Searching for the Body

In the early fifteenth century, two Tibetan monks debated how to transform the body ritually into a celestial palace inhabited by buddhas. The discussion between Ngorchen Künga Zangpo and Khédrupjé Gélek Pelzangpo concerned the mechanics of this tantric ritual practice, known as body mandala, as well as the most reliable sources to follow in performing it. As representatives of the Sakya and emerging Geluk traditions respectively, these authors spoke for communities of Buddhist practitioners vying for patronage and prestige in an evolving Tibetan scholastic culture. Their debate witnessed clashes between imagination and deception, continuity and rupture, and tradition and innovation.Searching for the Body demonstrates the significance of the body mandala debate for understandings of Tibetan Buddhism as well as conversations on representation and embodiment occurring across the disciplines today. Rae Erin Dachille explores how Ngorchen and Khédrup used citational practice as a tool for making meaning, arguing that their texts reveal a deep connection between ritual mechanics and interpretive practice. She contends that this debate addresses strikingly contemporary issues surrounding interpretation, intertextuality, creativity, essentialism, and naturalness. Buddhist ideas about the construction of meaning and the body offer new ways of understanding representation, which Dachille illuminates in an epilogue that considers Glenn Ligon’s engagement with Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography. By placing Buddhist thought in dialogue with contemporary artistic practice and cultural critique, Searching for the Body offers vital new perspectives on the transformative potential of representations in defining and transcending the human.

Searching for the Body uses a famous fifteenth-century Tibetan debate about a tantric ritual practice called body mandala to explore historical and literary questions that show the relevance of that debate to the broader field of the humanities. Dachille’s knowledge of the Tibetan texts is superb, and her analysis of the body mandala debate is a major contribution to the field., Rae Dachille makes exemplary use of exegetical practices drawn from trans, queer, Black, and disability studies to enable a posthumanist, and more-than-human, interpretative stance within Buddhism. She critically reframes the ways Buddhist authors can understand how reference, citation, and representation work in Buddhist texts and traditions, expanding our understanding of the ever-shifting boundaries between self, others, and world. This is a smart, beautiful, and timely work.

Rae Erin Dachille is assistant professor of religious studies and East Asian studies and affiliate faculty in social, cultural, and critical theory and gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.