Wednesday, August 5, 2009

The Mind-Made Body (manomayakaya)

It is interesting that we Western teachers pass over this teaching. I have never heard a talk by a Western teacher on the 'Mind-Made Body.' My earliest experiences with meditation, back in 1967, immediately connected me with the fact that the way I experienced my body - at that time, in terms of size, space and light - was a dependent arising. (I wouldn't have used that phrase then, but that's what I was recognising, just the same.) It was a dependent arising that depended on 'coming in there,' so to speak. That is, it depended on my doing something to break the habits of waking mind's version of the body-mind. That something was to sit the body down somewhere and stay put for a while. In my early days the sittings were confined to about twenty minutes, twenty minutes sitting in one spot. But the kind of body I had/was, in that twenty minutes, went through some very dramatic variations. I was stunned to realise that the body was so variable.

I think this was the beginning of the realisation that it might be possible to cultivate a subtle body. The Buddha's practice (as presented in the Pali Nikayas) clearly states that mastery of the mind-made body is an important stage of the inner work. In later teachings (e.g. the Lankavatara Sutra) it is referred to as the Will-body. An example in the Pali Nikayas is in the Digha Nikaya - in the Samaññaphala Sutta (the 'Fruits of Reclusehood'). (See Maurice Walshe's translation, for example, or Thanissaro's at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.02.0.than.html.)

I think too much is made about the supernatural feats that are supposed to come for one who has mastered this part of the contemplative life. I think the promise for me is in the integration (after the split) - or the holism (in the reality) - of emptiness with form, spirit with a worldly life, citta with a 'worldly' body. It also involves seeing that we have created our body out of our explorations of our contact with the environment (more on dependent arising), and that the body is not fixed, but in constant flux with the environment (continually dependently arising). So, it's important for me that the 'mind-made body' is not about escaping embodiment, but about making embodiment more real.

1 comment:

  1. I did a search for manomayakaya and this was one of the pages that came up. I'm glad to see this discussion in the Western Buddhist context. Just a couple additions..... (1) The Lankavatara has the manomayakaya, but the idea of "will body" is the translator's notion. (2) The Lankavatara names the earlier Sutra of Queen Srimala's Lion's Roar and that sutra also refers to the manomayakaya in a context that suggests looking at the three kinds of manomayakaya of the Bodhisattava as similar to the Buddha's three bodies. (3) in order to talk to westerners about the idea, I call it the mental (mano) -phantom (maya) -body (kaya) and point out that it can appear when a person gets a limb amputated and this is called the "phantom limb" symptom in Western medicine. The manomayakaya is analogous to the Astral Body in transcendentalism, but only as a psychological phenomenon or mind manifestation, since everything is a manifestation of mind.

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