Sthula-Sharira
Sthūla-Śarīra (IAST)Translation: "Gross Body"
A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy
Sanskrit: स्थूलशरीर
Transliteration: Sthūla Śarīra
Translation: "gross body; physical body"
Definition: "According to Sāṅkhya, it is constituted of the twenty-five elemental principles; the five Jñānendriya (the organs of hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell), the five Karmendriya (the organs of speech prehension, movement, excretion, and generation), the five Tanmātra (the subtle essence of the elements of sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell), the five Mahābhūta (ether, air, fire, water, and earth), and the five vital airs (Prāṇa, Apāna, Samāna, Udāna, and Vyāna)."
The Serpent Power (Arthur Avalon)
"The Sthūla Śarīra, with its three Dośas, six Kośa, seven Dhatus, ten Fires, and so forth, is the perishable body composed of compounds of five forms of gross sensible matter (Mahābhūta), which is ever decaying, and is at the end dissolved into its constituents at death. This is the Vedantic body of food (Annamaya Kośa), so called because it is maintained by food which is converted into chyle (Rasa), blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow and seed-components of the gross organism. The Jīva lives in this body when in the waking (Jagrat) state."
The Atman Project (Ken Wilber)
THE NIRMANAKAYA: THE GROSS REALMS
"In Hinduism, the gross realm is called the sthula-sarira; in Kabbalah it is everything below the Tipbareth; in Buddhism, it is the Nirmanakaya (which is the term I use most often, next to "gross" itself). The gross realm, the Nirmanakaya—the realm of ordinary waking consciousness—is simply composed of all those levels which are based on, or centered around, or take as their final referent the gross physical body and its constructs of ordinary space and time. The physical or axial body itself is called the "gross level," and all aspects of the psyche that reflect this level are called the "gross-reflecting mind" (or just the "gross mind" for short). Taken together, they constitute the overall gross realm—the gross bodymind of ego, body, persona, shadow, and centaur.
This "gross-reflecting mind" is what Aurobindo means when he speaks of the average individual as possessed of a "twilit or obscure physical mentality" or of "the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organization of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities." For in the ordinary egoic state "the mind, habituated only to the evidence of the senses and associating reality with corporeal fact, is either unaccustomed to use other means of knowledge or unable to extend the notion of reality to a supraphysical experience." And, in a phrase I particularly like, he speaks of the true subtle mind (as opposed to the gross mind) as "a mind and sense not shut up in the walls of the physical ego."
All of this—the gross body and the gross ego as constituting the overall gross realm—is in close agreement with standard Buddhist psychology. For the Nirmanakaya is said to consist of the five senses plus the manovijnana, and the manovijnana is the "mind involved with the senses." D. T. Suzuki unequivocally equates the manovijnana with both the ego of Western psychology and the logical-empirical intellect. He also speaks of this overall realm as the one of "sense and thought," and places all the data of Western psychology precisely in that realm—and that realm only. Thus, besides the gross or physical body, we see that the gross realm in humans consists of, or is inextricably intermeshed with, the lower or gross-reflecting mind, so that the entire realm itself is best referred to as the realm of the gross bodymind."
References:
- Grimes, John (1996). A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy: Sanskrit Terms Defined in English. Albany: State University of New York Press
- Avalon, Arthur (1950). The Serpent Power: Being the Shat-Chakra-Nirūpana and Pādukā-Panchakā. Adyar, Madras: Ganesh & Co. (Madras) Ltd. p. 67.
- Wilber, Ken (1996). The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development. Quest Books. p. 58
