The subtle body

Talk 3: Revised (2001-03-20) from talk given at Order Visualisation Retreat, Vajraloka 1998

The Buddha says somewhere in the Pali Canon, though I’ve not been able to find the quote, that the whole of the Dharma is to be found within this six foot extension that is our body. Our body is an excellent source of spiritual lessons, an excellent subject for reflection. It is at the centre of all our desires and antipathies. When I want food, sex, attention, praise, shelter, approval, it is for my body that I want it. And the body is the reason we are here – by definition. The body defines what ‘here’ means. ‘We’ are here because our body is here.

Ours is a precious human body, it’s the vehicle for our liberation – yet it’s a total mystery to us. If you think about bodies a lot, bodies turn out to be weird, strange, even sometimes rather frightening things. When we look at another person – that is, when we look at their body – we don’t know really what we are looking at. A ghost in a machine, perhaps. ‘When I look into my body’, sings Milarepa, ‘I see it as a mirage city’. What a rich image this is. And in fact Buddhist scriptures often symbolise the body as a city, or sometimes as a village, full of rich activity and teeming life. If we see a living body being opened up, for example during an operation, its complex life frightens us. It’s too surprising. There’s too much colour.

The word kaya has a much broader meaning than our word ‘body.’ Kaya literally means a group, an accumulation or a collection of things. (In fact the English word body can mean something similar, because you can refer to a body of water, or a body of policemen, or a governing body.) But kaya doesn’t just mean a collection of physical things, it also means a collection of mental things. It can refer to the four mental skandhas, just as well as to the rupa-skandha. So the mental kaya refers to something more like one’s person rather than just one’s physical form.

This seems fair enough, because all is mind – our experience of body is essentially a mental one anyway. All experience comes through the senses; the senses are mediated by the mind. So both world and body are essentially mental experiences – they are always mediated by the senses, and interpreted by the mind. So strange though it may seem, even the body is a mental experience. We experience our body through our senses – we can only see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, touch it. There isn’t any other way to experience it except through the senses, and sense experiences happen in this mysterious medium called ‘mind’.

According to Sangharakshita, we always have a body. In my first talk I spoke of the mind’s existence in different worlds: in waking life, in dreams, in the bardo. There is always mental experience. Now I am drawing your attention to the associated fact that with that universal mental experience there is also, always, an experience of body. Unenlightened existence, it seems, requires that we have a centre of experience, and the concept of a body provides us with such a centre. ‘Body’ is thus a principle of configuration, something around which we construct an entire world. It is the principle of location in time and space. We are here. We are always in a body. It is what we hang our experience on to. If you are unenlightened, you need a body of some kind to have as part of your identity. So where there is unenlightened consciousness, there is always a body. Even after death there is a body, there is a bardo body. When we lose waking consciousness and sleep, and dream consciousness arises, there is a dream body, the body we create for ourselves in the dream.

Death is a terrifying prospect mostly because we associate so much with the gross physical body. If we experienced the principle of ‘body’ in this more extended sense, as Buddhist tradition seems to do, perhaps we’d be a bit more relaxed about it. Perhaps we could try to associate more with our subtle body. But let us wind into that topic more gradually as we go on.

We’ve been told by Bhante that there’s an emphasis on body awareness in Zen meditation. Because of this, I’ve often wondered about ways of working on the mind, but through the body. There are certainly connections and correspondences between the two. The classic example given is the effect on our mental state of the way we physically hold ourselves: rounded shoulders equals low self esteem, etc. And then, a healthy body gives sensuous pleasure, which refreshes the mind. Poor health can depress our spirits.

Another illustration of the connectivity of body and mind is the way one’s mental state is reflected in the ‘breath–body’, and the way the state of the ‘breath-body’, in turn, affects the body of flesh. We can read in the Anapanasati Sutta how this term ‘breath body’, indicating the form or shape of the breath, is used in contrast to the form of the ordinary flesh body. Each is used to calm the other, so that awareness of the state of the breath body helps calm the flesh body, and vice versa.

When I spoke recently with Bhante about meditation, he said something he’s said before, a simple enough idea, but he said it again. He does that. He said that in the FWBO we could improve our meditation posture. He thought that on the whole Order members do not provide a very good example of meditation posture to mitras. And he said that in the Just Sitting practice we should primarily emphasise posture.

