once that is done the instruction is to keep going.
The tradition is emphatic that this is a section and not a residence. Buddhaghosa treats the ten foulnesses as objects for a particular temperament and a particular stretch of work, to be set down afterwards; the Vesālī episode records what happens when they are taken for a whole outlook instead. And the instruction after each contemplation is never be disgusted. It is to see that your own body is of the same nature — and then, at the end, to dwell independent, not clinging to anything in the world.