Body (Skt. शरीर, Sharira) is the physical form of a living being through which experience is mediated. On the path of knowledge, the body is understood as an object of experience it is not what we are.

The body as experience

The body is an appearance in consciousness. It is constantly changing growing, aging, decaying and therefore falls in the category of the false according to the criteria for truth used on the path of knowledge. Like all objects, the body does not have an independent existence; it is perceived through the senses and constructed in the memory.

We never experience the body directly we experience what the senses tell us about the body. The solidity, the warmth, the shape all of these are sensory outputs, not the thing itself. What is out there is a structure in the universal memory, not the solid flesh we imagine.

The body and identification

The most fundamental ignorance is the assumption I am this body. This identification is the root of suffering. Once one identifies with the body, all the limitations of the body become my limitations its diseases become my diseases, its death becomes my death, its hunger becomes my hunger.

In ordinary daily life, caught in the struggle for survival, we adopt the attitude I am the body, I am a person, I am the doer. awareness is the light that illuminates this behaviour we can go on doing the same things, but now in the light of awareness.

The body on the path of knowledge

The seeker should have a healthy body and should not have major diseases, because these become obstacles on the path. discipline of the body is required getting rid of bad habits, laziness, addictions to food, and other animalistic tendencies. However, the body is not the focus of the path; it is merely the instrument through which the path is walked.

The practice of neti neti (not this, not this) involves negating the body: I am not the body. When the body is seen clearly as an experience something that is witnessed the identification with it dissolves, and the experiencer is revealed as one's true nature.

The body is part of name and form that is superimposed on the nondual existence. Upon self realisation, one understands that the body is an appearance in existence it was never born and can never die. Only the form appears and disappears; the existence itself is eternal.

See also: body mind, bodies and world, gross body, subtle body, causal body, identification, neti neti, experiencer.