Which got me thinking. What would it mean ‘primarily to emphasise posture?’ Well, it certainly seems to me that meditation posture is not just about sitting in some arbitrarily worked out, ‘correct’ pose. But what are the principles involved? In the end it seemed to me that Order members and meditation teachers need themselves to generate a clearer understanding of meditation posture and the role of the body in meditation practice, and communicate that. So another reason for this exploratory talk on the body. Perhaps we could experiment a bit more in this area.

I have become quite interested myself in the energies, and energy centres, or chakras, in the body, in how this relates to a subtle body, and how the experience of a subtle body relates to our meditation and Dharma practice. This probably doesn’t appeal to everyone, but I’m sure it will accord with some people’s experience. In fact it’s certain that we all at least experience areas of our body which seem to be centres of emotion or which connect somehow with particular energies.

You can learn about what a chakra represents by simply concentrating your attention there. You don’t need to concentrate for long on particular parts of your body, before you get particular sensations, with particular associations and emotions. And the same phenomenon happens in reverse: when we feel particular associations and emotions, we often feel them resonating and vibrating in particular parts of the body. (My heart was pounding. There was a lump in my throat. My guts were churning. My heart was in my mouth. My head was all fuzzy.) As you traverse further up the body, the sensations and associations and emotions become more refined, and also become spiritually significant.

In eastern spiritual ideology it is axiomatic that these lotuses open and unfold as part of one’s personal development; and that the lower chakras need to be awakened before the lower ones. This is because the state of the lower chakras recapitulates the state of evolution of our psycho-physical energies, sexual and existential.

According to Bhante, Buddhism employs most of all the three upper chakras, that is the head, the throat, and the heart. It is assumed that the lower ones are already functioning; or if they are not fully functioning, it is assumed that they are at least functioning adequately enough to support the spiritually important developments at the head, voice and heart. Bhante’s view seems to be that if you start with the heart and the higher centres, the lower energies will eventually also be purified. If you develop the heart chakra, for example, energies are naturally going to drawn up from below.

What is interesting about the numerous systems of chakras in Indo-Tibetan yogic tradition is that they almost all differ in small respects. Some have an extra chakra here, or one is in a slightly different position. This shows that the chakras do not have a fixed physical location. In fact, one may even wonder if they are part of the physical body at all. I rather like Mr. Chen’s explanation, which is that the chakras are in fact key aspects of, or even gateways to, a subtle body which exists as it were in parallel to the physical body.

The Vajrayana speaks of three bodies – the physical, the subtle and the wisdom body, each existing in this kind of parallel. We know what the physical body is. The wisdom body or Vajrakaya seems to be a kind of transcendental body, to use that term, perhaps corresponding to some extent with the Rainbow body attained at death by sages such as Milarepa. Clearly it’s hard to envisage a ‘body’ which is transcendental, beyond subject and object. More relevant to our quest is the subtle body, so let’s look at that.

The subtle body is created by one’s spiritual practice. It’s a little like Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, but in reverse. We all just get older and fatter and uglier like everyone else, but up in our attic is a secret portrait of us, which becomes more and more beautiful as our practice deepens. This is the subtle body.

Not everyone has a subtle body. You bring it into existence through spiritual practice. So it isn’t quite the same as the body in which you transmigrate in the bardo – the astral body or ‘desire body’ as it is called in some Tibetan traditions. That eventually fades away after death, but the subtle body doesn’t – it continues on, changing and transforming as it goes, until Enlightenment. The subtle body is also equivalent to the manomayakaya or mind-made body, which the Buddha describes in the Pali Canon as arising like the pith of a reed being drawn out from its sheath, and being identical to the physical body in every respect except that it is luminous and unimpeded by space.

Amongst all these fascinating esoteric details, the important point for us is that this subtle ‘body’ is made, it is created by our practice, especially by meditation. And visualisation meditation actually utilises this subtle experience of body, giving us a way of reflecting so that our subtle body becomes gradually imbued with the particular qualities of the visualised Buddha or Bodhisattva – rather as though they were gradually etched or recorded on a tape. One is then increasingly able to support the experience of those qualities when they arise as potentialities in the bardo, either after death or in deep meditation.

As well as this general imprinting on one’s subtle body of the Buddha’s spiritual qualities, there are also those aspects of sadhana practice in which you visualise particular chakras and subtle energy channels. These are also activating and building up that subtle body. For example, the Om Ah Hum, the bijas or seed syllables which we visualise in some of our practices at our head, throat and heart. This is enabling, bringing about, the subtle body. The Om Ah Hum represents the body, speech and mind of the Enlightened being we are trying to become. The Om is the essence of his body, the Ah is the essence of his speech, and the Hum is the essence of his mind. When you visualise the syllables in yourself, you are symbolising your attempt to transform yourself into the Buddha or Bodhisattva. And since you have the potentiality to become that Enlightened being, your own body, speech and mind are the seeds for the Enlightened body, speech and mind which can now germinate and start growing. The rays of blessing from the Buddha encourage that growth, like sunlight and water on a growing plant.

