Like a Rider Upon His Mount: Reconciling the Nervous System with the ‘Subtle Life Supporting Wind’ (Tib. Srog ‘dzin gyi rlung phra mo) in the Decade of the Brain

This paper introduces an eruption of publishing about the gross and subtle body known to classical Buddhist Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna tradition among Tibetan monastics during the so-called “Decade of the Brain” (1990s). Responding to the privileging of the neurosciences and its materialist modeling of mind as entirely reducible to brain, a handful of prominent Tibetan monastic scholars in the PRC and in the refugee diaspora sought to elaborately translate and refuse the neuroscience of the day. In these Tibetan refusals of the brain sciences, not only was classical South and Inner Asian Buddhist knowledge about the subtle body and subtle winds restaged for a new global audience. In the process, the epistemological status of the subtle body came to possess a metonymical power to stand in juxtaposition with the imaginary totalities of the West, science, the Indian secular nation-state, and the erasures and exile of Tibetan civilization.