Understanding the Dhamma Body and Overcoming Mental Defilements : หน้า 112/263

to enslave the mind and how we can overcome them. This is a major difference from the naked (physical) eye to which the defilements are invisible. The limits of our human senses are to know the manifest symptoms of defilements — for example we realize “these are the signs of greed”, “these are the signs of hatred”, “these are the signs of delusion”. Human senses have no way of detecting the working of defilements, and therefore we have no way of even knowing how to start removing those defilements from the mind. It is no wonder that we lack the wisdom to transcend those defilements absolutely [samucceda-virati] — and that is why we are stuck as the victims of our own suffering without any hope of escape. By contrast, the eye of the Dhamma Body is able to penetrate and understand the nature of all things all the way from the root of the cause to the implications of the effects — that is why the Dhamma Body is able to transcend suffering. Thus the Dhamma Body is what enables insight — the Dhammakaya is what ‘sees’. Besides ‘seeing’ the Dhammakaya is also what ‘knows’ — furnishing a penetrating understanding by use of its ‘jewel knowing’ [ñāṇa-ratana] — to the point of liberation from those things, and attaining permanence [niccaṃ], happiness [sukhaṃ] and true self [attā] — a true self that is the embodiment of happiness (with no trace of suffering) and unchangability. Thus the Dhamma Body is every human’s body of enlightenment. It is a transcendental [lokuttara] body which is beyond the reach of defilements. It is a body which is to be found within every one of us without exception. Meditators who attain the Dhamma Body to the degree that their mind becomes irreversibly unified with the