To Do or Not to Do: The Body in the Buddhist and Taoist Traditions

Last time we talked about the skandhas - all five of them: form, feeling, perception, concept, and consciousness - the Buddhist description of ego. We said that we can see the skandhas as a description either of the components of ego or of ego's development. This time, we'll take a closer look at the first skandha: body.

But before we look into the skandha itself, let's take a brief detour back to our Buddhist-Taoist discussion, particularly the part about the body. Some will say that Taoists pay more attention to the body and that Buddhists pay more attention to the mind. We can see why people say this. After all, Taoists have developed a myriad of body-related practices ranging from Chi Kung to T'ai Chi to various other martial arts. Furthermore, Taoist ideas related to yin and yang have had a profound effect on Chinese medicine, a tradition of remarkable vastness and subtlety. And Buddhists just seem to sit around.

Actually, Buddhists don't "just sit around," but we can see why people say that they do. As I said in an earlier installment, we can find various Buddhist practices related to the body, ranging from lama dancing in Tibet to Zen remarks about "chopping wood and carrying water" to various body-related disciplines developed by contemporary Buddhist teachers. But we must admit that Buddhist do do a lot of sitting around.

This doesn't mean, however, that they pay no attention to the body. In fact, many Buddhist practices take the body as the prime focus for one's contemplations. For example, we can point to analytical meditation practices in which one looks carefully at the body as a source of ego identification; and in the traditional instructions known as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the first one has to do with the body.

However, in most of these practices, one doesn't really do anything with the body. Contrast this with the Taoist practices mentioned above: the practitioner learns a specific set of movements or techniques involving either the muscles or the breath. Though we find some Buddhist practices taking a similar approach, most Buddhist practices don't so much do something with the body as they do take careful notice of how we habitually relate to the body. Initially, the practices involve careful attention to what we find ourselves doing instead of developing a new set of things to do.