Virtuous Bodies: The Physical Dimensions of Morality in Buddhist Ethics

Abstract

This book investigates the diverse roles bodies play in Buddhist ethical development. Traditionally, Buddhists assumed a close connection between body and morality. Thus, Buddhist literature contains descriptions of living beings that stink with sin, are disfigured by vices, or are perfumed and adorned with virtues. Taking an influential early medieval Indian Mahayana Buddhist text — nullantideva's Compendium of Training (nulliknullasamuccaya) — as a case study, this book demonstrates that Buddhists regarded ethical development as a process of physical and moral transformation. This book chooses the Compendium of Training because it quotes from over one hundred Buddhist scriptures, allowing a broader Buddhist interest in the ethical significance of bodies to be revealed. The text is a training manual for bodhisattvas, especially monastic bodhisattvas. In it, bodies function as markers of, and conditions for, one's own ethical development. Most strikingly, bodies also function as instruments for the ethical development of others. When living beings come into contact with the virtuous bodies of bodhisattvas, they are transformed physically and morally for the better. This book explores both the centrality of bodies to the bodhisattva ideal and the corporeal specificity of that ideal. Arguing that the bodhisattva ideal is an embodied ethical ideal, the book poses an array of fascinating questions: what does virtue look like? What kinds of physical features constitute virtuous bo…