A Buddhist Psychosomatic Therapy against Anti-Aging Obsession

Abstract

This paper has two objectives: to provide a clear account of the reality on human life which is linked from birth to death through the Buddhist perspective and to expose Buddhism as itself psychosomatic therapy that provides means for managing physical and mental pain in order to overcome grief and loss in the course of life. In the modern world Population Ageing is an event faced by almost all the countries of the world. With improved medicine and treatment of major diseases, life expectancy of human beings is getting longer. Ironically, modern people do not seem to welcome their growing old appearance. These days, many people defray expenses on medicines, medical treatments, cosmetics, and even want to undergo plastic surgery to look younger. In an ageing society, people are obsessed with Anti-ageing; consequently they experience serious disorders between mind and body in the relationship between thinking processes and the resultant impacts on the physical body. The teachings of the Buddha, the one Fact of Existence is that all conditioned things are impermanent (sabbesankhārāanicca). What is impermanent is suffering (dukkha) and it comes from the five aggregates (pañca-khandha) affected by clinging. The cardinal teaching of impermanence is elaborated with regard to the life process, which consists of birth (jāti), ageing (jarā), illness (vyādhi), death (maraṇa). Clearly, ageing is the predominant subject under the concept of impermanence. People wish to live long and enjoy a long life span being obsessed by personality-belief (sakkāya-diṭṭhi), but it is rarely gained in the changeable world. Unless defilements subsided (kilesa-vūpasama) or eliminated in them, people cannot get perfect peace (nibbuti). Reached in eighty with decrepit body as an old cart, the Buddha himself showed mentality can be developed in old age by the concentration of mind (cetosamādhi). The Buddhist practices, viz. charity (dāna), virtue (sīla), meditation (bhāvanā), also help people to free the mind from these states of clinging or attachment to the permanence.