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