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Preliminaries for Spiritual Growth...
261
However it would be wrong to conceive of the insistence on the impurity of the body merely in this negative way. Inasmuch as also the Hinayāna aims at man's health and at an integrated personality, the idea of impurity may have some therapeutic effect in releasing the person from his bondage to the physical side of his being and in enabling him to discover the deepest and most intrinsic values he is pursuing But be. cause of his ego-centredness these values are much more difficult to find. The ego is steeped in images and roles and averse to experience, if not afraid of it. Even if we admit that it is an experience that prompted us to label our body as impure or our feelings as frustrating, in so classifying the experience we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of seeing our teing with complete freshness. There again the differene between Hinayāna and Mahāyāna becomes evident, the former preoccupied with judgments of perception and its abstractions, the latter starting from and attempting to maintain vividness of experience :
"The followers of the Hinayāna take as their objective reference merely the four topics of inspection as they relate to themselves and others. The concrete form they give to the pursuance of these ideas is that the followers of the Hinayāna contemplate them in terms of impurity and so on, while the followers of the Mahāyāna contemplate them in their openness of being. The aim they have is that the followers of the Hinayāna contemplate these topics in order to become detached from the disturbingly frail and fragile body and so on, while the followers of the Mahāyāna do not contemplate them for the sake of being or not being detached from it, but for the sake of realizing a Nirvāṇa that is in no way localizable." 3
Thus, in one case, a person remains within the limits of a dichotomous way of thinkiua which implies something 'higher as contrasted with something 'lower that is spurned and re. pudiated, while, in the other, the person is capable of an integrative way of thinking which does not imply a cutting
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