Body Works: Knowledge of the Body in the Study of Religion

Authors(s): Lawrence E. Sullivan

Source: History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 1, The Body (Aug., 1990), pp. 86-99
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 REVIEW ARTICLE

BODY WORKS: KNOWLEDGE OF THE BODY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION

Studies about the body raise pressing questions. What precisely is it that

the body knows? What kind of knowledge is bodily knowledge? Is bodily

knowledge cognitively valuable? Is it critical knowledge? In what way are

bodily knowledge and scientific knowledge of the body (or of anything else,

for that matter) related?

How will we come to know, in a discursive, conceptual way, the knowledge

of the body? Can we know without remainder, in this discursive way, what

the body knows? Is the knowledge that remains untranslatable into our

discursive, scientific languages, important knowledge? If it is important, how

may it be gathered into our experience for edification and for evaluation?

Then there is the question that has plagued modern and postmodern

philosophy: How would we know that we know what the body knows? Could

any certain and valid knowledge of bodily knowing-that is, could any

cognitively valuable knowledge of either the process or contents of bodily

knowing-be anything other than a form of bodily knowledge itself?

Not all of these bothersome questions belong exclusively to historians of

religions. In fact, some of them are important philosophical questions, of

direct interest to the historian of religions, but not central to the disciplinary

agenda of history of religions. Indeed, one may insist that some of these

questions fall within the province of epistemology, phenomenology of sense

perception, the sciences of cognition and communication, neurophysiology,

01990 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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 History of Religions 87

or behavioral science. And these areas seem to be among the most trouble-

some spots even for those highly trained in these disciplines.

One aspect of this inquiry certainly falls within the discipline of the history

of religions. The fundamental question is this: What role will other cultures

be allowed to play in answering these questions about the nature of different

modes of knowing and the relations among them? Since the Age of Dis-

covery, myriad cultures have appeared on the margins of Enlightenment

awareness. Normally, they have been taken as objects of study, subject to the

explanatory paradigms of the natural and human sciences, and thrust into

typological schemes which were not of their own making. I am speaking here

especially of the so-called primitive peoples of Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the

native Americas, but the same applies mutatis mutandis to the so-called high

religions. They have all been taken, in the main, as data to be explained

rather than as theoretical resources for the sciences that study them.

Through more prolonged association with people from these societies,

ethnographers have learned that their host cultures also possess elaborate

anthropologies, including subtle construals of the body and its processes of

knowing. Such studies make clear that, at times, the tribal peoples of Mela-

nesia, Amazon, or circumpolar regions, for instance, intend to speak about

human nature in general and not simply to make remarks that are culturally

relative, limited in application only to members of their own linguistic group.

Just as Greek philosophers did in their day and French deconstructionists did

in the 1970s, so the members of these societies wish to offer comment and

reflection upon the human condition in our day.

What status as general knowledge shall we give these general statements,

and on what defensible grounds shall we accord them this status? Here bodily

knowledge becomes a twofold problem for us because, in the first place, the

cultures in question are not only commenting upon the knowledge that the

body has of the world, which is a topic that we must face more directly if we

are to enlarge our capacity to evaluate culture, but, in the second place, this

very knowledge is transmitted in a critical apprenticeship or in a critical ritual

experience-that is, in a bodily experience-rather than through the trans-

mission of narrative, doctrine, or discourse. In other words, the knowledge of

the body that we wish to study and understand is itself often transmitted

through culturally shaped experiences of the body. But still, one may ask,

why is this a problem particular to the historian of religions?

The answer seems straightforward: the knowledge of the body is central to

the history of religions because these physiologies are religiously experienced

and religiously expressed. That is, the body is constructed, dismembered, or

repaired in ritual (indeed, the bodily changes of the life cycle-the moments

of birth, growth, death, pollution, and purification-are often the key mo-

ments of communal symbolic action and reflection). The senses are reoriented

and the bodily perceptions are corrected or rearranged through ritual contact

with the sacred beings who appear in myth. Moreover, critical knowledge of

the body is frequently related to critical experiences that are religious. Such

critical experiences are envisaged as crises and understood in terms of the

crises that affected the primordial worlds of deities, supernatural heroes,

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 88 Review Article

mythical monsters, and protohuman ancestors. These images of crisis derive

from the destruction of the primordial worlds that gave rise to the con-

structed, periodic cosmos. The well-constructed human body, when acting

properly, is an effective sign of that cosmos, which is sustained through the

periodic rhythms of production, reproduction, consumption, and exchange.

