How to view the body

I watched this Youtube last night (from a channel full of stories of odd or surprising aspects of Japanese history) about how it was quite the thing for a while for Buddhist monks to contemplate artwork of deceased and decaying women as a remedy for feeling sexual attraction towards them (while alive, I hasten to add!) 

 

I presume this tactic did not originate in Japan:  I recall a scene in the movie Samsara, set in Tibet I think, where a monk tried to bring back a fellow monk from abandoning the religious life for a woman by showing him a book which (if I recall correctly) allowed erotic drawings of intercourse to devolve in subsequent pages into corpses having sex.  (!)

Here's some of what Wikipedia says on the topic of Buddhism and the body:

Revulsion

Though perhaps less concerned with issues of purity and pollution than the Brahmanist tradition, certain views of the body recorded in Buddhist scriptures do depict the body as unwholesome and potentially an object of disgust.^[1] This is the “unwantedness” of a body in the tradition of Buddhism identified by some scholars.^[5] Reflecting on the loathsomeness of the body is considered to be a particularly powerful method for countering attachment to sensual pleasures, such as sexuality or pride in appearance.^[1] Stories recorded in scriptures and in the biographies of Buddhist teachers particularly focus on the contemplation of the foulness of the female body as a remedy for sexual desire in a male religious practitioner.^[1]

Value

In contrast to views of the body as disgusting or a source of unworthy desire, the Buddhist tradition does speak of the value of the body in the context of the preciousness of human birth, and the value of a healthy body as an aid to pursuing the Buddhist path.^[1] While contemplating the repulsiveness of the body is considered to be a powerful remedy for sensual attachment, this is a therapeutic perspective that is not necessarily intended to be carried over into other areas of life.^[1] In particular, the suitability of the human body for the pursuit of religious practice is praised in traditional sources, comparing favorably with the capacities of birth among the gods or the various chthonic realms.^[1]

 It's quite the balancing act, then.  Just as it still is in India today.  From a story on BBC News today:

"I can be naked in front of a thousand people… It's just that they get uncomfortable," Bollywood star Ranveer Singh told the Paper magazine recently.

That is exactly what happened when Singh recently posed nude for a photo spread in the same magazine. Social media exploded with both appreciation and indignation - but mostly the latter. Memes and jokes making fun of the pictures abounded; and many accused the actor of denigrating men. If this was not enough, a police complaint was lodged against him for "hurting the sentiments of women".

Singh is not your traditional male star. He's endlessly energetic, flamboyant and embraces a frothy fashion style - velvet pants, sequin turtlenecks, jewellery - that Vogue magazine calls a "positive nod to the non-binary fluidity that fashion today is embracing".

In other words, says Paper, Singh has "challenged practically every stereotype of masculinity in a still-traditionalist Indian society".

"He has an ideal kind of male body. But he dresses on the border of androgyny. He is not rigid and openly talks about sex. He doesn't fit in the notion of masculinity in India. That is causing a lot of anxiety, and also making a lot of men uncomfortable," says Rahul Sen, who's doing his doctoral dissertation on literature and sexuality at Tufts University.

The article goes on to note the odd Indian mix of attitudes to the body, where being nude in public as a way of a holy man showing a spiritual disconnect from material things is fine, but for sexual appreciation, is disturbing (despite the temples covered in depictions of sex):

The differing reactions to Singh are illustrative of what some call India's "wild moral confusion", where people harbour a strange mix of conservative and liberal attitudes. The most graphic examples of erotic temple art can be found in many small-town shrines. One of the world's oldest textbooks of erotic love, Kama Sutra, is from India. Model and dancer Protima Bedi streaked on a Mumbai beach in 1974 for a film magazine cover. Nudity is not uncommon: thousands of ash-smeared Hindu holy men belonging to a cult turn up naked at religious festivals like the Kumbh Mela.  

This made me think how it's also a little odd that Judaism has a reputation for being an 'earthy' religion, where the body and food for it are not to be disdained at all: 

In the Jewish tradition there is no absolute division between material and spiritual, body and soul. According to the Hebrew Bible, the human body expresses divine reality and is a key to divine knowledge. As the Bible states, “From my flesh, I will perceive God.” (Job 19):

Before his expulsion from Eden, Adam’s body shone like the sun and was capable of living forever. Only as a result of eating from the Tree of Knowledge did God “place His hand on man and shrink him”. This changed to skin the body of light which en-clothed him, making it subject to death. One of the goals of Jewish spirituality is to reverse this process: to perfect the body and make it shine.

Judaism’s ultimate goal is not to transcend the physical, but to make for God a dwelling place in the lower worlds. This brings the divine into the physical world. Judaism’s ideal is the soul fully inhabiting the body, not the soul liberated from the body.

And yet, it has also always viewed nudity as shameful:

Oddly, I would say that modern secular Japan, and Scandinavia, with their casual acceptance (indeed celebration) of communal bathing in a non sexual context - seem to hit a happy medium towards attitudes to bodies - not to be seen as awful and corrupting, but something normal, if sometimes still a little embarrassing.   I don't think the Japanese can be accused of the over-promotion of female or male bodies either - I don't think they equate big muscles as a masculine ideal still, nor do I think that their female pop stars ever emphasise their sexual features in dress like some Western ones do.  

Anyway, it's not that I have any particular new insight into this topic - I just remain pleasantly puzzled as to how religious and cultural attitudes towards bodies is such a complicated thing.