ABSTRACT
As this book demonstrates, ideas and practices relating to what we term here ‘subtle bodies’ have been around for many centuries, and they can be found in many parts of the world. While they are most often associated with Asian cultures, particularly Indic and Chinese, ideas and practices of this general kind have been found in a very wide range of societies, and form part of many religious traditions, at both elite and vernacular levels. Much of the contemporary literature regarding them, however, is popular rather than academic. This is a major omission, which we hope that this book will go some way to remedy. There have been academic studies of specific subtle-body traditions within particular cultures, but the present volume is, as far as we know, the first strictly academic book that attempts to survey and make some sense of subtle-body concepts and practices over a wide range of societies. Whether or not we regard these concepts as referring in some way to real phenomena within human experience, the wide range of time and space within which they have been evidenced surely implies that there is something there worth studying.