In so many cultures around the world, knowledge of the body is a religious

affair. That is why the comparative and historical study of the history of

religions plays a key role in addressing these important questions about the

ways in which the human knows and evaluates the world. The question is no

longer a purely objective one from which we can remain detached. At stake is

the evaluation of our own self-understanding as well as the standing of our

sciences. An intellectual posture that chooses mainly to objectify, demystify,

and thereby relativize the cultural constructions of the body from Africa, the

native Americas, Oceania, or "tribal" Asia, must, by its own logic, be de-

mystified in turn and expose the irrelevance of its own relativized form of

knowledge. The only option in aiming toward general knowledge of any kind

is to treat these subjects of study as cultural resources for our own sciences.

In that light, then, we must try to see what role the general history of

religions (allgemeine Religionswissenschaft) plays in determining the contents,

nature, and process of bodily knowing.

Without doubt, the most mammoth recent effort in studying the body is

Fragments for a History of the Human Body edited by Michel Feher with

Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi in three large volumes.1 The collection is a

wonderful grab-bag of articles. Michel Feher harnesses the many contribu-

tions to his overall purpose: the illumination of a history where life and

thought intersect. The changes undergone by the body are real and located in

history. By chronicling the "history" of the body, one can gain access to the

real forces of history which shape human life. "Regarded in this light, the

history of the human body is not so much the history of its representations as

of its modes of construction. For the history of its representations always

refers to a real body considered to be 'without history'-whether this be the

organism observed by the natural sciences, the body proper as perceived by

phenomenology, or the instinctual, repressed body on which psychoanalysis

is based-whereas the history of its modes of construction can, since it avoids

the overly massive oppositions of science and ideology or of authenticity and

alienation, turn the body into a thoroughly historicized and completely

problematic issue."2 The value of this collection lies in the high quality of

individual contributions and in its capacity to rough in the widest possible

parameters of the issue of the body.

The three volumes overlap considerably in content and in methodological

approach. Still, there is a division of materials according to the primary

I Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, ed., Fragments for a History

of the Human Body, 3 vols. (New York: Zone, 1989), 480 pp., 552 pp., 578 pp. These

three volumes could be fruitfully juxtaposed with Charles Malamoud and Jean-Pierre

Vernant, eds., Corps des dieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 408 pp.

2 Feher, "Introduction," 1: 11.

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 History of Religions
89

focus. The essays in volume 1 address the practical question, What kind of

body should an individual (Christian, Jew, Greek, or Chinese) attempt to

acquire or cultivate, given his or her understanding of important powers

attributed to the divine? Asceticism, pampering, lust, self-torture, body build-

ing? The focus falls on the body's relationship to what is above it, conceiving

ontology in vertical terms.

In volume 2 the contributions are concerned with "psychosomatic" ques-

tions. They investigate the manifestation (or production) of the soul, in the

first place, and the relationship of what is "inside" the body (e.g., emotions,

erotic forces) to what is "outside" the body, in the second place. How should

the body be made to relate to the social world of others, or the universe

itself? Once again, the examination sticks closely to practices, such as the

ritual practices of Japanese healers.

The third volume analyzes the practical use of specific bodily organs and

substances, as these are applied to the functions of society or the universe.

Here the body is taken as a metaphor. What is the fate of the body when the

body becomes a metaphor? The slavery of the Roman Empire and the life of

Victorian prostitutes serve as examples. So do Aztec rituals of sacrifice and

the bodies of kings in central Africa.

The materials in these three volumes defy brief summary. Michel Feher

believes that the fragmentary nature of the collection echoes the fragmentary

experience of the body itself in history, a fragmentation that assures the

jagged openness of bodily experience, and assures the need and possibility for

new formulations of meaning.

Piero Camporesi, in The Incorruptible Flesh, travels across the entire

medieval period in order to argue that, in Christian Europe of that period,

the body was treated as the great distillery.3 The human body produced a

range of valuable fluids, exudations, essences, and excreta that served as

medicinal substances as well as magical and practical ones: saliva, urine,

sperm, feces, milk, blood. Moreover, the body was an instrument particularly

well suited to absorb the powers inherent in the sensuous world. For example,

"the nose was the channel through which the mysterious and divine sneeze

was transmitted: a sensitive and refined conduit up which aromatic messages

made their way, ascending finally to the brain, the presumed seat of human

reason."4 It was imperative to absorb only beneficent powers conducive to

good health and avoid situations and practices that led to the absorption of

debilitating forces. These understandings lie at the basis of many liturgical,

magical, and hygienic practices.

