various fields of knowledge offer diverse conceptual and methodological
resources for understanding and perpetuating health. This study suggests
for further inquiry and action related to health, not just inter-disciplinary
but transdisciplinaryapproaches. In other words, we can do more than
apply concepts and methods of philosophy, medicine, religion, anthro-
pology, and so on, and (after the manner that holistic medicine recom-
mends focusing on the patient and not the science) take the human being,
not the discipline, as a starting point. In responding to the wholeness of
the human being, we can create more integrated—and thus more heal-
ing—constellations of the registers of human knowledge.
Whether the body is conceived as different from the person’s true
nature, to be transcended along with the rest of material nature, as classi-
cal Yoga holds, or whether body is considered part of the sacred creation
and integral to religious life, body remains essential to religious commu-
nication. Communication can be accomplished by language, both oral
and textual, but in a large share of religious communication, the body is
indispensable. Sacred language and songs, and practices such as Yoga’s
asana ̄ , pr ̄aÓn ̄ayama ̄ , and meditation techniques are formalized means of
contacting the transcendent, of realizing one’s sacred Self-nature. The
performance of formalized means of religious communication requires
the body, and their transmission depends on a living teacher, one who has
mastered them, not just cognitively, but who carries the knowledge of
their proper use in her or his psychophysical self.
Inquiry into the body in Hinduism reveals not a Cartesian material
body, but a range of concepts of body as a conscious locus of activity, a
system of subsystems participating in active relation within a web of
other systems—biophysical, social, and spiritual. Examples are the
UpaniÓsad’sfive sheaths model, the Bhagavadg ̄ıt ̄a’s‘field’ conception of
the person, Åyurveda’s ecological view of body and land as the two kinds
of place, and Tantra’s identification of person as a physioconscious mi-
crocosm within the physioconscious world macrocosm. Each of these
concepts of the human being counters not only the Cartesian view of
body, but counters the stereotype that the Indian traditions assume a du-
alistic view of body and Self.
One’s religious aim might be transcendence of the body, or religious
realization in one’s embodied state, but, in either case, our journey in
this world is an embodied one, and religious life demands our reconcil-
ing in some way the dimensions of sacredness and physicality. The larger
share of humanity is not inclined toward ascetic life; therefore it is valu-
able to articulate connections between religiousness and healthful living
community:relationality in religious therapeutics 173