Oriental Origins

Abstract

This chapter shows how the subtle body concept as established by the Cambridge Platonists was carried forward in popular and literary domains and later used as a stock concept in the earliest English translations of Sanskrit texts. It takes the reader through the birth of Indology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing the subtle body concept through early translations of yoga and Sāṃkhya philosophy, focusing on how the authors posited historical connections between Neoplatonic and Hindu philosophies, laying the groundwork for future understandings of the subtle body as a concept spanning a great East-West divide.