By the end of the 15th century, a major syphilis epidemic had swept Europe…

As well as hiding syphilitic sores, merkins could help to mask the scent of the rotting flesh…

Women bundled together and stitched their hair into the most sacred parts of the image—the deity’s hair or robes and Sanskrit seed-syllables—as a means to accrue merit for themselves or for a loved one.

This paper focuses on a set of embroidered Japanese Buddhist images said to incorporate the hair of Chūjōhime (753–781), a legendary aristocratic woman credited with attaining rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land. Chūjōhime’s hair embroideries served to show that women’s bodies could be transformed into miraculous materiality through corporeal devotional practices and served as evidence that women were capable of achieving enlightenment.

Women overestimated the facial femininity that men prefer in a partner and men overestimated the facial masculinity that women prefer in a partner.

These results indicate misperception of opposite-sex facial preferences and that mistaken perceptions may contribute to dissatisfaction with [one’s] own appearance.

In 2023, only 407 people donated a kidney to a stranger. The End Kidney Deaths Act would aim to increase that number nearly thirtyfold.

Also read part two here responding to a few, common counterarguments.

By examining abject preta bodies in accordance with their aesthetic description and function in relation to Buddhist understandings of karma and rebirth, we can observe two overlapping somatic discourses at work. The first speaks to the ultimately impermanent nature of the body, while the second depicts bodies as simultaneously ethical subjects and objects.

In this article, the author examines depictions of the abject bodies of disgusting pretas in early South Asian narratives. She explores what these abject bodies reveal about early, Indian Buddhist attitudes toward embodiment and difference.

The blurriness associated with myopia is caused by eyeballs that have grown too long; in a stretched-out shape, eyes aren’t able to properly focus images onto the retina. Researchers believe two culprits are to blame: the lack of outdoor play, and prolonged time doing up-close activities like using digital devices.

Regardless of what kind of unhealthy body image you start with, this contemplation is sure to get under your skin—not only in a literal sense but also in an idiomatic one.

A double self portrait: the darker-skinned Frida on the right is the indigenous Mexican that was adored by her husband, and the lighter-skinned Frida on the left is the European Frida that her husband rejected.

The fact that the body of a deceased monk did not decompose had long been considered a sign of high spiritual attainment in many parts of Asia, including Buddhist China. There are numerous records of eminent Chinese monks whose bodies miraculously showed no trace of decay after death. For months or years following their decease their unembalmed bodies continued to bear a healthy and lifelike countenance and give off a sweet perfume.

What should a practitioner or a teacher of meditation know about basic human anatomy and physiology?

In this paper I outline the physiological knowledge and particular insights I have found useful for enhancing a person’s understanding of how we breathe, how we regulate our heart rate, and how we control our metabolic rate in ‘control’ or non-meditative states and the kinds of changes we might expect in a meditating subject.

We suggest that muscular performance capabilities declined during hominin evolution in response to selection for repetitive, low-cost contractile behavior.

… their perfect physiques proclaim their supreme attainments.

This study is the first to use empirical physiological observations to examine the well-publicized theoretical 35°C wet-bulb temperature limit for human to extreme environments. We find that uncompensable heat stress in humid environments occurs in young, healthy adults at wet-bulb temperatures significantly lower than 35°C.

Exercise is an effective treatment for depression, with walking or jogging, yoga, and strength training more effective than other exercises, particularly when intense. Yoga and strength training were well tolerated compared with other treatments. Exercise appeared equally effective for people with and without comorbidities and with different baseline levels of depression.

Analysis of work practices in imaging units and hospitals demonstrates how each image intertwines aspects of a patient’s body, socio-technical features, and economic priorities in locally specific ways to constitute the body in medical practice and social life.

Despite the tendency of popular narratives to position MRI examinations as objective knowledge, these images are not neutral nor are they equivalent to the physical body.