The primary impetus for viewing the body as a process of distillation

appears to be religious. Camporesi notes how images of paradise are filled

with exotic fluids: streams, perfumes, unguents, balms, saps, resins, and

potable springs. The fluids bring forth the lush life of barely imaginable herbs

3 Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in

Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray and Helen Elsom (Cambridge and

New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

4 Ibid., p. 186.

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 Review Article
90

and fruits dripping with vitality. The sweet smells of Eden stand in stark

contrast to the deathly stench of the rotting cadaver and its moldering juices.

Insofar as human mortals remained in contact with the revitalizing fluids of

paradise, their flesh became incorruptible, a sign of divine immortality. "It

was said that from the dead bodies of God's virgins and the buried flesh of

his saints there gushed forth a healing sap, a wondrous balm. A 'most gentle

odour,' a 'marvelous odour' were unmistakable signs of the thaumaturgical

presence of a saintly corpse, that aromatic liberator from 'all manner of

sickness.' "5

By sifting the minutiae found in cookbooks, court records, incantatory

formulae, exorcism, and the practices of alchemy, pharmacy, surgery, and

medicine, Camporesi presents, in vivid detail, some shocking practices and

viewpoints associated with the body in medieval Europe. Working in the

manner of Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Camporesi

takes Mikhail Bakhtin's studies of Carnival as a guide.6 The array of bodily

images, smells, sounds, tastes, postures, and ministrations that he throws up

to us is nearly overwhelming. This is a book that must be read to be believed.

But Camporesi's case is not merely quantitative and startling; he also shrewdly

pursues the goal of decoding the incorruptibility of the moist, fragrant flesh

of saints. In the course of the investigation he shows to what extent science,

asceticism, torture, emotional life, and social relations were governed by a

religious understanding that harked back to the myths of creation and of

mortality in the violent expulsion of humans from the redolent gardens of

Eden. Trees, fruit, and foods figure in the myth of the Fall and in the

economy of salvation from the Fall which constitutes all subsequent human

history.

Above all, the primal garden of delights contained the tree of life. The

arbor vitae exfoliated from the center of paradise and connected all life in the

world. If human frailty had separated human flesh from the organically

connected channels of flowing juices that stream from creation into all of

history, the coming of Christ regrafted human life onto the tree of life. From

Christ's crucified side gushed the newly flowing waters of life. Falling to the

ground, these precious, immortal fluids caused paradisal plants to sprout.

These herbs had medicinal and magical properties that restored vital, fluid

health and life. The wooden cross of Christ reconnected human mortality to

the sap flowing through the Edenic tree of life. Christ himself served as the

vessel of newly flowing fluids of divine life and become the model for all other

forms of revitalization stemming from the life in the paradisal garden.

The Garden of Eden was above all an orchard of health, a mild place sheltered from

illness and decay, a general clinic in the open air, an aromatic apothecary's shop oozing

with dew, elixirs, balms, oils, gums, dripping with miraculous resins, rarefied honeys,

5 Ibid., p. 3.

6 Also valuable for the original way in which it scours such sources is Aline Rous-

selle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (New

York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), x+213 pp., which is an important complement to Peter

Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early

Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

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 History of Religions 91

where the air exudes aromas of delicate unguents, precious woods exhale vegetable

inebriants which prepare the body for beatitude, soft fattiness, and the total amnesia of

the ecstatic condition ... a place immune to putrefaction, where neither human beings

nor the fruits of the earth suffer degeneration ... Both body and fruit are as though

"fixed" in eternity, time stands still for ever. Dewy, honeyed and redolent with aromatic

balms, the saint was equipped to survive, mummy-like, in a timeless world.7

Christ's body had distilled the precious waters of salvation, in which all could

be reimmersed through baptism, the eating of his incorruptible flesh, and the

drinking of his blood.

