book reviews 277

Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston (eds) Religion and the in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body, New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. Pp. 275 + xiv. $155. ISBN: 978-0-415- 60811-4 (Hardback).

This eclectic collection of articles about the subtle body offers a needed entry point into a topic that has so far been mostly neglected by modern scholarship. One of the strong points of the volume is precisely its ambitious endeavour to bring to the same pages conversation partners who might not otherwise ever meet. With this, a reader who might only trace a conception of the subtle body in solely one geographic tradition or another here has the opportunity to form her own cross-disciplinary foray into this severely understudied topic. The book draws from disparate geographical boundaries and disciplinary boundaries. The bodies here range from Kohn’s treatment of Daoist concep- tions of energetic flow that affect the physical to Samuel’s, Sumegi’s, Gerke’s, and Alter’s discussions of Tibetan and Indian notions of the transmigratory entity comprised of cakras and nāḍīs. From this we venture also into Bon sha- manism’s souls of the dead to Addey’s elucidation of Neo-Platonism’s vehicles of the soul to Milani’s work on Sufi tripartite and quaternite understandings of self. This collection also gives us Bramble’s and Greenwood’s discussions of modern Theosophical translations of subtle body and contemporary new-age shamanic astral bodies as well as Barcan’s and also Johnson’s post-structuralist gestures towards a theory of a something-beyond that can map to an idea of body. Peppered throughout are also introjections from clinical, medical per- spectives, such as Chaoul’s, Chawla’s, and Gerke’s, which differ in style from the bulk of the contributions which focus on a history of religions or cultural theory or anthropological perspective. These add to the mix, underscoring with a kind of pragmatic tone, the lived reality of subtle bodies. So what indeed is a subtle body? Is it something real? Invisible as it is to our naked eyes, might we someday, with some new as-yet-uncharted techno- logical mastery hope to record in its fluctuations of energy the links between human bodies and the souls of the departed? Will study of the subtle body ulti- mately help us to understand the inexplicable, the telepathy of the yogi, and the healing power of the saint? It is certainly tantalising, if tinged with hubris, to think we might somehow find a way to bring under the sway of science the dusty nooks of religion’s irrational and miraculous lures; indeed, to record the dimensions of the soul. This book’s comparative project quickly deflates such ambitions. Its cross- cultural examinations point out the fundamentally diverse portraits of the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi 10.1163/15734218-12341333 278 book reviews subtle body across different traditions. Indeed even among just Asian tradi- tions, or even just among a single religious tradition, Tibetan , which this collection focuses on especially, we find somewhat mutually incompatible pictures of what the subtle body is. This book’s wide ranging into Neoplatonism, Islam, Hindu Śaivism, Daoism, and the new-age movement demonstrates all the more how fuzzy is our historical picture of the subtle body. Addey points out that Neoplatonism offers us a couple of different subtle bodies, some immortal, some not. Sumegi tells us the ‘essenceless, illusory nature of persons’ (p. 80) works against the plural materiality of Bon . Gerke’s article thoughtfully brings up the fundamental disjunction between our own modern sense of circular flow of blood in the body with Tibetan subtle conceptions of flow as in and out, not circular. Gerke also notes the difference between the ori- gins of subtle body channels as river flows and the contrasting Tibetan under- standing of the channels as plant metaphor, roots (rtsa) (pp. 88–90). However, here we should note she conflates the term nāḍī, i.e. the tubular stalk of any plant, any pipe, or tube, which is the Sanskrit word for the subtle channels, with the nadī of the river, even as she draws on the perennial Hindu concep- tion of the subtle body channels as the three rivers, triveṇī. The Tibetans are not quite so far from the Hindu Śaivas in this respect. In many of their articles, Greenwood, Alter, Milani, Bramble, Sumegi, Johnston, and Barcan try to con- textualise through history an understanding of the subtle body. If we can trace both the genealogies and those spontaneous correlations, and disjuncts, across cultural gaps, we can start to limn the contours of this elusive body. Does this indeed suggest there is no standard subtle body? That it functions as a construction of human imagination? Several of this book’s authors, explic- itly or implicitly, gesture towards this; for instance, especially Greenwood, Alter, Johnston, Samuel. In this context, Samuel’s final chapter of the book is wonderfully insightful. Here he suggests that the subtle body directs us to understanding our embeddedness in wider ecological and social environments (pp. 251–2), pointing toward the subtle body as a way of making material the host of psychological and interactive structures that encompass and limit us. In this sense, the subtle body functions as a heuristic map, a way to get a handle on to those inarticulate inner feelings, emotions, perceptions that are other- wise difficult to see (p. 262). He proposes that the representation of the subtle body is necessarily diverse in part because it operates as an imaginative func- tion relating self to environment and culture. In keeping with the neuroplas- ticity of human brains responding to how we imagine ourselves, the notion of subtle body is especially sensitive to and determined by how we think of self in relation to environment.

asian medicine 9 (2014) 273–304