Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Contents
viii
ix
xiii
1
G E O F F R E Y S AMU EL AN D JA Y JO HN ST ON
PART ONE
11
13
G E O F F R E Y S AMU EL
16
LIVIA KOHN
33
G E O F F R E Y S AMU EL
48
J A N E T C H A W LA
PART TWO
65
67
vi
Contents
69
A N G E L A S UM E GI
83
B A R B A R A GE RKE
100
A L E J A N D R O C HAOUL
PART THREE
115
117
J A Y J O H N S TO N
120
JOSEPH S. ALTER
149
C R Y S T A L A D DE Y
168
MILAD MILANI
PART FOUR
185
187
J A Y J O H N S TO N
192
J O H N B R A MB L E
211
Contents
12 Invisible, dispersed and connected: the cultural plausibility
of subtle-body models in the contemporary West
vii
224
RUTH BARCAN
239
J A Y J O H N S T ON
249
G E O F F R E Y S AMU EL
Index
267
Figures
1.1 The meridians in the body
1.2 The proper and wayward ow of qi
1.3 Postnatal metabolism
1.4 The inner organs in the body
19
20
23
26
Tables
1.1
1.2
2.1
9.1
11.1
25
30
40
176
221
Contributors
x Contributors
with the provisional title, Orient and Empire: The Metaphysical East in
the Modernist Imagination. His previous publications include Structure
and Ambiguity in Catullus LXIV (1970), Masks and Metaphors (1971), and
Persius and the Programmatic Satire (1974). After a period of informal eldwork spent travelling in the Near and Middle East he has settled near Hayon-Wye, the book-town on the Welsh borders, to write up his researches. Of
this regions scenery the nineteenth-century diarist Francis Kilvert wrote, an
angel-satyr roams those hills. Aptly for one interested more in to daimonion
than the divine, the last reported sighting of fairies in England took place in
the hamlet where John lives.
Alejandro Chaoul (MA, University of Virginia, 1999; Ph.D. Rice University,
2006) is assistant professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer
Center, where he is involved in mind-body research and holds a meditation
clinic for cancer patients. He also teaches meditation to cancer patients and
their caregivers, as well as to staff, faculty and medical students. Alejandro has
studied with leading Tibetan lamas of the Bonpo and Buddhist traditions. His
PhD dissertation was a study of the yogic practices (rtsa rlung phrul khor)
in the Tibetan Bon tradition and their contemporary medical applications. He
is the author of Chd Practice in the Bn Religion (Snow Lion Publications,
2009) and author/co-author of various articles and book chapters, focusing on
the role of mind-body practices in integrative cancer care and research, as well
as Tibetan meditation and ritual practices within religious studies, humanities,
and the intersection of humanities and medicine.
Janet Chawla is an independent scholar living in Delhi. She is the director
of MATRIKA, an NGO devoted to the promotion of traditional knowledge
about childbirth, the author of Childbearing and Culture (Indian Social
Institute, 1994) and the editor of Birth and Birthgivers: The Power behind the
Shame (Har-Anand Publications, 2005). She is currently ethnographic consultant for the Jeeva Research Project afliated with the Centre for Womens
Development Studies in New Delhi. Jeeva is documenting childbirth service
providers (including dais and shamans) in four remote areas of India located in
Bellary district, Karnataka; Bokharo district, Jharkhand; Dharamsala district,
Himachal Pradesh and Nandurbar district, Maharashtra.
Barbara Gerke obtained her DPhil in Social Anthropology in 2008 and MSc
in Medical Anthropology in 2003, both at the University of Oxford. She is
currently based at Humboldt University, Berlin, where she is the principal
investigator of a three-year DFG-funded research project on pharmacological
detoxication and therapeutic rejuvenation processes in Tibetan medicine,
with eldwork in India and Nepal. Her monograph Long Lives and Untimely
Deaths (Brill, 2012) presents ethnographic accounts and textual material
analysing how Tibetans in the Darjeeling Hills of India view the life-span
and map out certain life-forces to enhance their vitality, prolong their lifespans, and avoid untimely deaths. She has taught at UCSB in California
and at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and was assistant professor
at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University in 2011.
Contributors
xi
She has lived many years in Himalayan areas in India in Tibetan communities,
researching Tibetan medicine. She co-founded and directed the International
Trust for Traditional Medicine (ITTM) in Kalimpong, India, where she
promoted students research projects and provided residential facilities and
exchange opportunities for researchers from 1995 to 2008. At ITTM she
initiated and supervised the digitalization of Tibetan medical texts (ninth to
nineteenth centuries), which will be published online through the Tibetan and
Buddhist Resource Centre (TBRC), New York.