Camporesi details what he contends was a prevalent medieval anthropology

that held that the human being was a worm, spontaneously arising out of the

putrefying chaos that forms the universe. The presence of such worms gave

new life to the fermenting cosmos. Such a view was held by the heterodox

Dominican Friar Tommaso Campanella, for example. Views of this sort drew

attention to the lice and worms that infested the human body and digestive

tract because "the world was seen in terms of an entomic ratio: the worm is to

man's belly, as man the worm is to the belly of the world."8 "For Campanella,

mankind, 'like the worm in our stomachs,' lives inside the belly of the world

and stands in relation 'to the earth as lice do to our heads; and we do not

know that the world has a soul and love, as worms and lice do not know by

reason of their smallness of our soul and intelligence."'9 The matter of worms

does not end with an anthropology but carries over into theology and

soteriology. "God is a worm because he is not born of copulation, man, too,

is a worm because worms are born, again, not from copulation, but from the

putrefaction and decomposition of his flesh." This view put flesh on the pas-

sage from 1 Cor. 15:22: "But I am a worm, and no man, namely, I am the son

of man, and not a man: which is to say, I am Christ who breathes life into all;

not Adam in whom all dies." The image was taken from Psalm 6 and

developed by other Christian writers, including Augustine.

Camporesi makes the point that truly scientific progress in the medical

specialities was predicated on grossly unscientific principles: "Sympathetic

medicine-the belief, that is, that every organ of the human body possessed a

'virtue' of its own, a therapeutic power of its own-had pointed the way to

scientific specialization."'0

E. Valentine Daniel's Fluid Signs is a remarkably self-conscious work."1 In

many ways, Daniel keeps his eyes on the goal of building a new theoretical

platform for examining meaning in culture. He attempts to make room

between the anthropologists Clifford Geertz and David Schneider, and he

uses the work of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the linguist

Michael Silverstein to speak favorably of the semeiotic construction of reality.

7 Camporesi, p. 251.

8 Ibid., p. 275.

9 Ibid., quoting Tommaso Campanella without citing the work quoted.

10 Ibid., p. 269.

1' E. Valentine Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

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 92 Review Article

Daniel not only finds himself in the middle of two theoretical positions about

the location of meaning in culture but finds himself also at the intersection of

other points of contact: "I am a native Tamil speaker, born in the Sinhalese-

speaking south of Sri Lanka to a South Indian Tamil father who changed his

name from something divine to something daring in order to marry my

mother, a Sri Lankan Anglican whose mother tongue was English. My

father's English was poor, his Sinhalese ineffective; my mother's Tamil was

excruciating, her Sinhalese reserved for the servants.... For me, at least,

anthropologizing began early."'2

Daniel recognizes himself as a participating-observing sign in the center (or

at the growing edge) of a semeiotic system called cultural anthropology.

Daniel encourages us to discover the significance of the mundane, everyday,

unconscious gesture. For our purposes, it is interesting to note that Daniel

settles on the body as the prime sign in his effort to "capture the cultural

imagination in its dynamic flux, to trap the flow and hold it in a moment of

introspection."'3 Daniel centers his study on the body because he is convinced

that the simple gesture of breaking a coconut and pouring out its liquid onto

the figure of deity is the culminating event of a complicated process of

pilgrimage. The coconut represents the body of the devotee, a five-layered

body and self that the pilgrim comes to know only through the rigors of

pilgrimage from home and through the land. House and land represent the

body (or extend the body) in definable ways.

Houses are bodies: they are conceived, born, grow up, live, and interact as

human beings do. The house is not simply a projection of body features.

House and body are not simply structural homologies of one another. Rather

"both the house and the inhabitants are constituted of similar substances,

which they share and exchange."'4

It is in the house, and subject to its influence, that bodily fluids are

exchanged by a married man and woman. Bodily fluids (tatus) are manifest

in bile, phlegm, wind, blood, bone, flesh, fat, marrow, skin, saliva, serum,

and so on. Sexual fluid, or intiriam, is constituted of the essence or distillate

of all the other six tatus. The act of sexually blending bodily fluids from two

different individuals (and also houses, families, geographic areas, birth dates,

etc.) results in the conception of a body. If care is taken to match fluids

carefully and to calibrate the complex of variables (motions, planets, families,

pulses, spatial coordinates, months, ritual movements, and so on) so that they

are compatible, the fetus will be healthy.

"The coconut is the symbol of the body, since the coconut, like the body,

has five sheaths. The coconut's five sheaths are the outer skin, the husk, the

shell, the inner skin, and the kernel. In the very center of the coconut, ghee is

poured.... As an essence it corresponds to man's own essence, his jivatma,

which flows freely with the paramdtma ('the universal soul'-the Lord Ay-

yappan) only when the other body sheaths are torn asunder or broken, as in

12 Ibid., p. 57.

13 Ibid., p. 298.

14 Ibid., p. 161.

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 History of Religions 93

the case of the coconut which must be broken for the ghee to flow on, over,

and with the deity."'5 Daniel details the five body sheaths or bodies (panca-

mayakosas), as these are taught to the pilgrim who journeys to Sabari Malai

to honor Lord Ayyappan.

