audible, neither heavy nor too rapid, breathing in and
out slowly and effortlessly (Kamalas ́la, First Bhava-
nakrama). These instructions, written in the eighth
century C.E. for a Tibetan audience, would not differ
substantially from the instructions given to beginners
in other Buddhist traditions.
Other postures may acquire a similar significance,
whether they are explicitly linked to the technique of
meditation or not. Thus, walking meditation reflects
the gait and demeanor of the awakened, and monks
are sometimes asked to sleep in the recumbent posi-
tion of the Buddha in NIRVANA, while they remain
mindful of DEATHand liberation.
Some traditions expressed the connection between
body and meditation more concretely by locating cer-
tain religious experiences or stages of meditation in dif-
ferent parts of the body. Such conceptions were central
to the so-called Tantric tradition, especially in India,
although the idea also has East Asian manifestations.
In this meditation theory, several “spiritual nerve cen-
ters” (cakras) map out the interface between body and
meditative experience. As many as eight and as few as
five cakras are located along the spinal column, on
what traditional anatomy regarded as two veins or
pathways for spiritual energy. In the process of medi-
tation this energy (conceived sometimes as a kind of
fluid) was forced up or down these veins, concentrat-
ing alternatively in each one of the cakras: from the
lowest in the area of the genitals or the sphincter,
through the area of the solar plexus, the heart, the lar-
ynx, the eyes, and the crown of the head. Generally,
the concentration of energy on the top cakra was re-
garded as the culmination of the meditation process,
although each cakra had a distinct spiritual value.
A less technical location of meditation in the body
occurs in the practice of mindfulness meditation,
where the main exercise consists in cultivating a clear
awareness of one’s body, its breathing, its movements,
its functions and feelings. In the Chan tradition, like-
wise, there is a common rhetoric of the body not only
in an emphasis on proper posture, but also in the no-
tion that nonconceptual thought is located in the belly
(Japanese, hara), not in the head.
The body as object of meditation
The human body itself can become the object of med-
itation. Classical Indian texts describe various ways to
think about or mentally analyze the body into its parts
and processes. Some advise the meditator to sit next
to a corpse and reflect on the meditator’s own mor-
tality, on the fragility and corruption of the body, and
on the impossibility of discovering a permanent self in
one’s own material frame. This meditation is known
as “cultivating the impure” (as ́ubhabhavana) because
a greater part of the practice consists in understand-
ing that the living body shares the foul nature of the
rotting corpse. The practice continues in isolated
pockets in THERAVADAcountries, where monks now
may have to visit a public hospital and sit in the
morgue with the bodies of the unidentified and the in-
digent. The more common practice is to keep a skele-
ton or a skull in the monastery as a prop to aid in what
may be termed “a reflection on one’s self,” vicariously
using someone else’s body to imagine one’s own as the
object of meditation.
In Tibet this tradition resonated with a number of
local practices. In areas where the dead are disposed
by exposure, a traditional meditation on the corpse was
possible and occasionally practiced. But more charac-
teristic of Tibetan Buddhism is the practice of gcod
(chöd), a complex sequence of both performative and
meditative actions meant to provoke various experi-
ences of bodily dissolution. The meditator, instructed
by an experienced master who knows the proper in-
vocations and protective prayers, imagines himself be-
ing devoured by demons in a variety of settings called
“feasts.” In a “red feast,” for instance, the body is vi-
sualized as being dismembered and cut up into bloody
fragments, which are then offered to flesh-eating
demons. A “white feast” transforms each part of the
body into an idealized, pure part of a universe that will
delight the gods. The new sanctified body becomes am-
brosia and feeds benevolent deities.
Transforming the body into a spiritual body by rit-
ual or meditation is a central notion in the TANTRAS.
For instance, the ritual use of symbolic hand gestures,
called MUDRA, sacred “seals,” serve as a unifying prin-
ciple for the transformation of the person through
artistic representation, ritual performance, and medi-
tation. Although many of these are even today com-
mon Indian hand gestures, they are regarded as the
gestures of the Buddha himself, their association with
the Buddha being confirmed by their appearance in
Buddhist icons, and by the attribution of “secret” or
mystical meanings the gestures.Ritual acts, ritual frames
The theme of embodiment can also be used as a heuris-
tic in understanding the connection of meditation to
RITUAL. Most meditation practices occur within some
sort of ritual or symbolic frame, and follow veryMEDITATION