Buddhism and the formation of the religious body

A Foucauldian approach

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5778943
AutoresM Voyce (0000-0003-0972-7479, Macquarie University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen23
Páginas433-461
Fecha de publicación2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis (CONFERENCE)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0582-3226 • E-ISSN: 2343-4937
EditorialScripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.30674/scripta.67398
OpenAlexW2121832475
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas18

Poststructuralist debates around the body have demonstrated how our knowledge of the body is constituted in specific cultural and historical circumstances and in the context of particular relations of power. This article develops this approach to the body in Buddhism and thus attempts to show how the body has been represented within different discourses in Buddhist texts. Implicit in this account is the remedying of the failure in some Buddhist scholarship to recognise different types of bodies (negative and positive) and to show how these aspects of the body, as enumerated by texts, operate together to constitute forms of identities capable of being constituted within different historical moments out of the pressure of new social and material changes. At the same time the body is seen as being capable of self modification in terms of that discourse. The term 'body' is used here in the sense that it implies not only a physical aspect (flesh, bones, liquids etc.), but that it is connected to various cognitive and emotional capacities as outlined in the khandhas (see below) explanation of the human constitution. The author's concern in his treatment of the body is to avoid the problems of psychological analysis, as this form of analysis often implies the existence of a psyche or soul along with the ideas of complete individual self-determination

Physical body · Psyche · Soul · Chinese history and philosophy · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought