Beautiful Bodhisattvas: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Exemplarity

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to audiences at Leeds and at Nottingham for their comments and discussion and to David E. Cooper and Linda Zagzebski for encouraging my interest in this topic.