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Self and Suffering: Deconstruction and Reflexive Definition in Buddhism and Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Philip A. Mellor
Philip A. Mellor
Affiliation:
Liverpool Institute of High Education, Liverpool
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Extract

In a study of the religious significance of food to medieval woman, Caroline Walker Bynum argues that the ascetic practices embraced by these women are signs of a commitment to explore the religious potentialities of the body rather than being indications of a hostile attitude to the flesh. She comments that belief in the ‘salvific potential of suffering flesh (both our's and God's)’ differentiates Christianity from other world religions, since it is a ‘characteristically Christian idea that the bodily suffering of one person can be substituted for the suffering of another through prayer, purgatory, vicarious communion etc….’ In the discussion which follows I shall attempt to draw out this differentiating characteristic in a comparative study of Christian and Buddhist concepts of, and attitudes to, suffering. I shall suggest that the divergent orientations which structure the religious treatment of this issue are related not only to radically opposing conceptions of the religious ‘path’, but also to different understandings of ‘self’. Although the categories ‘self’ and ‘suffering’ are intimately related in each context, it is my contention that in the Christian context the religious meaning of life becomes apparent to the individual in so far as the content of self is defined progressively in the reflexive encounter with the ‘Other’ (God), an encounter which can be facilitated through suffering. In a Buddhist context, on the other hand, it is precisely such a reflexivity (between self and ‘others’ if not the ‘Other’) which is understood to create and reproduce both self and suffering, and from which the Buddhist desires liberation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 49 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Bynum, C. W., Holy Feast and Holy Fast, The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (London: University of California Press, 1987), p. 418Google Scholar n. In the course of my discussion I shall consider the medieval practices which are the focus of Bynam's study as indicative of a peculiarly Christian understanding of the relationship between self, suffering and the body. However, it is not my intention to suggest that this is the only Christian position on these subjects. The conflict between Platonic and Aristotelian influences on Christianity, in relation to the soul/body dichotomy, is only one among many such divergences attention could be drawn to.

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7 An apparent exception to this, the sacrifice of the body in gCod practice which I shall consider towards the end of this discussion, does not effectively undermine my argument: the Christian emphasis on self-sacrifice is far removed from the indifference to body which gCod practice is intended to signify.

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23 Ibid.

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44 Ibid. p. 222.

45 Ibid. p. 223.

46 Ibid. p. 223.

47 Ibid. p. 224.

48 Ibid.

49 Bynum, , op cit. (1982).Google Scholar However, Bynum also argues that this new attention to self did not entail the ‘loss of community’. In fact, she argues that the increased interest in individuation and particularity which encouraged the attention to self also encouraged a new interest in different types of groups, social forms, structures and types.