Embodied Transcendence: The Buddha’s Body in the Pāli Nikāyas

Eviatar Shulman

doi:10.3390/rel12030179

Abstract

This article reassesses the role of the body in advanced meditation as it is presented in the early Buddhist Pāli discourses, showing that certain theorizations of liberation held that it contained a marked corporeal element. The article also reflects upon the understanding of the Buddha’s body in this textual corpus, and demonstrates that for important strands of the early tradition, the Buddha’s liberation was thought to manifest in his body, so that liberation impacted his physical presence and the quality of his movement. There are also marked metaphysical dimensions to the Buddha’s body, so that its nature transcends the material. Common approaches that take liberation to be a purely psychological transformation thus ignore important aspects of the traditional understanding, which also directs us to think of a plurality of approaches to liberation.

Highlights

IntroductionWhat is a body according to the Buddha, and is it related to realization and awakening?
How did the early Buddhists understand the Buddha’s body, and how did they conceive of the relation between his body and mind? The more common interpretations of these issues emphasize the mental and psychological aspects of liberation, so that the body is not deemed essential to awakening and is considered tangential at best
Religions 2021, 12, 179 diversity speaks of multivalence and tolerance at the intersection between ideology and practice, and makes room for personal experimentation and creative self-reflection in the development of Buddhist self-identity. These grounded approaches can be meaningfully distinguished from the main mood of normative texts, which inclines toward an ideology and a vision of practice that is oriented toward masculine dominance and that often takes an ambivalent, if not starkly negative, view of the body. Siding with these studies in seeing the body as an integral part of the life of tradition on the ground, and adopting the theoretical opportunity they afford for appreciating plurality and complexity, this study aims to unearth the positive role attributed to the body in seminal contexts of the Buddhist path to liberation, including with respect to liberation itself

Summary

Introduction

What is a body according to the Buddha, and is it related to realization and awakening?. These grounded approaches can be meaningfully distinguished from the main mood of normative texts, which inclines toward an ideology and a vision of practice that is oriented toward masculine dominance and that often takes an ambivalent, if not starkly negative, view of the body Siding with these studies in seeing the body as an integral part of the life of tradition on the ground, and adopting the theoretical opportunity they afford for appreciating plurality and complexity, this study aims to unearth the positive role attributed to the body in seminal contexts of the Buddhist path to liberation, including with respect to liberation itself. My approach will be markedly distinguished from what I take to be the two most significant assessments of the nature of the Buddha’s body that have been produced in scholarship on the early tradition, those of Michael Radich and John Powers Radich, in his extensive and rich 2007 dissertation on “The Somatics of Liberation,”. There is, little evidence that it refers to masculinity: all audiences are impressed by his presence, which appears to be evident in the very way the Buddha carries himself, yet this applies at least as much to men, his main audiences, as it does to women; if he has any special physical strengths, these result from his unique understanding, which penetrates the secrets of nature and thereby controls nature. While I make no attempt to cater to the Buddhist modernist sentiment that may deny the sexual aspects of the Buddha, the Buddha of the Nikāyas does—as a literary figure—seem to display no interest in sex and his bodily perfection does not relate to his masculinity.

The Buddha’s Perfect Body

The Body in Advanced Meditation

Body and Mind

Metaphysics of Embodiment—What Is a Body?