Susan Greenwood is a past Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the University
of Sussex. She gained her doctorate in 1997 from Goldsmiths, University of
London, for research on western magic and is the author of Magic, Witchcraft
and the Otherworld: an anthropology (2000), The Nature of Magic: an
anthropology of consciousness (2005), The Anthropology of Magic (2009),
and Magical Consciousness (with Erik D. Goodwyn, under consideration for
publication). Recent chapters include Magical Consciousness: A Legitimate
Form of knowledge in Dening Magic: a Reader, edited by Bernd-Christian
Otto and Michael Stausberg (2012), and Toward an Epistemology of
Imaginal Alterity: Fieldwork with the Dragon in The Social Life of Entities:
Spirits and the Agency of Intangibles, edited by Diana Espirito Santo and Ruy
Llera Blanes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2013).
Jay Johnston is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Sydney
and Senior Lecturer, School of Art History and Art Education, College of
Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. She is inspired by concepts of
the self and materiality that challenge traditional boundaries. Publications
include Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics (Equinox,
2008) and numerous articles and chapters. She is the primary chief investigator for the project The Function of Images in Magical Papyri and Artefacts
of Ritual Power from Late Antiquity, funded by the Australian Research
Council (201214), and is completing a monograph Stag and Stone:
Archaeology, Religion and Esoteric Aesthetics on concepts of materiality, embodiment and image agency. Her other current scholarly obsessions
include trans-species subcultures (especially Otherkin); the body in alternative
medicine; Pictish studies, religious and material relations between Gaelic and
Scandinavian cultures; critical theory and Continental philosophy of religion.
Livia Kohn, Ph. D., graduated from Bonn University, Germany, in 1980.
After six years at Kyoto University in Japan, she joined Boston University
as Professor of Religion and East Asian Studies in 1988. She has also
worked variously as visiting professor and adjunct faculty at Etvs Lorand
University in Budapest, the Stanford Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto,
Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, and San Francisco State University. Her
specialty is the study of the Daoist religion and Chinese long life practices.
She has written and edited over thirty books, as well as numerous articles
and reviews. She has served on many committees and editorial boards, and
organized a series of major international conferences on Daoism. She retired
from active teaching in 2006 and now lives in Florida, from where she runs
xii
Contributors
various workshops and conferences, manages Three Pines Press, and serves as
the executive editor of the Journal of Daoist Studies. Her most recent work is
A Source Book in Chinese Longevity (2012). For more, see www.liviakohn.
com; www.threepinespress.com
Foreword
Ideas and practices involving so-called subtle bodies have existed for many
centuries in many parts of the world. Such ideas and practices are probably best
known from their occurrence in contexts of spiritual development and self-cultivation in Indian, Indo-Tibetan and East Asian societies, but they have become
increasingly familiar in the West in recent years, especially through the various
healing and yogic techniques and exercises associated with them. Arguably, similar concepts and practices can be found in very many human societies, including
preliterate societies, and arise from a widespread human way of thinking about
consciousness that nevertheless differs considerably from conventional Western
modes of thought.
Western understandings of consciousness remain for the most part premised
on the so-called Cartesian distinction between mind and body, which are seen as
radically different kinds of substance (res cogitans and res extensa, in Descartes
own terminology). This distinction is equally assumed whether the mind (soul,
spirit, consciousness) is seen as having an existence radically distinct from that
of the body or whether, as with many modern scientic approaches to consciousness, the independent existence of the mind is denied, and consciousness is
regarded as a simple derivative of material processes in the brain and central
nervous system. Typically, subtle-body practices posit a third alternative. They
assume a quasi-material level of human functioning that is intermediate between
conventional concepts of body and mind. In the sophisticated Indo-Tibetan and
East Asian versions of these practices, this intermediate level is conceived of in
terms of an invisible structure of channels within the body through which ows
of quasi-material substance (pran.a, qi, ki) take place. These ows guide and
support aspects of consciousness, including emotions, drives and motivations.
