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Virtuous Bodies breaks new ground in the field of Buddhist ethics by investigating the diverse roles bodies play in 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 Mah=ay=ana Buddhist text-'S=antideva's Compendium of Training ('Sik,s=asamuccaya)-as a case study, Susanne Mrozik demonstrates that Buddhists regarded ethical development as a process of physical and moral transformation. Mrozik chooses The Compendium of Training because it quotes from over one hundred Buddhist scriptures, allowing her to reveal a broader Buddhist interest in the ethical significance of bodies. 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. Virtuous Bodies 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, Mrozik poses an array of fascinating questions: What does virtue look like? What kinds of physical features constitute virtuous bodies? What kinds of bodies have virtuous effects on others? Drawing on a range of contemporary theorists, this book engages in a feminist hermeneutics of recovery and suspicion in order to explore the ethical resources Buddhism offers to scholars and religious practitioners interested in the embodied nature of ethical ideals.
This book offers virtue as the starting point for doing moral reflection and for giving moral advice.Taking familiar patterns from ordinary life, Keenan weaves one virtue after another through the fabric of human existence.
The desire to know the body is a powerful dynamic of storytelling in all its forms. Peter Brooks argues that modern narrative is intent on uncovering the body in order to expose a truth that must be written in the flesh. In a book that ranges widely through literature and painting, Brooks shows how the imagination strives to bring the body into language and to write stories on the body. From Rousseau, Balzac, Mary Shelley, and Flaubert, to George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Marguerite Duras, from Manet and Gauguin to Mapplethorpe, writers and artists have returned in fascination to the body, the inescapable other of the spirit. Brooks's deep understanding of psychoanalysis informs his demonstration of how the "epistemophilic urge"--the desire to know-guides fictional plots and our reading of them. It is the sexual body that furnishes the building blocks of symbolization, eventually of language itself-which then takes us away from the body. Yet mind and language need to recover the body, as an other realm that is primary to their very definition. Brooks shows how and why the female body has become the field upon which the aspirations, anxieties, and contradictions of a whole society are played out. And he suggests how writers and artists have found in the woman's body the dynamic principle of their storytelling, its motor force. This major book entertains and teaches: Brooks presumes no special knowledge on the part of his readers. His account proceeds chronologically from Rousseau in the eighteenth century forward to contemporary artists and writers. Body Work gives us a set of analytical tools and ideas-primarily from psychoanalysis, narrative and film studies, and feminist theory-that enable us to read modern narrative afresh.
In such works as Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter Judith Butler broke new ground in understanding the construction and performance of identities. While Butler's writings have been crucial and often controversial in the development of feminist and queer theory, Bodily Citations is the first anthology centered on applying her theories to religion. In this collection scholars in anthropology, biblical studies, theology, ethics, and ritual studies use Butler's work to investigate a variety of topics in biblical, Islamic, Buddhist, and Christian traditions. The authors shed new light on Butler's ideas and highlight their ethical and political import. They also broaden the scope of religious studies as they bring it into conversation with feminist and queer theory. Subjects discussed include the woman's mosque movement in Cairo, the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the possibility of queer ethics, religious ritual, and biblical constructions of sexuality. Contributors include: Karen Trimble Alliaume, Lewis University; Teresa Hornsby, Drury University; Amy Hollywood, Harvard Divinity School; Christina Hutchins, Pacific School of Religion; Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley; Susanne Mrozik, Mount Holyoke College; Claudia Schippert, University of Central Florida; Rebecca Schneider, Brown University; Ken Stone, Chicago Theological Seminary
Embodiment in the theology of Gregory of Nyssa is a much-debated topic. Hans Boersma argues that this-worldly realities of time and space, which include embodiment, are not the focus of Gregory's theology. Instead, embodiment plays a distinctly subordinate role. The key to his theology, Boersma suggests, is anagogy, going upward in order to participate in the life of God. This book looks at a variety of topics connected to embodiment in Gregory's thought: time and space; allegory; gender, sexuality, and virginity; death and mourning; slavery, homelessness, and poverty; and the church as the body of Christ. In each instance, Boersma maintains, Gregory values embodiment only inasmuch as it enables us to go upward in the intellectual realm of the heavenly future. Boersma suggests that for Gregory embodiment and virtue serve the anagogical pursuit of otherworldly realities. Countering recent trends in scholarship that highlight Gregory's appreciation of the goodness of creation, this book argues that Gregory looks at embodiment as a means for human beings to grow in virtue and so to participate in the divine life. It is true that, as a Christian thinker, Gregory regards the creator-creature distinction as basic. But he also works with the distinction between spirit and matter. And Nyssen is convinced that in the hereafter the categories of time and space will disappear-while the human body will undergo an inconceivable transformation. This book, then, serves as a reminder of the profoundly otherworldly cast of Gregory's theology.
