ABSTRACT

In the Indian tradition, Ramanuja made the analogy between the God-world relationship and the soul-body relationship. There are various theological advantages to the doctrine that the cosmos is the body of God. First, if God acts without the use of some intermediate thing on the cosmos then there is a resemblance between this and the way we move our bodies. Second, thinking of the cosmos as God's body makes the notion of God as a person more accessible. Another aspect of Indian thought affects the meaning of soul-body in-separability. Within the Indian tradition, reincarnation was a widely held belief, and was part of the orthodox tradition to which Ramanuja belonged. Ramanuja thinks of God primarily as the "inner controller," who acts through individual souls. One reason why Ramanuja refrained from thinking of the soul as being simply a fragment of God, is that he wished to evade the implication that God gets touched or polluted by karma.