Have
Observed, yet failed to pay Attention!
During Transmigration downwards the Yāma deva asks one this: Did you never see in this world a man or a woman,
eighty, ninety, or a 100
years old, frail, crooked as a gable-roof, bent down, resting on crutches,
with tottering steps, shaking, far from young, with broken teeth, grey &
scanty hair or bald, wrinkled, with black blotched limbs? Did that sight
never make you think, that you also will become old, & cannot escape it?
Did you never see in this world a man or a woman who, being sick, ailing,
and grievously ill, fumbling in own filth & excrement, lifted up by some
and put to bed by others? And did that sight never make you think that
you also inevitably will become sick, & that you cannot ever escape it?
Did you never see in this world the corpse of a man or a woman, 1, 2 or
three days dead, swollen up, pale bluish-black, smelling & half-rotten?
Did that repulsive sight never make you realize, that you indeed also
inevitably will meet death, disintegrate and that you cannot escape it?
Source: (edited excerpt) AN 3:35
