Body Works: Knowledge of the Body in the Study of Religion Author(s): Lawrence E.

Sullivan Reviewed work(s): Source: History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 1, The Body (Aug., 1990), pp. 86-99 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062793 . Accessed: 15/08/2012 08:40
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REVIEW

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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. 0018-2710/91/3001-0004$01.00

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or behavioral science. And these areas seem to be among the most troublesome 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 Discovery, 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 Melanesia, 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 transmission 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 moments 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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mythical monsters, and protohuman ancestors. These images of crisis derive from the destruction of the primordial worlds that gave rise to the constructed, 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 demystified 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 contributions 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 MichelFeher,with RamonaNaddaffand NadiaTazi, ed., Fragments a for History of the HumanBody, 3 vols. (New York:Zone, 1989),480 pp., 552 pp., 578 pp. These threevolumescould be fruitfully and juxtaposedwith CharlesMalamoud Jean-Pierre eds., Corpsdes dieux(Paris:Gallimard, Vernant, 1986),408 pp. 2
Feher, "Introduction," 1: 11.

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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 building? 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" questions. 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 Mutationand Mortification in and Religionand Folklore,trans.Tania Croft-Murray Helen Elsom(Cambridge and New York:Cambridge Press,1988). University

4 Ibid., p. 186.

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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 Gardenof Eden was above all an orchardof health,a mild place shelteredfrom illnessand decay,a generalclinicin 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. 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 Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
6 Also valuable for the original way in which it scours such sources is Aline Rous-

Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women,and Sexual Renunciationin Early

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where the air exudes aromasof delicateunguents,preciouswoods exhale vegetable inebriants whichprepare body for beatitude, fattiness,andthe total amnesiaof the soft the ecstaticcondition... a placeimmuneto putrefaction, whereneitherhumanbeings nor the fruits of the earthsufferdegeneration... Both body and fruit are as though in "fixed" eternity, timestandsstill for ever.Dewy,honeyedand redolentwith aromatic to in balms,the saintwas equipped survive,mummy-like, a timelessworld.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 passage 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."1In 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, 251. p. 8 Ibid.,p. 275. 9 Ibid.,quotingTommasoCampanella withoutcitingthe workquoted.

of Angeles: University California Press, 1984).

10Ibid., p. 269. 1' E. Valentine Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way(Berkeley and Los

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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 Sinhalesespeaking 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 Ayyappan) only when the other body sheaths are torn asunder or broken, as in
13 Ibid.,p. 298. 14 Ibid., p. 161.

12Ibid., p. 57.

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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 (pancamayakosas), 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 conception 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 nomenclature 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 nonspecialists 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 understand 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 experience 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 "animistic entities." These are located in "animistic centers," organs where vital substances concentrate and where basic impulses originate for directing the
15Ibid., p. 278.

of the Ancient Nahuas,2 vols., trans.ThelmaOrtizde Montellanoand Bernard Ortizde Montellano of (Salt LakeCity:University Utah Press, 1988),xiv+449pp., 315 pp. 17Fray Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario lengua castellana mexicana(Madrid: en y EdicionesCulturaHispanica,1944);Fray Bernardino Sahagfn, Historiageneralde de las cosasde NuevaEspana(Mexico:Editorial Porruia, 1956).

16 AlfredoL6pez Austin, The HumanBody and Ideology:Concepts

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processes that give life and movement to the body and allow for the fulfillment of psychic functions. Animistic energies are often considered selfstanding, 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 configured 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."18These 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 associated 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 condition, 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 undergirds 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
19Kristofer Schipper, Le corps taoiste: Corps physique, corps social (Paris: Fayard, 1982). 20 Ibid.,pp. 141,298.

18L6pezAustin, 1:236.

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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, acupuncture, 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 "conceptual 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 impossible. 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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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 inhabitants 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 mountains 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 epidemic 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."22Death is a form of transformation 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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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 constitution, 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 throughout the history of Taoism. His treatment of the body extends from liturgical 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 proposes 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 epistemological 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
25 Ibid., p. 240.

New YorkPress,1987),vii+256pp.

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Review Article

theories.... The preoccupation with technique alone is taken to be dangerous."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: "Cultivation 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'stheory 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 cultivatorrealizesthat the threeeverydaykarmicactions[of body, language,and that is, if one formsthe mudrds with the mind]are, in theirorigin,the threemysteries, hands,recitesmantraswith the mouth, and placesthe mind into a samddhistate, the three functionsof body, mouth and intentionreach 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 hiddenbeneaththe everydayworld:It is the everydayfunctionof the three karmic acts transformedinto the three mysterieshaving the Buddha power and dimension.The true aspect of the metaphysical unioriginatingin the metaphysical is verse,as exhibitedin the six greatelementsand the four mandalas, 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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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 consciousness 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 concurrence 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 understanding of the body can vary markedly from one culture and epoch to another, we may have to add to our customary list of hermeneutical reflections yet another question: What kind of challenge is our own bodily existence to the study of religion? LAWRENCE SULLIVAN E.

Harvard University