Pilgrimage ruptures the various sheaths that constitute the multiple-layered

and multiple-fluidified body. Such breaks from the home, soil, foods, and

sexual partner where one is rooted are a necessary part of the process of

purna vidyd, perfect knowledge. Just as the coconut is shattered, its essence

brought into flowing contact with the deity, and its husk heaped onto the

flames, so the devotee comes to know the essence of his soul when the husks

of karma are burned off in the arduous self-knowledge of pilgrimage, and the

fluid identity of the individual is united with his Lord.

Alfredo Lopez Austin's The Human Body and Ideology is an enormous,

specialized work.'6 He moves far beyond earlier studies of the Aztec concep-

tion of the human body. For the first time a single source gathers all the

known Nahuatl designations for human body parts (1:89-159; 2:131-91). In

this effort, L6pez Austin takes Molina and Sahagun as his guides, even while

he laments the fact that these two sixteenth-century Franciscans aimed to

create dictionaries, not textbooks on anatomy.'7 In an appendix found in the

second volume (2:193-253), Lopez Austin provides what he calls "polemical"

etymologies based on his own reconstructions. Given that L6pez Austin is the

world's leading nahuatlato, there could be no better point of departure for

future discussion. In order to frame correctly his discussion of body nomen-

clature and corporeal ideology, Lopez Austin provides an exhaustive survey

of the Nahua texts that deal with specific terms that refer to the body and

also provides readers a lengthy overview of the Aztec worldview. A glossary

in the second volume helps readers keep in touch with the meaning of any

technical terms used. The result is a work that is both accessible to non-

specialists and unabashedly precise in its use of primary sources in Nahuatl.

Having taken such an exact grip on materials concerning the body, Lopez

Austin demonstrates that ideas about the body are the surest way to under-

stand Aztec conceptions of the universe, the state, language, the plant world,

sex, death, the fundamental structures of time that control fate, and contact

with invisible powers. In L6pez Austin's interpretation, anthropocentric ex-

perience and notions of the human body are projected into all enigmatic

realities so that knowledge of the human body becomes the basis for all Aztec

science. The body, in turn, is created and driven by what are termed "animis-

tic entities." These are located in "animistic centers," organs where vital

substances concentrate and where basic impulses originate for directing the

15 Ibid., p. 278.

16 Alfredo L6pez Austin, The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient

Nahuas, 2 vols., trans. Thelma Ortiz de Montellano and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano

(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), xiv+449 pp., 315 pp.

17 Fray Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana (Madrid:

Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1944); Fray Bernardino de Sahagfn, Historia general de

las cosas de Nueva Espana (Mexico: Editorial Porruia, 1956).

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 94 Review Article

processes that give life and movement to the body and allow for the fulfill-

ment of psychic functions. Animistic energies are often considered self-

standing, capable of independent life outside the organ where they are most

often located. In general, there are three major zones of animistic centers: the

head (cuaitl) where consciousness and reason originate, the heart (yollotl)

that governs a multiplicity of animistic processes, and the liver (elli) from

which passions emerge. In each of these zones there is a network of vital

substances, conduits, excretions and exudations, body organs charged with

specific kinds of force, and particular substances (such as hair or the skin of

one body part or another) that have recognizable values. In ritual, medicine,

warfare, economic process, statecraft, and personal relations, sense organs

and animistic entities could be set in motion and brought into newly con-

figured relationships. For example, to the degree that the heart could be

raised and brought near the ixtli (literally, what we might call the "face," but,

more exactly, the perceptive organ that includes the eyes, taste, and sense of

smell), consciousness attained the heights of contemplation.

L6pez Austin offers extended and lucid discussion of the primary forces

that drive the body, its experience, and its destiny: tonalli ("shadow"), teyolia

(soul of the heart), and ihiyotl (a luminous gas that resides in the liver but can

permeate the body's breath). "The three entities, according to both ancient

and modern thought, are considered divine gifts that make man's existence

possible; but none of the three is exclusive to mankind."18 These forces are

associated with elements in the wider world and with specific qualities of

relationship among people and things. In the body, these entities are asso-

ciated with three vital fluids.

