In
order to meditate upon the transience of all being, the monks, in a
widespread exercise, imagined a naked woman. This so-called analytic
meditation began with a perfect and beautiful body, and transformed
this step by step into an old, diseased, and dying one, to end the
exercise by picturing a rotting and stinking corpse. The female body,
as the absolute Other, was meditatively murdered and dismembered as a
symbol of the despised world of the senses.
- The Shadow of the Dalai Lama by Victor & Victoria Trimondi