With Indian, Tibetan and East Asian societies, such concepts regarding subtle
bodies form a basic explanatory structure for a wide range of practices. These
include forms of healing (acupuncture, acupressure, shiatsu, pran.a vidya, etc.),
modes of exercise and martial arts (qigong, taijiquan, rtsa rlung phrul khor,
etc.), as well as religious practices aimed at the renement and transformation of
the human mind-body complex (Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, and similar Daoist
practices). Subtle-body practices within Indian, Indo-Tibetan and East Asian
cultures imply a specic training of sensitivities, perhaps originally deriving from
xiv
Foreword
the context of healing and medicine but developing into a variety of spiritual and
interpersonal modalities. To the extent that these sensitivities can be shown to be
objectively valid, they raise philosophical issues about the nature of the senses
and of the person. Healing techniques associated with the subtle body also raise
issues of both practical and philosophical interest. At the same time, the progressive incorporation of these practices into Western societies is in itself a cultural
phenomenon of considerable interest.
Sophisticated versions of subtle-body practices have also existed in Western
thought (including Neoplatonism, Islam and Judaism) though they have been
historically marginalized and for many centuries have been associated primarily
with mystical, occult and esoteric traditions. Outside these sophisticated and literary contexts, similar concepts and practices are staples of folk healing and
shamanic practices around the world.
Subtle-body practices of many kinds have been introduced, or reintroduced,
into Western societies in recent years, and hundreds of thousands of people today
are engaged with them in one way or another. It no longer makes sense simply to
dismiss these practices as unscientic or nonsensical, but it is far from easy to
know how we might understand them. This book explores subtle-body practices
from a variety of perspectives. It includes studies of these practices in Asian and
Western contexts, and explorations of the possibilities for new models of understanding which these concepts open up. It also considers some of the ways in
which subtle-body practices may be of use within the complementary and alternative health context. We hope that the book will help to establish this eld as an
area of serious and systematic scholarly enquiry, and also suggest some of the
lines along which that enquiry might proceed.
The editors thank Dorothea Schaefter, Jillian Morrison and Leanne Hinves
of Routledge for their encouragement and support for this project, despite the
considerable delays that have ensued in bringing it to completion. We thank
all our contributors, and acknowledge the convenors of the 2nd International
Conference on Religions and Cultures in the Indic Civilization conference, which
took place in Delhi in December 2005, for providing the initial impetus for this
book. Jay Johnston would especially like to thank Geoffrey Samuel for initiating
this project and his subsequent enthusiasm and patience with its development,
Barbara Mar for meticulous proofreading assistance and Iain Gardner and Lili
Kamala Johnston for all manner of sustenance and support. Geoffrey Samuel
equally would like to thank Jay for her ongoing energy and commitment, without
which this book would certainly never have reached completion and Santi Rozario,
whose encouragement and support was vital to this book, as to all his work.
General introduction
Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston
As this book demonstrates, ideas and practices relating to what we term here
subtle bodies have been around for many centuries, and they can be found in
many parts of the world. While they are most often associated with Asian
cultures, particularly Indic and Chinese, ideas and practices of this general
kind have been found in a very wide range of societies, and form part of many
religious traditions, at both elite and vernacular levels. Much of the contemporary
literature regarding them, however, is popular rather than academic. This is a
major omission, which we hope that this book will go some way to remedy. There
have been academic studies of specic subtle-body traditions within particular
cultures, but the present volume is, as far as we know, the rst strictly academic
book that attempts to survey and make some sense of subtle-body concepts and
practices over a wide range of societies. Whether or not we regard these concepts
as referring in some way to real phenomena within human experience, the wide
range of time and space within which they have been evidenced surely implies
that there is something there worth studying.
ra
,
in
the
context
of
Sam
karas
work, forms part
.
General introduction 3
However, a blanket dismissal of subtle-body concepts because of the
Theosophical associations of the term would be unfortunate. Subtle-body
concepts and practices existed long before Theosophy came along, and the need
for a coherent and systematic approach to them remains, irrespective of the value
one places on the specically Theosophical versions of these ideas.
We are left with the questionable nature of the term subtle body itself. Our
intention in this work is to use it as a generic term, while being aware of the
possible difculties that this may cause. Certainly there is a need for a generic
term to cover the various concepts, practices and phenomena discussed in this
book. They have in common their interstitial positioning between mind and
matter, as well as a series of established or possible historical relationships, some
of which will be explored in the following chapters. Subtle body is not ideal,
but it at least conveys a general sense of the area we are considering, and we have
decided, with some reservations, to retain it. As noted above, in this book we use
the term subtle body generically, to include not only concepts such as the Vedic
suksma
sarra and related ideas, but a variety of aspects of Indian and Tibetan
yogic and tantric practices, and a range of similar conceptualizations found in
East Asia and elsewhere in the world. We will explore a variety of these in Parts
One to Three of this book. We will be also looking, in Part Four, at ideas and
practices relating to the subtle body in the contemporary world, and at the possible
contributions of subtle-body concepts to contemporary thought.