It is amazing how extensive and clear a treatment can be accorded a body

of ideas so devastated by conquest. Lopez Austin shows that laborious

attention to even paltry source materials can bring to light the coherence and

power of ideological systems associated with the body. Not only is the Aztec

worldview breathtaking in its newly disclosed order, but Lopez Austin's

methods of research provide a creative, constructive example for historians

constrained to work with colonial documents. And, in a postcolonial condi-

tion, who of us can claim to be free of such strictures?

In Le corps taoiste Kristofer Schipper delineates several ways that the

taoist tradition has envisaged the human body.'9 One set of approaches to the

body, Schipper believes, is theological, to the extent that the cosmological

system that underlies it recognizes a supreme reason (li) and some grand

universal design that endows meaning on the world.20 This cosmological

schema has long fascinated students of Chinese cultural history and under-

girds state ritual complexes as well as medical theories. Such an ensemble of

body images depends heavily on an ontology and cosmology laid out in

elaborate systems of correspondences. Schipper wishes to make clear that this

18 L6pez Austin, 1:236.

19 Kristofer Schipper, Le corps taoiste: Corps physique, corps social (Paris: Fayard,

1982).

20 Ibid., pp. 141, 298.

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 History of Religions 95

theological approach is linked to specific understandings of transcendental

principles, including at least essential energies, souls, breaths, and notions of

divinity associated with the composition of the body.

A second set of approaches to the body Schipper has labeled empirical.

Here lies the basis of instrumental therapies such as bone setting, acupunc-

ture, pharmacy, and many Chinese arts. Schipper insists that the empirical

approach is embedded in popular practice and defies reduction to literary and

philosophical terms, even if philosophers and literary savants have tried to

capture this approach within their cosmological system of correspondences.

The empirical approach continues to exist outside and beyond such "concep-

tual and literary baggage." It is transmitted through apprenticeship, in the

practice of learning one's craft under a master in professional organizations.

These first two approaches to the body may be found in Taoism, but they

also cut across Chinese culture at every level. A third approach to the body,

however, is specifically taoist. This is the one that most interests Schipper. He

calls it a symbolic vision of the body. The body becomes an immense

landscape beheld during the cultivation of practices that heighten interior

vision. This approach emphasizes the absolute priority of the human body. In

order to rediscover creative spontaneity, the laws and secrets of the universe

must first be known through an exploration of the universe interior to the

body.

"The human body is the image of a country."21 This adage not only

describes the relationship of each inhabitant to his or her territory and each

sovereign to his kingdom, but it also serves as the point of departure for

initiates who will, through bodily practices, acquaint themselves with the

complex landscape of an immense interior world.

Schipper argues that only the specifically taoist symbolic vision of the body

is associated with a meaningful mythology. In such a mythology, chaos plays

a key role. Here we are far from the smooth systems of correspondence. The

mythology is full of logical contradictions that make systematization impos-

sible. The heart of bodily vision is located deep within the interior world of

the body and, in the most ancient descriptions, has no counterpart in the

wider macrocosm. Only by turning the pupils of one's eyes inward, thereby

channeling the astral luminescence of the outer sky down into the dark abyss

of one's inner physical mass, can one transform one's eyes into the brilliant

sun and moon of the interior universe. Through physical training one can

learn to illuminate the inner landscape and concentrate all light in its center

(in the middle of one's forehead, the place identified with the Pole Star). One

creates a laser: the beams of light from one's eyes are concentrated in the

mirror-like center between one's brows. This mirror then reflects concentrated

light into the depths of the body.

Adept initiates behold a wonderland of illumined forms. No full account of

the details could be given here. A couple of examples can suggest what is at

stake. Within one's head is a chain of mountain peaks surrounding a central

21 Ibid., p. 142.

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 96 Review Article

lake, in which there is a nine-story Palace of Lights (Ming-t'ang) with

structures that bear calendrical values. The nose is an immense valley whose

entryway is guarded by two towers (the interior of the ears), each containing

sonorous stones that sound out when anything passes by them. A stream

connects the central lake to a smaller one traversed by a bridge (the tongue).

The mouth and its saliva are associated with a spring. Interior waterways

wend their way through the body's interior landscape.

