ABSTRACT
The boundaries that demarcate (indeed construct) ‘Asia’ and the ‘West’ are of course far from solid: as amply demonstrated in postcolonial studies and critical, comparative religious studies. The permeability of the categories – temporal and geographical – used to order the contents of this volume are similarly not hermetically sealed but porous. Moving from a focus on Asian traditions in the last two sections, the next three chapters provide case studies not only of specific European and Muslim traditions but also of the exchange of ideas across social, cultural and geographic boundaries. Ideas travel: concepts of subtle anatomy and agency seem well suited to moving across boundaries and in the process being adapted to new contexts. Indeed, these chapters also open out considerations of comparative scholarship on subtle bodies which are more fully embraced by the contributions in Part Four, ‘Subtle Bodies and Modernity’. In this introduction, a brief contextualization for each of the chapters is provided by way of a necessarily reductive overview of subtle-body traditions from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. This overview touches upon numerous rich, fascinating and complex areas of study. To this, each of the following case studies will speak with a unique particularity of analysis: providing targeted and specialist contributions to the scholarship of the broader area plotted below.
