ABSTRACT
Monastic discipline is role play. The monk creates what Susan Langer, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruce Kapferer have called a virtuality, a situation that does not pretend to be reality but is a part of reality. The enacting of a role facilitates conceptual blending that does not consist of merely metaphorical figures, but that is experienced in the body that undertakes the enacting. Vrindavan, India, shows that the creativity of such play does not depend entirely on discipline, as such. Râs lila theatre in Vrindavan involves lila – play that earnestly suspends one identity for the possibility of discovering or creating another. Modern video games also demonstrate how playing undoes an identity and remakes it as something constituted by the playing that it does. In such circumstances, what the body knows as reality is composed of the playing body and all with which the body plays.
