The somatics of liberation

Previous scholarship on Buddha-bodies has given excessive, teleological pride-of-place to the doctrine of trikaya ("three bodies"), and as a result, has paid insufficient attention to a broad range of other relevant ideas, especially ideas about bodies of beings other than Buddhas, or bodies not named kaya. As a result, our received history of ideas about the body in Buddhism is fundamentally inaccurate. This dissertation therefore proposes a through revision of this history. Most notably, there is not sufficient evidence to believe that any significant concept of positive, adequate, ideal embodiment of Buddhist liberation is entertained in the period down to the close of the Pali canon. Inscriptional evidence strongly suggests that the earliest identifiable such positive embodiment of Buddhahood is to be found in the relics of the Buddha. The very notion of positive, adequate embodiment of Buddhahood therefore seems to originate in relic-centred cultic practice around the turn of the Common Era. Subsequently, in Mahayana and the Mainstream "Schools", a whole range of new ideas about ideal embodiments emerges, including, centrally, the ideas that Buddhahood is most veritably embodi