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The Human Body Uncovered . . . in Early Christianity and Early Buddhism Nadine Quehl, M.A. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
University of Calgary
Introduction:The human body is a relevant component in any discussion of religion and social morality, since "ethics always has to do with the body in one way or another, for morality refers to human action" (Cahill 1996:73). The body is also a perfect object of study since, as Mary Douglas (1966:122) has pointed out, "just as it is true that everything symbolizes the body, so it is equally true that the body symbolizes everything else." On the surface, both Christianity and Buddhism appear to denigrate the body, but if the texts and writings of the early period are examined one finds in both religions assertions of the value of the body and affirmations of psychosomatic unity. Psychosomatic unity refers to the holistic understanding of the human as a unity of soul, mind and body. By the early period I am referring to the first five centuries of each religion. I will begin with an examination of Early Christianity followed by an examination of Early Buddhism, during which I will highlight the comparable or contrasting elements.The Human Body: Early ChristianityIn examining any religion it is important to remember that you can never separate religion and culture. So in examining Greek Christianity, we must first examine the Hebraic-biblical tradition, which is usually strongly holistic in its understanding of the human person, as well as the Hellenic-Platonist approach which often makes a definite distinction between soul and body (Ware 1997:91). While the body is not perceived as evil in Platonic thought, the "true" person is believed to be composed of an intellect or mind which is imprisoned in a material body and wanting to be freed (Ware 1997:92). The soul or mind was perceived to be the highest status member of the body or even a separate entity that ruled over the body. In Plato's Phaedo, the soul is to the body as master is to slave or divine to mortal. Philo of Alexandria, (c.20 B.C.E. - c.C.E. 50), a Jewish Platonist, even maintained that the body is "evil by nature"(Martin 1995:30). However, extreme positions like his were repudiated by Christians of the "proto-orthodox" strand within the early church.The Platonic view of humanity, though, influenced the Gnostic movement, which was a complex religious movement emphasizing "gnosis," the revealed knowledge of the divine and of the origin and destiny of humankind. It was by receiving "gnosis," that one's spirit could be redeemed (Cross and Livingstone 1983:573). By the second century, a Christian Gnosticism had emerged that was viewed as heretical by the proto-orthodox strand, but still gained much support. According to Gnostics like Valentinus (2nd cent.) and Basilides (2nd cent.), the human person was a spirit whose presence in the material world was brought about when God purified the heavens because of a sin among the angels. Thus, the human spirit yearns to be liberated from matter and attain spiritual existence which is characterized by knowledge of God (Burns 1981:2). Other Gnostics went so far as to claim that matter was the source of all evil and could not have been created by the good Supreme Deity but by some lesser power (Bottomley 1979:45). Gnostic beliefs led to Encratism, a Christian heresy beginning about C.E. 170 which taught that sex is essentially evil and sinful (Bottomley 1979:55).
This understanding of the human body contrasts sharply with the Hebraic-biblical tradition, where the human person is not conceived of as two separate entities, body and soul, but as a psychosomatic unity:
Jewish thought sometimes distinguishes between body and soul, but it does not separate them. It neither over-emphasizes the body, nor despises it, nor does it neglect the soul or cleave it from the body as the essential element of man. Both body and soul are essential elements in the constitution of man who is the only true image of God (Bottomley 1979:30).
The notion of the immortality of the soul is not found in the Hebrew Bible; when the later canonical writings refer to life after death, it is understood, instead, as the resurrection of the body. Direct Hellenistic influence explains later texts like Wisdom 8:20 where there is talk of the soul's pre-existence and immortality (Ware 1997:91). It is also interesting to note that the Temple worship in Judaism involved the whole person, body and soul, which is evident in the ceremonies of physical prostration as well as acts of penitence like sackcloth and fasting. These acts of worship implied the value of the body as essential in spiritual activities (Bottomley 1979:22). Louis Jacobs (1997:78) points out that while the body is to be restrained from working on the Sabbath, the satisfaction of bodily appetites on the same day is a religious duty. Jewish people see the body almost as a sacrament, since its use and relations symbolize a relationship to God and creation (Bottomley 1979:30).
Keeping in mind this contrasting heritage, we now examine Early Christianity's views of the human body, where "the spiritual value of the human is firmly underlined by the central event on which the Christian faith is founded: God's flesh-taking or incarnation" (Ware 1997:92). God's incarnation in the human body of Jesus affirms the value of the body, and Jesus referred to his own body as a "temple," when he said "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19). Later, Paul writes to the Corinthians, "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? … Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?" (1 Corinthians 6:15,19).