I too am sick of the body…

Spared from the surgeon’s knife
you are a tiny flag of resistance

Look down. Look at your body,
how it falls from your head…

… bunched skin rough as braille above the heel bone,
the instep whitening under the pressure of my touch…

you descend, or drive, are driven
by mother’s body

My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice
she used to say ‘no woman could love you’…

Recycled over and over
people born look like parents…

July is the 7-Eleven of your childhood, fluorescent.
Your jelly sandals are neon. Your panties—
washboard and starch white, snapping…

Anti-fat bias has an arguably more decisive impact on people’s health than physical body weight.

A hard, sceptical look at the data behind the “obesity epidemic.”

I avoided mirrors. I avoided pictures. I wasn’t going to let anyone take a picture of me from the side until I got my nose fixed.

A passive prosthesis, also called a cosmetic prosthesis, is a device that closely resembles a “natural” limb. It doesn’t crush any cans or get you any attention… In fact, it serves the opposite purpose: to help you blend in.

You know, it would be better if you asked me how I’m sleeping.

A Black and a White American sit down and discuss how racism doesn’t just live in our minds and institutions, but also lives in (yes, all) our bodies.

1. The haunted mansion
2. The possessed raccoon
3. The hitchhikers
4. The parents
5. The morgue

No matter how many stories one reads in which the bodhisattva agrees to give his body away, one still holds one’s breath every time the momentous decision is made. One still feels a shudder run up the spine whenever the bodhisattva cuts open his flesh, and the text dwells almost lovingly on the pain and agony endured. It is only the story that engages us to such an extent…

The above-linked guide is the 2018, Canadian edition which is quite thorough.

The Red Cross in other countries have their own guides. For example, here is the 2020 guidebook for Singapore and India’s 2024 Manual.

The U.S. American Red Cross also has First Aid iPhone and Android apps.

Drawing upon an Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist compendium of bodhisattva practice, this paper explores the role bodhisattva bodies play in the ethical development of other living beings.

Bodhisattvas adopt certain disciplinary practices in order to produce bodies whose very sight, sound, touch, and even taste transform living beings in physical and moral ways. The compendium uses a common South Asian and Buddhist metaphor to describe a bodhisattva’s physical and moral impact on others. Bodhisattvas are said to “cook living beings.” The paper considers how this metaphor suggests ways of nuancing modern Western conceptions of ethical self‐cultivation, particularly as articulated by Michel Foucault in his studies of the technologies of the self.

Whenever anyone bodybuilds, he or she is always trying to understand and control the physical in the face of death. No wonder bodybuilding is centered around failure.

The body is like a robot. The mind is the one who directs and tells the robot what to do. So, whatever happens to the body, the mind should stay clear.

Bhikkhus, this body is not yours, nor does it belong to others. It is old kamma, to be seen as generated and fashioned by volition, as something to be felt.

Everything is always at once a subject and object

A close reading of the medieval story of a boy raised by wolves and a wider meditation on man’s place in the world.

… the fight for disability rights in the UK and India, the remarkable life of Helen Keller, how a Rwandan Paralympic volleyball team made history, and the invention of the Invacar

… all beings are subject to death. Death is their end

Pasenadi laments the death of his aged grandmother.

What even is the immune system and how does it actually work?

Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.

The god Rohitassa tells how he tried to go to the end of the world, and the Buddha explains how to do it successfully.

For Venerable Ānanda’s own exegesis of this sutta, see SN 35.116.

We ask Gotama, the Eye that has arisen in the world:
Is one a brahmin by birth, or by action?
Explain to us what we do not understand –
how to know a brahmin.

What makes someone respectable?

While today a fever is seen as a symptom of some underlying disease like the flu, back then the fever was essentially regarded as the disease itself.

‘I smiled at the guards standing at my cell,’ he writes. ‘Being thrown in the Hole was worth the pleasure of seeing them still alive.’

A review of Jarvis Masters’ spiritual memoir Finding Freedom analyzing the work as a critque of toxicity in an American prison and the presentation of an alternate “Bodhisattva” masculinity possible even among killers.