Virtuous Bodies: The Physical Dimensions of Morality in Buddhist Ethics.

• Author: Witkowski, Nicholas
• Position: Book review

Virtuous Bodies: The Physical Dimensions of Morality in Buddhist Ethics. By SUZANNE MROZIK. OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007. Pp. 200. $45.

Virtuous Bodies is based on Mrozik's 1998 Harvard dissertation, "The Relationship between Body and Morality According to the Siksasamuccayah" and several articles published over the last few years. The Siksasamuccaya, translated by Mrozik as Compendium of Training, is a collection of passages from Mainstream and Mahayana Buddhist scriptures, divided into nineteen chapters and interspersed with commentary. The compiler and commentator, Santideva--most likely a monk living in the eighth century at the great monastery of Nalanda--was a strong proponent of the Mahayana and intended the Compendium to be a manual for the bodhisattva. Because the Compendium contains citations of numerous Buddhist sutras, scholars over the last century have utilized the collection to shed light on the textual histories of the sources quoted at length within.

At the outset Mrozik presents the two defining approaches to her interpretation of the Compendium. The first is to emphasize the role of the "body" in the passages assembled in the Compendium. Mrozik's theoretical orientation is meant to be a corrective to the emphasis on cetana (translated 'heart-mind') in scholarly discourse on Buddhist ethics. While recognizing the significance of cetana within the ethical tradition, Mrozik intends to "demonstrate ... that Buddhist attention to heart-mind does not preclude an equal attention to the body" (p. 4). Armed with an interpretive strategy that focuses on the role of the body in the ethical development of the bodhisattva as presented in the Compendium, the author attempts to prove that the presence of ascetic discourse "does not bespeak a lack of interest in bodies" (p. 6). The author understands ascetic discourse to be the representation of bodies as "impermanent, foul and without intrinsic and eternal essence ..." (ibid.).

Mrozik's second approach is to read the Compendium as a text with literary integrity, not merely as a collection of sutra fragments. Although the material gathered by Santideva came from texts that have different doctrinal orientations and subject matter, Mrozik quite reasonably assumes that the selection and editing of texts represents an authorial orientation that should be considered in its own right. The Western scholarly tradition has largely ignored questions about how the Compendium is organized. Mrozik notes the recent publication of several studies on the text, including Clayton (2006), Hedinger (1984), and Mahoney (2002), but refers only briefly to their findings. It is clear from this dearth of secondary literature that Mrozik is moving into uncharted waters. The fact that there has been no complete translation of the Compendium since the publication of Bendall and Rouse in the early twentieth century is an indicator of the scholarly neglect of the text and of the status of Mrozik's book as a pioneering work that will set the bar for future studies.

Virtuous Bodies is broken into six chapters. The introduction lays out the goals of the study and the methodological choices that inform Mrozik's analysis. Chapter two is a discussion of possible translations of the term atmabhava based on usages in the Compendium and its relationship to other terms that illuminate conceptions of the body in the sutra material. Mrozik argues that atmabhava is the...