This volume explores the role played by monastic discipline in the emergence and evolution of modern Chinese Buddhism. A central feature of the Buddhist tradition, monastic discipline has received growing attention in the contemporary Buddhist world, but little from scholars. Adopting a diachronic perspective and a multidisciplinary approach, contributions by leading scholars investigate relevant Vinaya-related practices in twentieth and twenty-first centuries China and Taiwan, including issues of monastic identity and authenticity, updated ordination procedures, recent variations of Mahāyāna precepts and rules, and original perspectives on body movement and related sport activities. The restoration and renewal of Vinaya practices and standards within Chinese Buddhist practices shed new light on the response of Buddhist leaders and communities to the challenges of modernity. Contributors are: Ester Bianchi, Raoul Birnbaum, Daniela Campo, Tzu-Lung Chiu, Ann Heirman, Zhe Ji, Yu-chen Li, Pei-ying Lin, and Jiang Wu.
While early Buddhists hailed their religion’s founder for opening a path to enlightenment, they also exalted him as the paragon of masculinity. According to Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha’s body boasts thirty-two physical features, including lionlike jaws, thighs like a royal stag, broad shoulders, and a deep, resonant voice, that distinguish him from ordinary men. As Buddhism spread throughout Asia and around the world, the Buddha remained an exemplary man, but Buddhists in other times and places developed their own understandings of what it meant to be masculine. This transdisciplinary book brings together essays that explore the variety and diversity of Buddhist masculinities, from early India to the contemporary United States and from bodhisattva-kings to martial monks. Buddhist Masculinities adopts the methods of religious studies, anthropology, art history, textual-historical studies, and cultural studies to explore texts, images, films, media, and embodiments of masculinity across the Buddhist world, past and present. It turns scholarly attention to normative forms of masculinity that usually go unmarked and unstudied precisely because they are “normal,” illuminating the religious and cultural processes that construct Buddhist masculinities. Engaging with contemporary issues of gender identity, intersectionality, and sexual ethics, Buddhist Masculinities ushers in a new era for the study of Buddhism and gender.
Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655) was an eminent Chinese Buddhist monk who, contrary to his contemporaries, believed karma could be changed. Through vows, divination, repentance rituals, and ascetic acts such as burning and blood writing, he sought to alter what others understood as inevitable and inescapable. Drawing attention to Ouyi's unique reshaping of religious practice, Living Karma reasserts the significance of an overlooked individual in the modern development of Chinese Buddhism. While Buddhist studies scholarship tends to privilege textual analysis, Living Karma promotes a balanced study of ritual practice and writing, treating Ouyi's texts as ritual objects and his reading and writing as religious acts. Each chapter addresses a specific religious practice—writing, divination, repentance, vows, and bodily rituals—offering first a diachronic overview of each practice within the history of Chinese Buddhism and then a synchronic analysis of each phenomenon through close readings of Ouyi's work. This book sheds much-needed light on a little-known figure and his representation of karma, which proved to be a seminal innovation in the religious thought of late imperial China.
The acclaimed English translation of this masterpiece of world literature - prepared with the participation of the Dalai Lama One of the greatest works created by any culture and one of the most influential of all Tibetan Buddhist texts in the West, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has had a number of distinguished translations, but strangely all of these have been partial abridgements. Now the entire text has not only been made available in English but in a translation of quite remarkable clarity and beauty. A comprehensive guide to living and dying, The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains exquisitely written guidance and practices related to transforming our experience in daily life, on the processes of dying and the after-death state, and on how to help those who are dying. As originally intended this is as much a work for the living, as it is for those who wish to think beyond a mere conventional lifetime to a vastly greater and grander cycle. 'Extraordinary ... this work will be a source of inspiration and support to many' His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems are filled with powerful heroines, from Evangeline, the exiled wanderer, to Vittoria Colonna, the aging genius of the Italian renaissance. In The Heroines of Henry Longfellow: Domestic, Defiant, Divine, Timothy E. G. Bartel provides a survey of Longfellow’s major heroines, placing them in the context of Longfellow’s body of work and the poet’s interests in theology, politics, and history. Though Longfellow’s heroines have sometimes been dismissed as mere domestic caricatures, Bartel argues that Longfellow’s heroines are nothing of the sort. Instead, they provide us with unique pictures of how one’s individual talents and desires can be harmonized with the Christian ideals of communal justice, ethical living, and ultimate union with the Divine.