That Jesus attached great importance to the body is evident in the institution of the Lord's Supper, when he says of the bread and wine: "Take, eat; this is my body … Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins (Matthew 26:26-27). Some of Jesus' teachings such as the following could be misinterpreted to imply a denigration of the physical body: "If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell" (Matthew 5:29). Here Jesus is emphasizing the importance of the body in spiritual activities; because the body is so important, profaning it by committing adultery is a serious sin. To keep the body pure, although it lacks a limb, is far better than having a whole but impure body. That the body is essential in spiritual activities is underlined in Jesus' words, "The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness (Matthew 6:22-23).
Just as some of Jesus' teachings could be misinterpreted, Paul's writings were misunderstood by extreme ascetics and wrongly used to support contempt for the body and puritan and ascetic theories. Paul writes in Galatians 5:16-17, "But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh ... ." The misinterpretation concerned Paul's use of the words flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma), which many people equated with body (soma) and soul (psyche). However, Paul uses "flesh" to mean not the physical aspect but total humanity, soul and body, when it is separated from and rebelling against God. "Spirit," then, is not the soul, but total personhood when it is living in obedience to God: "'Flesh' is the whole person as fallen, "spirit" the whole person as redeemed" (Ware 1997:93). In his book, The Corinthian Body, Martin (1995:176) calls this notion an "ethical-cosmological dualism" in which Christ is opposed to "this cosmos." This is in place of the hierarchical notion where the body is lower on a hierarchical scale of meaningfulness than the human mind.
Although it seems paradoxical to us today, Paul perceived that the mind could become "fleshly" or "carnal" just as the body could become "spiritual" (1 Corinthians 15:44). Kallistos Ware sums the issue up well in the following comment:
While Paul's view of the flesh is somber, his estimate of the body is highly affirmative. "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God," he writes (Rom 12:1) "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit ... Glorify God in your body" (1 Cor 6:19-20). That is exactly why sexual promiscuity is so deplorable - not because the body and its sexuality are unclean but because they are potentially holy: "Your bodies are members of Christ" (1 Cor 6:15). This vital Pauline distinction between sarx and soma has unfortunately been overlooked by all too many Christian preachers and moralists in later times, and so they have assumed that his strictures about the flesh apply to the body as such. The pastoral consequences have been depressing" (Ware 1997:94).Martin also notes in The Corinthian Body that Paul's anxieties about porneia, meaning prostitution, sexual immorality or fornication (Brown 1971:497), are linked to concerns about the body's boundaries. Paul is worried about the integrity of the body, both the individual Christian's and the body of Christ, which is composed of all Christians. Martin (1995:172) explains that the early Christians lived in a world where the invasion etiology of disease dominated, in which the body was seen as a permeable entity susceptible to attack by demonic agents. Clearly, if understood correctly, much of Paul's doctrine was an enlargement of Judaic thought that viewed the body as a manifestation of the soul, that helped humans re-establish themselves in their original and pure state (Bottomley 1979:43). Here we see an issue that will come up again in the discussion of early Buddhism: at some level, it may be said that while the body is in no way disparaged, it is subordinated to the soul in that it is instrumental in attaining knowledge of God, or enlightenment in Buddhism, rather than being valued as an end in itself.The first two centuries of the Christian era were a time of crisis. The Church had to adjust itself to the fact that the "parousia" was not imminent, and then it had to struggle to survive persecution by the State as well as Gnostic tendency to spiritualize and downplay the importance of ontology. However, Bottomley (1979:58) concludes that despite these trials, "the psychosomatic unity of man is maintained against heretical distortion and there is asseveration of the dignity of the human body." It was at the end of the second century that Irenaeus of Lyons composed the most extensive surviving report and refutation of Gnostic doctrines, Against Heresies (Burns 1981:2).