General introduction 5
series of attempts to bridge the gap between materialist and idealist extremes, to
draw mind and body, consciousness and material reality, matter and
spirit, within the same eld of discourse.
While such developments were by no means unknown in the Western tradition,
they have tended to be marginalized into residual categories of mystical, occult
or poetic (see Uberoi 1984; Samuel 2005b; and Chapters 10, 11 and 13 in this
volume). Subtle bodies nevertheless came to feature strongly in Western mystical
and esoteric traditions, often on the basis of borrowings from the Jewish mystical
tradition of the Kabbalah, which itself had close associations with the Islamic
mystical tradition of Susm. In this respect the founders of the Theosophical
Society were continuing a long-established tradition of esoteric thought,
although choosing to nd their inspiration in an alternative and South Asian
cultural context. In contemporary esotericism, subtle levels of consciousness
continue to feature, for example in the practice of ritual magic, where they
provide the mediating yet invisible substance that enables a spell, charm or ritual
to work. In general, for such practices, the intent (mind) of the practitioner is
directed to manipulating subtle matter.
Chinese thought has also developed its own modes of understanding subtlebody phenomena, as have many of the preliterate traditions found in small-scale
societies around the world. Indian philosophical schools, with their partiality for
non-dualist approaches, have nevertheless probably provided the most complex
and intellectually sophisticated descriptions of subtle-body processes. Buddhist
varieties of non-dualism in particular, such as the Madhyamaka philosophy of
Nagarjuna and his followers, can be read as a systematic refusal to avoid closure
to one side or the other, and this refusal led naturally, as in the Cittamatra or
Mind-Only schools, to many centuries of intellectual speculation and practical
enquiry into what might lie between.
General introduction 7
with various aspects of psychological functioning, untying knots in psychic
channels may be seen as releasing emotional blockages, and so on. Much of this
goes back to the development of cakra concepts within the Theosophical tradition
from the 1920s onwards. A key gure here was Charles Webster Leadbeater,
whose book The Chakras, rst published in 1927, has been particularly inuential
(Leadbeater 1972). In addition to the work of Blavatsky, Leadbeater and other
Theosophists of his time relied extensively on the translations and other writings
of Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon), particularly The Serpent Power, rst
published in 1919 (Woodroffe 1953). This modern Western history of the subtle
body underlies several of the chapters in Part Four.
Indic, Chinese and for that matter New Age subtle-body practices can also be
seen as part of a wider range of concepts and phenomena, including soul and
spirit concepts, synaesthesia and other apparently anomalous sensory processes,
shamanic forms of healing and religion, and non-dualistic modes of understanding
more generally. It is tempting to interpret much of this material in psychological
terms, especially since many of the practices have been incorporated into a
general eld of therapy oriented around individual self-improvement. However,
we should be cautious about Western psychological readings, particularly in
relation to earlier Indic and Chinese concepts and practices. Western psychology
tends to take for granted much of the mindbody dichotomizing endemic in
contemporary Western thought, and psychological readings of subtle-body
concepts may be partial, simplistic or simply irrelevant. In fact, much of the
contemporary value of subtle-body concepts may lie in their potential to generate
a critique of Western psychology (cf. Samuel 1990, and Chapter 14 in this
volume). Subtle-body processes do not t neatly into the Western categories of
mind (consciousness) or body, but hint at the need for models and modes of
understanding that go beyond these divisions.
Western medical science accepts the interaction of mind and body within an
essentially materialistic framework, and subtle-body practices have been studied
scientically in terms of the yogic control over physiological and neurological
processes associated with consciousness (electrical impulses, temperature, etc.;
see Chapter 14). However, the subtle body and similar ideas strain the limits of
such reductionisms. A full understanding of subtle-body processes is likely to
encompass humanities and social sciences as well as natural sciences. It is also
likely to require some degree of openness to the experiences of those who have
or claim to have worked with subtle-body processes. We hope that this book will
stimulate further work in these areas.
Notes
1 Thus Dominik Wujastyk comments that the time is long overdue to drop subtle as a
translation for suks ma in s u ks masarra, both because of its Theosophical associations
and because the word subtle has itself changed signicantly in sense since the nineteenth century (personal communication, 2 August 2012).
2 The exact associations vary: e.g. pran.a proper with inhalation and intake of food,
samana with digestion, apana with exhalation and excretion, vyana with circulation,
udana with upwards movement, as with speech.
