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ABSTRACTS
SESSION IV: ENCASING
THE TRANSCENDENT
Body in the Vedanta of Ramanuja
K. R. Sundararajan, St. Bonaventure University
 In Ramanuja’s Vedanta, body (sarira)
plays an important role. His Qualified Non-dualism, Visistadvaita,
describes the relationship among the three eternal principles,
tattvas, the Supreme Self, Brahman, the individual self,
atman, and primordial matter, prakriti, as that of the
body and the self (sarira-sariri). This relationship
highlights two things: 1) against the Non-dualism of Sankara, it
states that atman and prakriti are real and uncreated;
and 2) the non-dual nature of Brahman, as described in some of the
Upanisads had to be understood in a qualified sense, with
body-self relationship highlighting the total dependency of body on
the self. The total dependency of the atman and prakriti
on Brahman is what is stressed when Brahman is described as the
One without a second.
It is important to note that the state of being
“embodied” is a constant factor in Ramanuja’s Vedanta. In the state
of samsara, the jiva is “embodied” with a physical
body that has three qualities (gunas), sattva, rajas,
and tamas. Death is not strictly a state of disembodiment;
there is the karmic subtle body which gets enveloped by a physical
body in (re)birth. Even the salvational state, moksa, is not
a “disembodied state.” Those freed from samsara reside in the
realm of Vishnu (Vaikuntha), have bodies of pure sattva.
Even Vishnu in the highest form has a bodily form not perhaps
dissimilar to the human form. Thus Ramanuja’s Vedanta seem to
provide a different perspective on body in the Hindu world,
dominated by the notion that moksa is a state of
disembodiment.
Atman
and the Body: A Religio-Medical View
Anthony Cerulli, Transylvania
University
 Of the
different types of disease mentioned in the Caraka Samhita, a
classical Sanskrit medical text, the mental type in particular gave
the eleventh century commentator, Cakrapanidatta, pause to
dwell on embodiment and the nature of human being. His reflection
offers a useful starting point from which to explore the concept of
the atman (“self”) and its association with the body in
classical Indian medicine, or Ayurveda. The present paper explores
some of the explanatory methods that the compilers of the classical
Ayurvedic sources and their commentators employed to illustrate the
nature of the atman and the body typologies that accompany
those illustrations. Body typology in Sanskrit medical discourse, I
suggest, is ultimately proportionate to the weight the tradition
affords to religious and social factors in the explanation of health
and illness. To this end, in this paper I discuss two general body
typologies in classical Ayurveda: the anatomico-physical body and
the embodied self (i.e., a material body that acts in tandem with an
atman); and I demonstrate the ways in which the medical view
of the embodied self interlinks somatic states of illness
with socioreligious praxis, personal cultivation, and
self-knowledge.
The Advent of the Idea
of the Buddha as Embodied in his Gnosis in the Early Common Era, as
Seen in Prajńāpāramitā and Sarvâstivāda Texts and in Reliquary
Inscriptions
Michael Radich, Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand
 This paper will present some
findings of my 2007 Harvard PhD dissertation, “The Somatics of
Enlightenment: Buddhist Doctrines of Given and Ideal Embodiment
Buddhism, with Special Reference To Buddhakāya And
Āśrayaparāvrtti”. There, I make the larger arguments that the
history of doctrines about the Buddha’s bodies has hitherto been
seriously misunderstood for at least two reasons: (1) it has not
been recognised that relics are one of the major forms in which
Buddhism historically recognised the veritable embodiment of the
Buddha; (2) analysis has been overly fixated on the supposed
sectarian categories of later doxography, and preconceived notions
about what various “schools” of Buddhism should have thought.
This paper will present a
major component of a revised vision of the history of ideas about
the Buddha’s bodies, considered without these distorting
assumptions. I will argue that across at least three very disparate
bodies of material - reliquary inscriptions, primarily in Kharoṣṭhī;
the earliest Prajńāpāramitā, as represented by Lokakṣema’s 179 CE
translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajńāpāramitā-sūtra; and the
early cycles of the Sarvâstivāda Abhidharma literature – we see the
emergence of an understanding of the Buddha’s embodiment
unprecedented in earlier materials, whereby the Buddha is thought be
be embodied primarily and most veritably in the gnosis that makes
him a Buddha. This development, moreover, seems to sit right on the
cusp of the emergence of discourse about buddhakāya as such,
and is therefore an important watershed in the overall history of
doctrines about the embodiments of the Buddha.
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