Buddhism and the Body in Tibet

In recent years, the study of religion and the body has flourished as a multidisciplinary site of scholarly investigation. Understanding that “the body is at once biological and cultural” (Fuller 2015), some scholars have emphasized the importance of culture in constructing human thought and behavior, whereas others have focused on how our biology influences religious thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and so forth. Given the complex nature of the body and its numerous interactions with the world at large (whether social, biological, political, ritual, cosmological, and so forth), the body has been described as a “kind of Rorschach ink blot onto which particular cultures project preoccupations that are social and local” (Fuller 2015).

The aim of this symposium is to interrogate the category of the body within Tibetan Buddhist contexts. We seek to understand some of the culturally specific ways Tibetan Buddhists have understood the body, and in particular, how Tibetan notions of the body might challenge modes of explanation based in biology, genetics, and so forth. We also plan to explore how these notions of the body have interacted with other Tibetan frameworks such as philosophy, medicine, cosmology, ritual, and so forth. Lastly, we will imagine how Tibetan understandings of the body might contribute to the broader academic study of the body or to how the body is imagined in a cross-cultural perspective. 

→ Register

→ Symposium Schedule

Organizer: Michael Ium, Postdoctoral Fellow michael.ium@utoronto.ca