So that is the subtle body. You might wonder, assuming the subtle body exists to some extent as part of our experience, whether we can experience it directly. Perhaps we could, if we could subtract from our experience everything associated with the gross physical body. Doing this as an exercise is quite interesting, and perhaps also a little humiliating, because we start to see just how much of ourselves is associated with the gross physical body. What in our experience has not been mediated by the five or six senses? So much of the personality that we have has been built up as a result of our contact with the physical world. Sometimes, perhaps, we do have experiences which seem not to be related to this world, and these are interesting. So this perhaps illustrates how far we have to go in developing the subtle body.

Just to conclude I’d like to offer for your interest the way I have come to see the three principle chakras in relation to the Yogachara system of eight consciousnesses, which make up the whole of our experience. You’ll probably remember that these are the five sense consciousnesses of sight, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching, then the mind sense, making six. This is what we’re trying to experience in our practice on this retreat – just the simple sense experiences as they come in through the doors of the senses, just as they are without interference and interpretation. Perhaps it’s useful, then, to recall that it’s the seventh consciousness which does this interference. That is, the klistamanovijnana or the defiled mind consciousness. This continually interprets the simple experience as my experience, and all that comes from that interpretation. This klistamanovijnana is what we are trying to let go in the Just Sitting and in our meditation and mindfulness practice generally. So that’s the seventh consciousness. The eighth consciousness is just the repository of images and potentialities in the depth of the mind. The seeds in our mind which cause us to get excited or afraid or peaceful when they are stimulated. Such as the name of someone we were once very much in love with. Or, more positively and with more relevance for our practice here, the name of a Buddha in his or her mantra. These are seeds with the potentiality to stir us up, and perhaps to stir up the subtle body, so that it furthers our practice. Anyway, I see a correspondence of these eight consciousnesses with the three main chakras which you may or may not find useful. At least it may stimulate you to reflect more about it. The eight consciousnesses boil down to three main elements: the six sense vijnanas, the Klistomanovijnana, and the Alayavijnana (though this can function in two completely different modes: samsaric or nirvanic). And there are three main chakras: at the head, throat, and heart.

1. In fact at the head two chakras are found, though they are often included together as one. Both are represented by the syllable OM. At the top of the head is the Thousand Petalled Lotus. This represents the potentiality for complete Enlightenment, and corresponds to the Alayavijnana in its full transformation, after the great turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness. Here the ‘head’ is experienced symbolically or mythically, as though it were the summit of Mount Meru, as the highest point or essence of existence.

At the forehead is the brain chakra. This corresponds to the body, since the brain connects with the six sense vijnanas. The six ordinary senses, that is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and the perception of mental objects, are translated by the brain. So here the ‘head’ is experienced as the centre of the body experienced as a physical organism.

2. Our more emotional centres are lower down in the body. Moving from the head to the heart we find the mind chakra, the HUM. That is, our actual, present, untransformed mind – not our ideal mind. The heart is thus equivalent to the Alayavijnana in its untransformed state. A great ragbag – or storehouse – of potentiality and habit. Here is stored our reactive emotionality, our untransformed will. Here is ‘what everyone wants’. Emotion, feeling, reactivity; klesas and dharmas – whether relatively integrated, or relatively unintegrated, it’s all here.

3. Then, at the throat, is the speech chakra, the AH. This has to do not only with speaking and communication with others, but also with ourselves, our constant internal dialogue. A lot of our mental activity has to do with telling ourselves stories about what’s going on. We do this at a deep level in our dreams – we fit all the sense impressions of the day, all the difficulties and puzzles, into a plausible story which may not be true, but which at least keeps us sane. If we don’t dream, we go insane. And this story is the self which we communicate to others. So at the throat we find the klistomanovijnana – the seat of ego, the seat of our internal dialogues regarding the world, the place where we organise all the sense impressions, ideas and thoughts in a way which makes sense to us, deluded as we are, and the place where this is communicated through the medium of Voice, both internal and external.

So perhaps that’s why, when we focus our attention on the heart, on the throat, and perhaps also on the forehead, we get such strange, and somehow meaningful, feelings.

[27 mins]