What is the Subtle Body?
by Jacob Kyle
The “subtle body” is a term used ubiquitously in the modern postural yoga and spiritual communities to refer to a wide range of phenomena relating to what is sometimes called the energetic body. It is variably conceived, and those who use the term often do so with a relatively vague understanding of what it refers to beyond a sense that it indicates a dimension of our embodiment below the threshold of our physical body – a dimension “subtler”, as it were, than the so-called material body.
For the purpose of this short article, I will discuss two accounts of the “subtle body” found in the Indian philosophical systems of sāṃkhya and śaiva tantra, respectively. The difference between how the subtle body is conceived in these two systems will illustrate how broadly encompassing this term has become, and in turn how this has enabled the term to accommodate soteriological perspectives that are in contrast with but not unrelated to one another. Finally, I will address how “subtle body” has come to be used in modern parlance.
Reference to various bodies can be found throughout Indian philosophical and religious literature,1 but the Sanskrit terms most frequently translated as “subtle body” are sūkṣma-śarīra and liṅga-śarīra. We find references to it notably in the dualistic sāṃkhya tradition. In kārikā XL of the sāṃkhyakārikā of īśvarakṛṣṇa, liṅga (the “characteristic mark”) is said to be inclusive of thirteen elements: the buddhi (pre-egoic awareness space; sometimes called “intellect”), the ahaṃkāra (the I-maker; ego), the manas (mind), the five buddhīndriyas (hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, smelling) and the five karmendriyas (speaking, grasping, walking, excreting, generating).2
This thirteen-fold instrument, or karaṇa, is comprised of the “internal” organ (the three-fold antaḥkarana) and the external organ (the ten indriyas, or sense-capacities) and is that “subtle body” which transmigrates from lifetime to lifetime, until the puruṣa – the pure, contentless consciousness that is the true “identity” of every individual – attains liberation. This transmigrating aggregate of karmas and saṃskāras is what is frequently being indicated when the term sūkṣma-śarīra is found in the Indian philosophical tradition. As such, it is both a description of what persists when the material body is left behind and a prescription regarding what is to be ultimately relinquished when liberation is accomplished and the cycle of saṃsāra comes to an end.
What we find in the traditions of śaiva-śākta tantra is a somewhat different conception stemming from another soteriological objective to that of the sāṃkhya (which is, at least in its classical form, very much a renunciatory tradition). In these traditions we find terms and categories that will be familiar to the student of haṭha or modern postural yoga – cakras, nāḍis and granthis, which are psychic devices harnessed by the sādhaka (or, practitioner) to experience the presence and movement of kuṇḍaliniī in the body. But, whereas the sūkṣma-śarīra of sāṃkhya is an invisible coagulation of thirteen3 transmigrating elements, what we find instead in, for example, the yoginīhṛdaya (Heart of the Yogini) is an imagined body – a body of images that is consciously imposed upon one’s existing body in an effort to transmute and transform one’s current state toward that of the jīvanmukta (lit. “Liberated while living”).
The cakras, then, that are so frequently cited as features of what is often called the “subtle body” in modern conversations about yoga are not physical places to be “found” already existent in the body – ready, as is claimed by some of the modern literature, to be “balanced”, “healed”, or “cleansed”; they are instead, from a tantrik perspective, visualization devices that are mapped onto the body in the context of a sometimes very long and complicated sequence of tantrik ritual performance that includes the recitation of mantra, the “placing”(nyāsa) of various deities on the body, the use of mudrās, etc.
Based on the fact that the term sūkṣma-śarīra would, according to André Padoux, never have been used to describe this latter tantrik body (but instead in the Sanskrit literature always refers to the transmigrating body), he posits that the use of “subtle body” to refer to the visualized body of tantra is a misnomer. Instead, he prefers the term imagined or yogic body.4 Following Padoux’s lead and making a distinction between these two conceptions would certainly contribute some clarity and precision to a term that is often broadly circulated as a placeholder for practically any notion of “soul”, “spirit” or “energy” that is other than the materially physical body. When we look at Indian intellectual history, with its various typologies and “geographies” of the body, we can begin to see how the use of a single term to encompass them all might lead to confusion.
From the perspective of modern embodied practice, while the widespread embrace of a “subtle body” is arguably a positive reflection of our willingness to embrace dimensions of experience subtler than the physical, its ambiguous adoption by modern postural yoga communities has caused two important ideas to become conflated. The yogic body of śaiva and śakta tantra is fundamentally different from the sūkṣma-śarīra of sāṃkhya on one very important point: the former is to be cultivated, while the latter is to be eradicated.
Being a tool of householder sādhanā, the yogic body is a map whereby the practitioner affirms and realizes their true nature as the body of śiva. Through the rituals of tantrik sādhanā, one “encodes” an understanding into the psycho-physical apparatus; one divinizes the body, or rather “recognizes” that this microcosm that is my body is nothing other than an expression of the macrocosm of the God/Goddess. The sūkṣma-śarīra, however, is not a positively affirmed phenomenon, but rather a lingering effect of one’s lack of enlightenment – a thing ultimately to be “dissolved” or “neutralized” as a result of one’s practice.
On the face of it, one might think that these two conceptions are somehow in conflict with each other, however this need not be the case. Instead, teasing out the difference between the subtle body, as traditionally conceived in yogic systems, and the imaginal body, offers a framework through which one can make sense of both one’s body as a more or less determined aggregate of limitations (subtle body) and one’s body as a horizon of potential (imaginal body) actualized through tantrik sādhanā. In other words, the imaginal body is what liberates the subtle body. Considered together, they express a dialectic of freedom and determinism that motivates the arc of a yogi’s contemplative adventure.
Note, for example, the so-called “doctrine of three bodies” (śarīra-trayam) or the five kośas (“sheaths”).
Gerald James Larson. Classical Sāṃkhya: An Interpretation of its History and Meaning. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass (1969: 236). Those familiar with the sāṃkhya will recognize these as thirteen of the twenty-five tattvas – elements (lit. “thatnesses”) that comprise the psycho-physical map directing the practitioner toward ultimate liberation, what in this tradition is called kaivalya (‘isolation’ from prakṛti, or primordial nature).
This number is sometimes counted as eight, when the 5 karmendriyas are left out of the count.
André Padoux. The Heart of the Yogini: The Yoginīhṛdaya, a Sanskrit Tantric Treatise. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2013: 10).