Cleaning of Washrooms and Non-Duality

The pictures that I am going to post in this article will not be something pleasant. In fact, it will come across as revulsive to most of you. My wife Anjali was even wondering whether we should post it on social media because she felt people only like to read and share beautiful and pleasant things, nobody wants to share ugly and unpleasant things. I decided to go ahead with posting, along with a write-up, that would explain the philosophy behind it.

Today we took up the challenge to clean the abandoned toilets and washrooms of Neev Centre: a place where we couldn’t dare to stand. Ever since we came to NEEV Centre after a two-year gap, we did cleaning work, except for the back side toilets and the room where we store wood because that was not of immediate use. However, it was there in our minds that we had to clean them someday.

Our capitalistic world has created a world of duality where we hide the unpleasant and the ugly behind a curtain and create a world of classes. I would not say that work division is an outgrowth of capitalism, as it has existed since time immemorial in all human societies, leaving the tribal ones. We denigrate and demean the tribals, but these are the societies where there was no real division of labour. All other societies, ranging from feudal to present-day capitalism, are fuelled by the division of work into classes. All civilization is created by the slave labour. From the pyramids to the modern skyscrapers, to architectural marvels that we proudly honour; what lies behind their magnificence and glitz is a gory tale of slaves living in such horrible conditions that would cause us nausea. It’s a hidden tale of exploitation and deprivation which rarely any history book shall cover. History is the history of kings and emperors and aristocrats and thinkers, it is not the history of slaves who, in the first place, made the work of all these classes possible. Today we don’t have slavery as an institution, but we have a sophisticated class system, caste system and racism in its place. At one point in my life, I thought that I could cause a change in the world by changing systems, and that is what attracted me to communism. But then I gradually realized that systems are made from human thought and thought itself is the culprit. Communism established itself in various countries. But the very communism which was meant to uproot class consciousness created totalitarian regimes, with the communist leaders bathing in bathtubs of gold while the working class being pushed to greater subjugation and poverty. So I realized that it is not systems but thought that is the culprit. And the root culprit, both psychologically and metaphysically, is duality: the duality between good and bad, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and painful, pleasing and horrifying.

When we cling to duality, we cling to one side of the equation of life. In non-duality, there is no polarity, so nothing left to cling to. Our societies condition us to view life dualistically. We all grow up with a “tinsel town” imagination of the world. Like Buddha was shielded from sickness, ageing and death, all of us are shielded from the ugliness of life. A curtain is drawn over those aspects of life that are revulsive, ugly and degrading. A decade back, as a social worker, I used to work in a leprosy slum. We did a lot of work there related to health and hygiene, curing many people from tuberculosis. Further, we worked on the education of slum kids and livelihood options for women. How many of us would dare venture into a slum, let alone a slum where there are leprosy patients. But the slums are the places from where your maids come, from where the sweepers, toilet cleaners, rubbish cleaners, sewage cleaners, drivers, and construction workers come. These are the wheels of the city. If these legs and hands stop working, the tinsel towns we thrive in today would be reduced to huge mounds of debris in a matter of days. And how do we as a society treat them? We hide them as an ugly underbelly. Because as a society, we sustain and nourish a duality between hand work and head work. Headwork is considered superior to handwork. This duality is the root of an exploitative caste and class system. Many of you would be surprised to know that as an NGO we rarely get funding from other organizations or government agencies for working in slums because almost all slums are on illegally occupied lands. Being occupants of illegal lands, they are not even given access to state welfare schemes because they cannot produce land documents to make Adhar cards etc. So we have disenfranchised those very people who make our cities possible. This is a case of interior colonization and the scale is vast.

How would life be if we did not harbour psychological and metaphysical duality? A few years back, I wrote an article on death. A Canadian reader commented that he was surprised with the number of times I used the word “death” in my article. He said that people in his place don’t want to use that word. They use euphemisms like “passing away” etc. Life is beautiful and death is morbid. Duality always makes us cling to one pole even though life as a whole is not dualistic. Life cannot be separated from death, pleasure cannot be separated from pain and beauty cannot be separated from ugliness. Thus, all non-dual paths teach various ways to deconstruct this duality. Krishnamurti talked about how death has to be faced as a fact while living. Such a psychological obliteration of the boundary between life and death would bring us to “living and dying from moment to moment”. In the Bag of Bones, A Miscellany on the Body compiled by Bhikkhu Khantipalo, he writes:

“When the emphasis is so much on sensuality, youth, and beauty as we find now, the darker sides of life get pushed away and attempts are made, always unsuccessful, to sweep them under the carpet. Those who try to do so will not be pleased with the exercises contained in the Buddha’s contemplation of the body. Such things will appear to them as morbid and unnatural. Yet they are also a part of this life and should not be ignored. And if the effort is made to ignore what is unpleasant about the body, sooner or later one will be jolted into the recognition of these things. Such jolts are not pleasant. Rather than leave it until one is forced to know the body’s unpleasant sides it is better to acquaint one’s emotions with this knowledge gradually.”