In the third century, we see the beginnings of systematic thought in the writing of the Church Fathers. Although he was a Christian Platonist, Clement of Alexandria (c.C.E. 150 - c. 215) viewed the body in a positive light. He denied the pre-existence of the soul, and viewed the body as the "soul's consort and ally" and claimed that it is only "through the body" that Christians can attain their goal (I, 13 (162, 3) cited in Ware 1997:97). Furthermore, Clement of Alexandria links the divine image not only with the soul, but also with the body and even human sexuality. The African Tertullian (c.C.E. 160 - 225) writes polemics against Gnosticism, insisting on the reality of Christ's flesh and the centrality of the Incarnation (Bottomley 1979:59). Tertullian not only argues that the body is an essential element of our human nature, but that Christianity has given the body the highest honour: "And though the soul, in consequence of its salvation, is chosen to the service of God, it is the flesh which actually renders it capable of such service" (viii cited in Bottomley 1979:62). In contrast, Clement of Alexandria's student, Origen (c.C.E. 185 - c. 254), who has been described as the "culmination" of the Platonising movement in the early Church, viewed the body as merely a tool of the soul, since the soul existed before the body and after it had fallen into sin it was "bound to the body as a punishment" (I, viii, I cited in Ware 1997:97).
Although St. Ambrose of Milan (c.C.E. 339 - c.397) felt the body should be cared for, he also felt that "We are souls, our members are our garments" (79 cited in Bottomley 1979:69). Here we see the beginning of support for ascetic practices. In the fourth century, Jerome (c.C.E. 342 - c.420), the translator of the Latin Vulgate, was a major propagator of asceticism. While asceticism in all its forms seems to imply a denigration of the body, "it is only because the body is good and created by a good God, that it can be worthily sacrificed or mortified" (Bottomley 1979:77). In words reminiscent of Paul's ideas, the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov says, "Kill the flesh, so as to acquire a body" (Bloom 1967:41 cited in Ware 1997:100). In other words, if asceticism is understood correctly, it is a struggle not against but for the body. If Paul's ideas can be seen as supporting asceticism, this is not based on a denigration of the body but on a positive explanation whereby the life-energy contained by the body must be made available to the spirit (Miles 1979:55).
It is Saint Augustine of Hippo (C.E. 354 - 430) who is often blamed for centuries of repression and contempt for the body. However, we will see that this is a simplistic assumption; one could even say that Augustine has been made a scapegoat for the negative attitudes towards the body that have prevailed despite Christianity, not because of this religion. It is important to examine St. Augustine's background to understand his writings. In his youth, Augustine spent nearly a decade in the Manichaean tradition, which had strong Gnostic elements, so it is not difficult to see where his negative views on the body originated (Cross and Livingstone 1983:108). Moreover, Augustine is correctly described as "a passionate man: a man of deep emotions, responses and desires. He was fond of food, obsessed by sex, could be carried away by music and intensely moved by the play of light" (Bottomley 1979:82). Thus, we must keep the conflicting nature of Augustine's character and his religious background as a Manichaean in mind.
Although Augustine liked to quote Wisdom v.15 that "the body weighs down the soul," he is adamant that there is nothing wrong with the body in itself; rather, in a statement Paul would agree with, Augustine (City of God {CG}, XIII, cf. XIXI, 18, cited in Bottomley 1979:85) says that "it is not the body, but the corruptibility of the body which is a burden to the soul." Consequently, Augustine opposed those who believed spiritual progress as a process of disembodiment. In response to such beliefs, Augustine held up the basic Christian beliefs of the Incarnation, sacramentalism and resurrection of the flesh (Bottomley 1979:86). These views confirm Margaret R. Miles' conclusion in Augustine on the Body that
to the extent that a patristic author has understood the significance of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Christ, he will insist on the meaning and value of the body; insofar as these doctrines have not permeated his consciousness and values, he will write as a late classical author, demonstrating the negative valuation of the body characteristic of the culture (Miles 1979:4).Miles proceeds to show how Augustine's thought moves from a belief in the superiority of the soul to affirming the whole person, both body and soul. For example, Augustine begins to refer to the body as "spouse" of the soul in contrast to his earlier metaphors of the body as "snare" or "cage" (Miles 1979:97). Primarily, it was Augustine's understanding of the Incarnation where he perceived that Christ was fully human and fully God; consequently, body and soul in humans were unified (Miles 1979:97). Miles' examination of Augustine and his writings led her to agree with Armstrong's conclusion that "Augustine, whatever the defects of his thought ... at any period of his life, when seen in the context of his own time and compared with his contemporaries, appears on the whole like other Christian Platonists, moderate, humane, and positive in his attitude to the world and to the body" (Armstrong 1972:39 cited in Miles 1979:77).In the fourth century, there were even more positive attitudes towards the body. For example, members of the Antiochene Tradition reacted against the prevailing view of the Alexandrian and Augustinian positions that essentially minimized the role of the human body in salvation. These Christians believed that humans were a unified whole of body and soul and rather than identifying the image of God with the "first creation" or soul, as Philo did, they identified God's image with the person of clay created at the "second" creation (McLeod 1995:32). So the human body is not only an appendage to the soul, but an essential element of God's plan of salvation.