Alongside the rivers one finds complicated architectural structures as well

as natural landmarks. The trachea, for example, is a twelve-storied edifice

that marks the border between the upper world and the middle ones. The

central world is covered with clouds (the lungs) that obscure the view of Ursa

Maior in its sky. In this central world is the Yellow Court where all inhabi-

tants of the inner world assemble. The lowest world is presided over by the

kidneys, which are the sun and moon of that realm. They throw light onto a

vast ocean in which a giant tortoise swims. From the center of that ocean

rises the sacred mountain K'un-lun. Its dimensions are the reverse of moun-

tains found in the outer world. It has a narrow base and an expansive summit

that widens at its highest point.

At the center of the lowest world is the Cinnabar Field, which is the root of

the human being and the locus of each human's vital spirit. At the bottom of

the ocean is the final exit, a fiery hot place where the vital forces spill and

drain and where the energies contained in the Cinnabar Field can be siphoned

off.

Each meditative position has a different inner landscape and inhabitants

that the initiate must come to know. Some are fierce and menacing, such as

the Three Cadavers and the Nine Worms associated with the origins of life in

the Cinnabar Field. Others, like the Queen Mother of the West and the

Sovereign of K'un-lun, nourish the traveler. But the initiate must remain on

guard even with helpful residents of the inner world. The Queen Mother of

the West, for example, presides over the Mountain of Immortals, but she is

also the goddess of the dead and the one who afflicts populations with epi-

demic disease.

The taoist image of the entire universe is contained within the cosmic

body-the symbolic, visionary body-of the ancient master, Lao Tzu. Setting

the myth of P'an-Ku in parallel with texts that deal in detail with the body of

Lao Tzu, Schipper draws attention to the fact that the world is created by the

death of the primordial being. "The differentiation of energies and the birth

of the human universe are linked to death."22 Death is a form of transforma-

tion and the human body is the locus of the creative union of forces (e.g., yin

and yang, heaven and earth) that look to be separate and opposed, but may

more truly be seen as inseparably joined in a prior chaos that has given way

to order (the alternating order, or rhythm, of sound and echo).

The transformation of Lao Tzu's body into a landscape, through inner

vision and death, reveals the structures and meaning of pien-hua: change,

22 Ibid., p. 157.

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 History of Religions
97

mutation, transformation, and flux. The transformation of Lao Tzu's body

into landscape is an embryological process, taking place in nine phases. Each

phase embodies and manifests a key taoist principle: ultimacy, veritability,

mystery, augustness, primordiality, ancestry, nature, orthodoxy, greatness

(principles vary in different accounts). Gestation of the body becomes the

model for creation of the universe and transformation of the body, even at

death. The process of gestation accomplishes the same remarkable passage as

creation: the passage from undifferentiated invisibility to articulated visibility.

Return to the body, especially to the embryological process of its constitu-

tion, acquaints one with the forces and processes at work in the chaos of the

womb of all creation. That is why "the body of the Tao ... is, in this world, a

woman's body. The feminine body, the body of the pregnant mother is the

only truly complete body, the only one that can accomplish transformation,

which is the work of the Tao."23 Schipper details the process through which

Lao Tzu becomes his own mother and is initiated to the mysterious secrets of

the bodily reproduction of life.

Based on key ideas about the body and its transformation, Schipper argues

for the coherence and persistence of aesthetic and ascetic practices through-

out the history of Taoism. His treatment of the body extends from liturgi-

cal practice to meditation, alchemy, popular music, calligraphy, and sexual

performance.

Yasuo Yuasa, in The Body, also attempts to cut a wide historical swath

through East Asia.24 Yuasa focuses, for the most part, on key thinkers in

Japanese history: Dogen and Kukai in ancient history; and Tetsur6 Watsuji

and Kitaro Nishida, in the twentieth century. Yuasa straightforwardly pro-

poses to open up a "path to a new philosophy, one that would reconcile

religion and science."25 To find this path he demonstrates, in the first place,

that there exists a difference of strategy and emphasis between Eastern and

Western theories when they describe the relationship of mind to body. On

this relationship of mind to body, he argues, depend theories of knowledge

and metaphysics (the grounds of science and religion). In the second place,

Yuasa suggests that mind-body theories found in Eastern philosophy may be

able to break the infertile separation that exists between western philosophy

and western science. Neither seems much inclined to place cultivation of the

body in the central position given to bodily practice in Eastern thought.

