Reading guide
A corpse, and a name spoken directly
The first two verses are narrated in the third person, unusually: ‘Kullo sivathikaṅ gantvā, addasa itthimujjhitaṅ’, ‘I, Kulla, went to a charnel ground and saw a woman's body abandoned there’. The second verse then addresses him by name — ‘passa kulla samussayaṅ’, ‘see this bag of bones, Kulla’ — a device also seen with Dabba and Vīra in the Book of the Ones and Senaka in the Book of the Fours, though here it appears to be a second voice instructing rather than simple self-address.
The teaching taken up as a mirror
The third verse turns from the corpse outside to the body within: ‘dhammādāsaṅ gahetvāna, ñāṇadassanapattiyā’, ‘taking the teaching as a mirror, for realizing knowledge and vision’. This site's own Thig 10.1 (Kisāgotamī) already uses this same image, dhammādāsa, for her own confirmation of realization — here Kulla applies it specifically to examining the body, ‘hollow, inside and out (tucchaṅ santarabāhiraṅ)’, a related but distinct use of the same shared image.
A run of reversibility couplets, echoing widely
The fourth and fifth verses build a sequence of paired opposites — ‘as this is, so is that; as that is, so is this’, ‘as below, so above; as above, so below’, ‘as by day, so by night; as by night, so by day’ — four such pairs in total. This reading guide notes only that the phrase-pattern echoes broadly across contemplative literature; it does not assert a specific historical connection to any other tradition's similar-sounding formulas.
A closing turn toward absorption, not revulsion
Rather than ending on the corpse or the body's unattractiveness, the final verse pivots toward positive practice: ‘even the music of a five-piece band can never give such pleasure as when, with unified mind, you rightly discern the teaching’. The charnel-ground observation and the reversibility reasoning both serve, in the end, as preparation for meditative absorption rather than as ends in themselves.
Fourth poem, fourth structure
After narrative, dialogue-refrain, and antithetical parallelism in the first three poems, Kulla's poem adds a fourth distinct approach: third-person scene-setting opening into direct address, then abstract reasoning, then a closing simile. Four poems in, the Book of the Sixes shows no sign of settling into one template.
Key terms
The text
§1I, Kulla, went to a charnel ground and saw a woman’s body abandoned there, dumped in a cemetery, full of worms that devoured.
§2“See this bag of bones, Kulla—diseased, filthy, rotten, oozing and trickling, a fool’s delight.”
§3Taking the teaching as a mirror for realizing knowledge and vision, I examined this body, hollow, inside and out.
§4As this is, so is that; as that is, so is this. As below, so above; as above, so below.
§5As by day, so by night; as by night, so by day. As before, so behind; as behind, so before.
§6Even the music of a five-piece band can never give such pleasure as when, with unified mind, you rightly discern the Dhamma.
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