In this book, Bhikku Khantiplao has compiled a set of Buddhist reflections which help seeker confront the duality mind is conditioned with and see things in the true non-dual way. There are several teachings in Buddhism and Tantra which teach the seekers to overcome duality between the pleasant and the horrifying, one of the teachings being that students should sit in the cremation and the charnel grounds and watch the dead. These practices bring equanimity. In several passages, Krishnamurti describes himself looking at a procession of a dead man being taken to the funeral grounds, and he is quietly following them. To develop equanimity towards the body, I am just quoting two passages from Buddha’s teachings:

Gratification and Danger in Form (Body)

“And what is gratification in the case of form (body)?

“Suppose there were a girl of warrior-noble cast or brahmin caste or householder stock, in her fifteenth or sixteenth year, neither too tall nor too short, neither too thin nor too fat, neither too dark nor too fair: is her beauty and loveliness then at its height?”

“Yes, venerable sir.”

“Now the pleasure and joy that arise in dependence on that beauty and loveliness are the gratification in the case of form.

“And what is danger in the case of form?

“Later on one might see that same woman here at eighty, ninety or a hundred years, aged, as crooked as a roof, doubled up, tottering with the aid of sticks, frail, her youth gone, her teeth broken, grey haired, scanty-haired, bald, wrinkled, with limbs all blotchy: how do you conceive this, bhikkhus, has her former beauty and loveliness vanished and the danger become evident?”

“Yes, venerable sir.”

“Bhikkhus, this is the danger in the case of form.”

— M. 13, “The Mass of Suffering,” trans. Ven. Ñanamoli

N.B. Women reading this should change the sex of the person in the above.”

The Discourse on Victory
[The Buddha:]

Walking or standing, sitting, lying down,
He bends it in or stretches it: this is the body’s movement.
This body by bones and sinews bound, bedaubed with membrane, flesh,
And covered up with skin — is not seen as it really is.
Filled with guts, with belly filled with liver-lump and bladder,
With heart, with lungs as well, with kidneys and with spleen,
With snot and spittle, and with fat and sweat,
With blood, and oil for the joints, with bile, and grease of the skin;
Then by nine streams the unclean flows forever from it:
Eye-dirt from the eyes, ear-dirt from the ears,
Snot from the nose, now from the mouth bile is spewed,
Now is spewed out phlegm, and from the body sweat and dirt.
And then its hollow head is stuffed with brains;
The fool thinks (all is) beautiful — led on by ignorance.
But when it’s lying dead, bloated up and livid blue,
Cast away in the charnel ground, even kin do not care for it.
Dogs eat it and jackals, and wolves and worms,
Crows and vultures eat it, and whatever other creatures are.
Wise the bhikkhu in this world who having heard the Buddha-word,
The body he knows surely and thoroughly, he sees it as it really is,
(Thinking): As this (living body) so that (corpse was once),
As that (corpse is now) so this (body will surely be) —
So for the body, within and without, discard desire.
Such a bhikkhu, wise, discarding desire and lust in this world,
Attains to deathlessness, to peace, Nibbana the unchanging state.
Pampered is this foul, two-footed, fetid thing,
Though filled with various sorts of stench and oozing here and there:
He who with such a body thinks to exalt himself,
Or should despise another — what else is this but blindness?

— Sutta-Nipata, Vijaya Sutta, Verses 193-206

Source: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/khantipalo/wheel271.html

What we did today was an exercise to confront duality. I have always talked about erasing the duality between handwork and headwork because I see this as the root of all economic exploitation in the world. This was one of the reasons I took up woodworking as a hobby. Though this greatly challenged the duality between handwork and headwork, what we did today challenged this and the duality between the ugly and the beautiful. We had to clean the washrooms in the back area of the centre, which we had left abandoned for the past three years. They were filled with cobwebs and sludge-like dirt. They were so dirty that we did not even dare open the doors and peek inside. In fact, two days back, I challenged Anjali that if she could just look inside and tell me what is their condition I would give them Rs. 200. In fact as I write, I can still feel some rasping sensation in my throat due to the cleaning acid and bleaching powder fumes that we inhaled during the cleaning process. I am posting the pics of the work we did. They won’t be a pleasant sight to behold but they are the undeniable fact of life. Seen in the pics are my wife Anjali, her sister Tannu and myself.