Yuasa may be less intent on offering the West a way out of its episte-

mological impasse than on encouraging his Japanese contemporaries to value

a sense of their own traditions and not to throw them over too quickly in the

rush for western technology and its accompanying (lack of) values. "Training

solely for technique without concern for the perfection and enhancement of

the personality has usually been regarded as heretical in Eastern cultivation

23 Ibid., p. 173.

24 Yasuo Yuasa, The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, trans. Nagatomo

Shigenori and Thomas P. Kasulis, ed. Thomas P. Kasulis (Albany: State University of

New York Press, 1987), vii+256 pp.

25 Ibid., p. 240.

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 98 Review Article

theories.... The preoccupation with technique alone is taken to be danger-

ous."26 Fascinating it is, then, that Yuasa's exhortation zeroes in on the body

as the central issue. On the view of the body depend evaluations of human

nature. How one cultivates the body shapes construals of art and civilization.

Yuasa argues that Western mind-body theories lead to merely therapeutic

strategies-attempts to salvage what is average and to pull the abnormal

back up to the mediocre level of the norm. He points to psychotherapy as his

most graphic example of this. The Western propensity toward therapy is

based on mind-body relationships that are reified and objectified. The body is

thought of as an entity that simply is, rather than as a condition that must be

sought.

Yuasa contends that Eastern mind-body theories lead not to therapy and

adjustment to the norm but to cultivation. Pointing to traditional arts,

martial arts, and meditation, Yuasa says their goal is supranormality: "Culti-

vation aims at enhancement and perfection of the personality by elevating

various capacities of the body-mind from average normality to a supranormal

standard.... One characteristic of the Eastern cultivation theories is the

holistic, unified grasp of the various mental and physical abilities, lending

religious significance to the personality's nucleus as the center of that unity."27

Yuasa states his views of cultivation most forcefully in his considerations of

Kuikai's theory of kaji ("grace"). Kikai (774-835) gave to Japanese history a

new and articulate theory of cultivation based on his unique teaching that

Mahavairocana, the absolute Dharmakaya or dharma-body Buddha, teaches

the dharma himself to the cultivator.

If a cultivator realizes that the three everyday karmic actions [of body, language, and

mind] are, in their origin, the three mysteries, that is, if one forms the mudrds with the

hands, recites mantras with the mouth, and places the mind into a samddhi state, the

three functions of body, mouth and intention reach a state commensurate with the

Buddha's. To form a mudra is a corporeal function; to recite a mantra is a verbal

function; meditation is a mental function. These three mysteries are synthesized in

cultivation. That is, the grace of the three mysteries indicates cultivation's disclosure of

the place hidden beneath the everyday world: It is the everyday function of the three

karmic acts transformed into the three mysteries having the Buddha power and

originating in the metaphysical dimension. The true aspect of the metaphysical uni-

verse, as exhibited in the six great elements and the four mandalas, is clarified through

this experience.28

By viewing the body-mind as a full spectrum of possible conditions and by

cultivating its capacities to their fullest extent, Yuasa believes that both

philosophical knowledge and scientific knowledge can expand by bringing the

"bright consciousness" of full, deliberate awareness into more fruitful contact

with a deeper layer of consciousness. This deeper layer is what Yuasa calls the

"dark" consciousness, a level that might be the ground of what psychoanalysts

26 Ibid., p. 209.

27 Ibid., p. 208.

28 Ibid., p. 151.

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History of Religions 99

refer to as the unconscious, neurophysiologists call the autonomic nervous

system, and Buddhists refer to as "no-mind." Through cultivation of the

body-mind-through practices that draw the reflexivity of bright conscious-

ness into the dark consciousness the dark consciousness can be trained to

arrive at knowledge that contemporary philosophy and science systematically

avoid.

These fascinating works on the body, thick with detailed analyses of

specific cultural systems, offer new materials and new strategies for study.

Two closing observations spring to mind when these works are looked at

together. The first is that all of these studies, whether of Aztec, Chinese,

Tamil, Japanese, medieval European, or ancient Mediterranean communities,

insist that the body lies at the center of the cultural worldview, especially at

the heart of religious experience and practice. Whether one is interested more

in cross-cultural comparison or culture-specific study, this is a striking con-

currence of judgments. In the second place, remarkable differences among the

conceptions of the human body-from its most mundane experience to its

more extraordinary ones-cannot be ignored. Since the body is so often

demonstrated to be a primary instrument of knowledge, and since the under-

standing of the body can vary markedly from one culture and epoch to

another, we may have to add to our customary list of hermeneutical reflec-

tions yet another question: What kind of challenge is our own bodily exis-

tence to the study of religion?

LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

Harvard University

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