The body

and then, when it parts from the body, it suffers pain in the utmost degree — at the loss of the body and of the sensory pleasures and bodily objects of desire that hang upon it, and because of the base bodily conditions and the ugly attributes that have settled in the soul and give it pain.

As for the disease, it is the soul's intense inclination toward the body and its love for it;

And the spirit, when it was breathed into the body, came to permeate it and to run through its veins and its members, as fire permeates charcoal and as water runs through the rose.

but I do not hold that the bestial spirit existed before the body of beasts, and in this there is a subtlety, namely that the body of man was created for his spirit, while the spirit of beasts was created for their body.

The exposition of this is that God, exalted be He, joined the dense body to the subtle soul, so that the body might be perfected by the soul and the soul by the body, and He made the perfecting proceed first from the side of the soul:

The purport of this discourse, in utmost brevity, is that if the soul were composed of an inhering thing and a locus, like the body composed of the inhering form and the matter in which the form inheres, the body's subsistence being by these two parts, the objection would hold.

(“And when the soul has emanated from its Originator upon the body, or has become attached to it — on whichever of the two doctrines it may be — there no longer remains for the body, nor for anything that attaches to it, any effect of causality nor any effect of conditionality in the soul's existence nor in its subsistence.

So if the body or the temperament were a condition of the soul's subsistence, circularity would follow.

I am greater, and born for greater things, than to be the slave of my body, which I regard as nothing else than a chain thrown about my liberty.

so the mind, cooped up in this sad and dark dwelling, whenever it can, seeks the open and rests in the contemplation of Nature.

The wise man and the follower of wisdom does indeed cling to his body, but with the best part of himself he is away, and bends his thoughts to lofty things.

> This body, O Vasudhā, is called the field (*kṣetra* (क्षेत्र));

42 // And he should see this body as composed of seven constituents.

but after I have covered myself over, I beg of you, my children, let no one look upon my body, not even yourselves.

nor yet, my sons, have I ever convinced myself of this—that only as long as it is contained in a mortal body is the soul alive, but when it has been freed from it, is dead;

Now as to my body, when I am dead, my sons, lay it away neither in gold nor in silver nor in anything else, but commit it to the earth as soon as may be.