Divine Bodies

A path-breaking scholar's insightful reexamination of the resurrection of the body and the construction of the self When people talk about the resurrection they often assume that the bodies in the afterlife will be perfect. But which version of our bodies gets resurrected--young or old, healthy or sick, real-to-life or idealized? What bodily qualities must be recast in heaven for a body to qualify as both ours and heavenly? The resurrection is one of the foundational statements of Christian theology, but when it comes to the New Testament only a handful of passages helps us answer the question "What will those bodies be like?" More problematically, the selection and interpretation of these texts are grounded in assumptions about the kinds of earthly bodies that are most desirable. Drawing upon previously unexplored evidence in ancient medicine, philosophy, and culture, this illuminating book both revisits central texts--such as the resurrection of Jesus--and mines virtually ignored passages in the Gospels to show how the resurrection of the body addresses larger questions about identity and the self.

Examines how embodiment is conceived and experienced in South Asian religions. Refiguring the Body provides a sustained interrogation of categories and models of the body grounded in the distinctive idioms of South Asian religions, particularly Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The contributors engage prevailing theories of the body in the Western academy that derive from philosophy, social theory, and feminist and gender studies. At the same time, they recognize the limitations of applying Western theoretical models as the default epistemological framework for understanding notions of embodiment that derive from non-Western cultures. Divided into three sections, this collection of essays explores material bodies, embodied selves, and perfected forms of embodiment; divine bodies and devotional bodies; and gendered logics defining male and female bodies. The contributors seek to establish theory parity in scholarly investigations and to re-figure body theories by taking seriously the contributions of South Asian discourses to theorizing the body.

The historical shift from Vedic traditions to post-Vedic bhakti (devotional) traditions is accompanied by a shift from abstract, translocal notions of divinity to particularized, localized notions of divinity and a corresponding shift from aniconic to iconic traditions and from temporary sacrificial arenas to established temple sites. In Bhakti and Embodiment Barbara Holdrege argues that the various transformations that characterize this historical shift are a direct consequence of newly emerging discourses of the body in bhakti traditions in which constructions of divine embodiment proliferate, celebrating the notion that a deity, while remaining translocal, can appear in manifold corporeal forms in different times and different localities on different planes of existence. Holdrege suggests that an exploration of the connections between bhakti and embodiment is critical not only to illuminating the distinctive transformations that characterize the emergence of bhakti traditions but also to understanding the myriad forms that bhakti has historically assumed up to the present time. This study is concerned more specifically with the multileveled models of embodiment and systems of bodily practices through which divine bodies and devotional bodies are fashioned in Krsna bhakti traditions and focuses in particular on two case studies: the Bhagavata Purana, the consummate textual monument to Vaisnava bhakti, which expresses a distinctive form of passionate and ecstatic bhakti that is distinguished by its embodied nature; and the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, an important bhakti tradition inspired by the Bengali leader Caitanya in the sixteenth century, which articulates a robust discourse of embodiment pertaining to the divine bodies of Krsna and the devotional bodies of Krsna bhaktas that is grounded in the canonical authority of the Bhagavata Purana.

For early civilizations, consciousness and the sense of self were experienced as located in the center of the body, most often near to or within the physical heart. Enlightenment was understood as the illumination of a transformed “spiritual heart.” Thus the mind of the body as a whole was represented by the heart-soul. In contrast, modern culture places consciousness within the brain, resulting in a mind/body dualism. This separation of mind and body has recently been emphasized as characteristic of the psychopathologies of the modern self. This volume explores the understanding and experience of consciousness in the earliest civilizations before about 500 BCE. Beginning with a description of ancient Western and Eastern heart-consciousness, the psychological and spiritual manifestations of the ancient mature heart-soul are summarized. Ancestor worship, lineage identity, primitive consciousness and the ways in which the external world was mirrored by the inner world provide additional clues about the experience of heart-consciousness. Finally, the work addresses the fundamental changes in the experience of consciousness that led to the mind/body dualism of today.

Physics in Neoplatonist thought, the subject which occupies the second volume of this sourcebook, was innovative: the world of space and time was causally ordered by a nonspatial, nontemporal world, and this view required original thinking

This book analyses cultural questions related to representations of the body in South Asian traditions, human perceptions and attitudes toward the body in religious and cultural contexts, as well as the processes of interpreting notions of the body in religious and literary texts. Utilising an interdisciplinary perspective by means of textual study and ideological analysis, anthropological analysis, and phenomenological analysis, the book explores both insider- and outsider perspectives and issues related to the body from the 2nd century CE up to the present-day. Chapters assess various aspects of the body including processes of embodiment and questions of mythologizing the divine body and othering the human body, as revealed in the literatures and cultures of South Asia. The book analyses notions of mythologizing and "othering" of the body as a powerful ideological discourse, which empowers or marginalizes at all levels of the human condition. Offering a deep insight into the study of religion and issues of the body in South Asian literature, religion and culture, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian studies, South Asian religions, South Asian literatures, cultural studies, philosophy and comparative literature.

Sommer utilizes a recovered ancient perception of divinity as having more than one body, fluid and unbounded selves.

Legend has it that dragons dominated the Celestial Dragon Continent billion years ago. However, dragons had already flown up to heaven, leaving people to imagine the world under the rule of dragons. People on the continent claimed descent from dragons. After the extinction of dragons, the land entered an era of the way of martial arts, which witnessed the rise of rare talents. Lin Tian, a teenager of natural endowment, was known as the top one talent of the Celestial Dragon City. But misfortune befell him. Attacked by someone jealous of his talent, his cinnabar field and meridians, which were the foundations of cultivation, were all destroyed. However, there was always a way out and misfortune turned out to be a blessing in disguise. On the edge of death, the teenager was accidentally endowed with a drop of blood of ancestral dragons, becoming the heir of it so that he could learn the mysterious martial arts of dragons. A dragon would never be restricted to a little pond and would fly up to heaven once it encountered winds and clouds. Come and join the epic adventures about how the teenager swept away the powerful cultivators and became the unrivaled cultivator on the land. ☆About the Author☆ Gong Zi (公子) is a Chinese web novel writer, who is good at the novels in the fantasy genre. By using his sparkling words, he is skilled in creating imaginative yet logical world, in which readers could immerse themselves.