3 Further references on subtle-body concepts in India include Hartzell 1997, Flood 2006
and Samuel 2008.
References
Flood, G. (2006) The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition of Hindu Religion. London and
New York: I.B. Tauris.
Hartzell, J. F. (1997) Tantric Yoga: a study of the Vedic precursors, historical evolu
tion, literatures, cultures, doctrines, and practices of the 11th century Kasmri Saivite
and Buddhist unexcelled Tantric Yogas, unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia
University. UMI No. 9723798.
Johnston, J. (2008) Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics, Gnostica
Series. London and Oakville: Equinox.
(2010a) Hermetic embodiment: angels and intersubjectivity, in M. T. Mjaaland,
S. Fiorgeirsdttir and O. Sigurdson (eds) The Body Unbound: Philosophical
Perspectives on Embodiment, Politics and Religion. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Press.
(2010b) Cyborgs and chakras: intersubjectivity in spiritual and scientic somatechnics,
in C. Cusack and C. Hartney (eds) Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of
Professor Garry W. Trompf. Leiden: Brill.
(2010c) Subtle anatomy: the bio-metaphysics of alternative therapies, in
E. B. Coleman and K. White (eds) Medicine, Religion and the Body. Leiden: Brill.
Leadbeater, C. W. (1972) The Chakras. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House.
General introduction 9
Samuel, G. (1989) The body in Buddhist and Hindu Tantra: some notes, Religion 19:
197210.
(1990) Mind, Body and Culture: Anthropology and the Biological Interface.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
(2005a) Beyond biomedical assimilation?, paper for ACHRN Conference, Diversity
and Debate in Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Nottingham University, 29
June1 July.
(2005b) The attractions of Tantra: two historical moments, in Samuel, Tantric
Revisionings. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass and London: Ashgate.
(2006a) Healing and the mind-body complex: childbirth and medical pluralism
in South Asia, in H. Johannessen and I. Lzr (eds) Multiple Medical Realities:
Patients and Healers in Biomedical. Alternative and Traditional Medicine. New York
and London: Berghahn Books.
(2006b) Tibetan medicine and biomedicine: epistemological conicts, practical
solutions, Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity 2: 7285.
(2007) Spirit causation and illness in Tibetan medicine, in M. Schrempf (ed.)
Soundings in Tibetan Medicine: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. Leiden:
Brill.
(2008) The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
(2010) Healing, efcacy and the spirits, Journal of Ritual Studies 24(2): 720
(special issue, The Efcacy of Rituals Part II, ed. W. S. Sax and J. Quack).
Uberoi, J. P. S. (2004) The Other Mind of Europe: Goethe as a Scientist. Delhi, Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press.
Woodroffe, Sir J. (Arthur Avalon) (1953) The Serpent Power: Being the Shat-ChakraNir u pana and Paduka-Panchaka, Two Works on Laya-Yoga, translated from the
Sanskrit, with introduction and commentary, by A. Avalon, 5th enlarged edn. Madras:
Ganesh.
Part One
14
Geoffrey Samuel
and practices regarding the subtle body, comparable to that found in China, is not
attested until the Tantric literature of the eighth and ninth centuries. The associated practices became central to the Indian traditions of asceticism and
self-cultivation, and were exported to Southeast and East Asia and to Tibet.
Chapter 3, by Janet Chawla, is included as representative of the important
presence of subtle-body-type concepts within vernacular and non-literary
contexts. It strongly makes the point that subtle-body-type concepts are not just
about intellectual understanding, they are also about doing. The context here is
that of childbirth in contemporary India, which is still largely handled by
midwives or birth attendants (dais) whose knowledge comes from family or folk
tradition rather than biomedical training (cf. Rozario and Samuel 2002). Chawla
shows how Indian midwives today employ subtle-body concepts in their work.
The example is particularly signicant because, as Samuel notes in Chapter 2,
subtle-body concepts may well have arisen in India in large part as a way of
understanding childbirth and the coming into existence of new human life.
Readers might note that Indian concepts of the subtle body are explored elsewhere in this volume in Chapter 7, which develops a comparison between ideas
of physical and spiritual cultivation in India and in ancient Greece.
Note
1 Other useful studies include Schipper 1994 and Mayor and Micozzi 2011. The latter
includes a range of studies analysing qi-type processes in scientic terms.
References
Harper, D. (1987) The sexual arts of ancient China as described in a manuscript of the
second century B.C., Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47: 53992.