Beautiful Bodhisattvas: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Exemplarity

The world's spiritual traditions incorporate a variety of types of exemplar, persons who exemplify a life of aspiration to, or attainment of, spiritual goods. Within Buddhism, the range of exemplars includes monastics, bodhisattvas, the Zen masters and the Buddha himself. Spiritual exemplars ar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Contemporary buddhism
Main Author: Kidd, Ian James 1983- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge [2017]
In: Contemporary buddhism
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
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Summary:The world's spiritual traditions incorporate a variety of types of exemplar, persons who exemplify a life of aspiration to, or attainment of, spiritual goods. Within Buddhism, the range of exemplars includes monastics, bodhisattvas, the Zen masters and the Buddha himself. Spiritual exemplars are typically described as having a distinctive form of bodily beauty, closely related to their ethical and spiritual qualities, that manifests as a form of radiance, luminosity or charisma. Drawing on recent work on beauty, virtue and the body in the Buddhist tradition, I propose an aesthetics of spiritual exemplarity, arguing that certain spiritual traditions - including Buddhism - are distinctive by virtue of their capacity to generate new forms of experiences of embodied moral beauty.
ISSN:1476-7953
Contains:Enthalten in: Contemporary buddhism
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/14639947.2017.1386417