The Human Body: Early BuddhismJust as Christianity did not arise in a vacuum, Buddhism entered into the culture of India, so we must examine this culture as well. Perhaps most importantly, Buddhism needs to be seen against the background of the pan-Indian focus on purity and pollution, which refers to states in which worshipers are viewed as fit or unfit to take part in sacred activities. In this context both the permanent social status and the temporary condition of the individual are threatened by what seem to Westerners to be natural events, such as birth, death, menstruation, excretion and aspects of cooking and eating food. The concern with purity and pollution was also typical of Judaism and other Hellenistic religions; however, while Christians eventually rejected most of the traditional Jewish ideas about ritual purity, the cultural pattern is preserved in Buddhist attitudes to the body (Collins 1997:94). For example, the traditions existing in India taught that the body and its secretions were polluting; thus, many promoted asceticism since the body was believed to have a negative effect on one's chances of enlightenment.However, in the Sutta Pitaka, the Buddha taught that extreme asceticism and self-denial were not necessary and even could be as misleading as indulgence. It seems that the Buddha came to this truth in the six years he spent as a wandering ascetic subjecting his body to extremes of such things as heat, cold, hunger, and thirst. Once he gave up what he came to realize was futile behavior, he gained enlightenment (Hamilton 1995:53).
However, as in Christianity's subordination of the body to the soul, where the body was valued primarily as a means to attain salvation, the same can be said of Buddhism: "the body is valuable precisely inasmuch as it can be used to advance on the path to Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings" (Williams 1997:214). While compassion requires an active embodiment, and bodhisattvas' bodies are their "Being for others," paradoxically, in Mahayana, that Being for others is only possible through a "letting-go" of the body resulting from meditations on its repulsiveness (Williams 1997:228). In other words, enlightenment requires a human body, only because one must attain detachment from the body in enlightenment (Williams 1997:218).
It is also necessary to examine the way Buddhism conceives of the human. While the early Christian writers conceived of the human as a psychosomatic unity made up of body, mind, and spirit, Buddhists believe humans are compounds made up of several different constituents. The five parts are called "skandhas" and include form (the physical shape), the feelings, the perceptions, the inherent impulses (karmic dispositions) and the background consciousness. In this conception both physical and psychological entities are united (Ellwood 1996:128).
On the other hand, Buddhism can be seen as dualistic since the body comes to an end at death, while consciousness continues. The belief in reincarnation holds that the consciousness can be reborn, while in nirvana there is no physical existence. This has led to a "Manichaean" attitude as the body is rejected and escape from the body is the religious goal (Collins 1997:188). However, this attitude may not have been what the Buddha had intended by his teachings. Wimal Dissanayake (1993:124) states that "the Buddha saw the human being as a psychophysical entity (namarupa) ... he pointed out the interdependence of mind and the physical personality."
As we saw with Early Christianity, for example, in the writings of Saint Augustine, there appears to be an extreme devaluation of the body. Similarly, Early Buddhism seems to denigrate the body. For example, in the early stages of Buddhist meditation one of the primary objects that a practitioner contemplates is the human body, in different stages of decomposition. However, it was not an ideal that such meditations should lead to excesses. For example, one story in the canonical texts tells of some monks who, having practiced these Cemetery Meditations, had become disgusted with their own bodies, and committed suicide. The Buddha condemned these actions and promulgated the monastic rule against murder and suicide (Collins 1997:95). It could be argued that the Buddha would have condoned monks who burn themselves to death in present times to draw attention to the suppression of Buddhism. However, in this instance the monk can do such a thing because of his meditation on the impermanence of the body, but he does not do it because the body is undesirable. Rather, it is seen as precious and therefore can be nobly sacrificed for others' benefit. This notion parallels the idea in Christianity that the body can be sacrificed, not because it is inferior in any way, but because it is holy. In fact, the Buddha encourages his followers to cultivate the body, and Anne C. Klein (1997:141) has said that "much of Buddhist practice can be understood as a way of consciously seeking a more spacious way of experiencing our embodiment."
