In 1855, Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems including one that has come to be known as “I Sing the Body Electric.” To Whitman, who had an almost Daoist relationship with wild Nature, the body and the soul were one thing: obviously, literally, essentially; how otherwise? This influential poem—an early and masterful work in free verse—begins:
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
“Soul” is a useful term, like “mind” or “spirit,” to delineate the interior reality and essence of a person. Whitman wrote a poem, not a theological tract. Buddhists sometimes get hung up on the word “soul.” They shouldn’t. The language is artistic, poetic, sensual, unafraid to be plain. Whitman asserts that the soul is also none other than the body. The body is sacred, the body is the vehicle for all understanding. The senses are the basis for reasoning. Complete devotion should be full-body. This is the essence of Buddhist Tantra and every other kind of tantra. Ritual dance in Buddhism, dance-as-meditation, deity visualization, and becoming one with Nature, indeed meditation itself, are full-body acts of self-cultivation. There is no separation of physical reality and spiritual action. Breath is the path to enlightenment.
Whitman’s lush concept of the full-blooded holiness of the flesh finds a parallel in the tantric concept of Body Mandala. Or Body-as-Mandala. The chakras—energy centers that align with the spine and torso and head—are each a mandala in themselves. Mandala simply means “circle” in Sanskrit. Mandalas come to symbolize all aspects of life, seen and unseen, felt and discovered, depending on their use and level of abstraction in design. The Body Mandala essentially functions in two ways: first, where the human form is the central focus of a geometric mandala, which defines the deity field of the deity. The human form becomes a structural component of a geometric structure. Conversely, the Body Mandala is also a mandala—or deity field—in the shape of the human body. The body is the locus of spiritual and mental cultivation. The unseen subtle body is depicted; the circulations of energy and intention. Sacred geometries appear within the human form, distinct from mandalas where a human body is ensconced within a geometric form.
Tantric art, especially within Hindu and Buddhist traditions, makes extensive use of the human form as a symbolic map of the universe. They highlight the spiritual and energetic aspects, circuits, channels, pathways, and quantum dynamics of energetic transformation of the mind and its condition, and so inexorably, the body and its condition. The parts and components of the body are aligned with various cosmic energies, deities, virtues, and sacred principles. The process of activating these structures is a technique to divinize the body; to rarify the metabolic consciousness toward a more pure apprehension of essential reality.
There are any number of specific techniques to do this. Buddhist monastic cham and Newar Charya dance are two distinct traditions with different ways to divinize the body using ages-old techniques, passed down since ancient times. Remarkably, both of these traditions are practiced today with vitality, mystical skill, evolved creativity, and danced excellence. Buddhism is a living repository of pre-Buddhist mystical techniques, connecting contemporary practice with meditation skills that have roots receding into prehistory.
Westerners have also availed themselves of the concept of Body Mandala from the Middle Ages until today. Artist Peter Max created Astrological Astralplane in the 1960s as part of his Cosmic Art period of output. This astral plane is peopled with sky travelers, wise men, and messengers leaping through their field of Peace and Love, as wisdom-generating heads stabilize the expanding Earth consciousness in this mod mandala composed of human bodies. Three decades later, the iconic singer Grace Jones transformed herself into a geometric icon of radiant self-power, a Body Mandala of liberated self-expression.
Another pop artist of the same era as Jones, the late Keith Haring, used the human form to communicate myriad states of consciousness and being. He painted bodies, such as that of the pioneering choreographer of identity politics, Bill T. Jones. I’ll conclude this short homage to the Body Mandala with the very best of 1980’s New York downtown arts culture; a surreal meditation and collaboration between Keith Haring and Grace Jones, with appearances by Timothy Leary and Andy Warhol. Singing the body electric. Erecting the Body Mandala. Haring directed this early music video and painted the extraordinary dress as a graffiti-symbol mandala, resulting in an apex expression of the 1980’s avant-garde pop movement.
The human body in Tantric and Buddhist art is an intersection of art, meditation and energy. These traditions recognize that that the body is a sacred vessel, a geometric temple, a cauldron for spiritual transformation, transcending taboo. In many tantric depictions, the body is shown radiating light, constructed according to sacred geometries, gird with patterns, halos, ensconced in a web of dazzling powers, symbolizing the body’s connection to the divine and the cosmic order. Whitman concludes his well-known poem:
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!
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