Buddhist texts like the Sutras call the body a 'bag of excrement," a "heap of corruption," a prison, an abscess, an ant hill, a pot (which is created and later destroyed), and refer to bodily functions as "impure." Introducing an instruction for meditation, the Dharma-samgiti Sutra says the body (kaya) "is just a collection of feet and toes, legs, chest, loins, belly, navel, backbone, heart, ribs and flanks, hands, forearms, upper-arms, shoulders, neck, jaw, forehead, skull, accumulated by the action that causes existence, the abode of sundry passions, ideas and fancies" (Bendall and Rouse 1971:216). However, Sue Hamilton (1995:51) argues that the Sutras imply in these exercises that there is nothing about the body that is intrinsically undesirable or repugnant; rather, the exercise is simply analytical. It is only because we identify (falsely, say Buddhists) so completely with our bodies that we must be made to see they are actually impermanent. This is strikingly evident in the verses in the Therigatha where Subha responds to a man who is infatuated with her: "What you, infatuated, see here in the body and regard as excellent/ is subject to destruction and fit to be tossed in a cemetery filled with corpses" (vs. 380 cited in Trainor 1993:65). Subha then gouges out her eye, which he had earlier admired, and offers it to the man. Because the fundamental cause of suffering and rebirth is attachment to transient things, Subha is displaying vividly the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment. Thus, it is not the undesirability of the body that is to be focused on, but the temporality of the body and Subha's compassionate regard for the man, whom she helps attain enlightenment. Moreover, there is a shift in somatic imagery at this point in the poem. Previously, the body was characterized negatively but when the Buddha's body is described it is so extraordinary that it heals Subha's eye. So the positive use of sight, especially directed toward the Buddha's body, is emphasized.
As well, in Post-Ashokan Indian Buddhism, the female body takes on a horrific appearance in order to save a renunciant (Wilson 1995:76). Grotesque figurations of the female body are instrumental to men seeking total closure which is the ideal state symbolized by a highly controlled body (Wilson 1995:92). In the Tathagatacint-yaguhyanirdesa Sutra the female bodhisattva shows her lover her body as a corpse to release him from his lust (Ku 1984: 237 cited in Williams 1997:215). Indeed, it is the final vision of dead women that leads Gotama to renounce the world, by fleeing from the palace of desire in which his father had imprisoned him (Wilson 1995:77). Thus, while terms like "rotten," and "putrid" appear to negatively value the body, they are actually used to emphasize the body's impermanence.
Hamilton even goes so far as to say that because the Buddha defines karma as volition: "I say that volition is karma. Having willed, one acts through body, speech and mind" (Sutta Pitaka cited in Hamilton 1995:48), it is not the body from which passion, desire and hatred originate since the Buddha distinguishes volitions from the body. Thus it is misleading to claim that volitions such as passion and thought that disturb the mind arise from the body. Instead it is one's state of mind, not one's body that is the source of desire. Hamilton (1995:52) concludes that "the Buddha's attitude toward the body is therefore not a negative one. In fact, it is neither positive nor negative. As we have seen perhaps most clearly in looking at the mindfulness exercises, one is to have a purely analytical attitude toward one's body."
AnalysisAccording to Peter Berger (1967:3) "society is a dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer." So humans form societies and religions, but societies and religions also form humans. This can be seen in the way people and religions are so thoroughly influenced by the surrounding culture, as we saw in both Early Christianity and Early Buddhism. Berger's idea of the social construction of reality is clearly evident in the fact that our bodies are universally very similar, but very different meanings have been attached to them, and these meanings become reality. This examination also lends support to Green's (1988:3) ideas about the "deep structure" of religious reasoning since both religions have a positive view of the body. It is only rational to have such a positive view of the body since all followers of the religion are necessarily embodied.In conclusion, it can be argued that neither Early Buddhism nor Early Christianity disparages the human body. However, it can also be argued that both religions subordinate the body to the soul in their quest for salvation or enlightenment. While both religions have encouraged ascetic or even self-mutilating practices, it is not because of any disgust for the body. On the contrary, such practices are only possible because of the high esteem in which the body is held: otherwise the sacrifice would be meaningless. The very fact that the Christian God became embodied in the person of Jesus attests to the supreme value of the body. And the Buddha's instructions contain only positive remarks about the body. Although these religions are widely divergent - one from the East and one from the West, one theistic and one non-theistic - there can be found many parallels. Perhaps most importantly, each religion upholds the value of the human body, and possibly even a psychosomatic unity, at least in its early years.
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