[IR 17.

4 (2014) 433-442] Implicit Religion (print) ISSN 1463-9955

doi: 10.1558/imre.vl7i4.433 Implicit Religion (online) ISSN 1743-1697

We Are the Walking Dead:

Robert Kirkmans Zombies and Buddhist Body Image1

P eter H erman

Georgetown University

ph274@georgetown.edu

A bstra ct
Robert Kirkmans popular horror comic The Walking Dead offers the basisfo r
a constructive Buddhist reading o f the identification o f the body w ith the au
thentic self By applying both traditional Buddhist readings o f charnel ground
meditations and theorist Julia Kristevas understanding o f abjection, this
article argues that the comic can be read in a socially progressive mode, destabiliz
ing the identification ofauthentic personhood w ith specific and particular bodies.

Keywords
Buddhism, Comic Books, Zombies, Theology, Body Image.

Western society may be said to be bound to the body in a way Buddhism

would regard as an unhealthy attachment. Seemingly obsessed with our
bodies, we devote millions or billions every year to improving or reshaping
them. The following essay intendsin line with Buddhist goalsto seek
out the root of unsatisfactory body interactions. O f course, many social
movements have sought and continue to seek a changed attitude to the
body: however, the contention here is that these movements tend to sim
ply invert beauty standards, rather than subverting or substantially chang
ing them. For instance, if one looks to a so-called plus sized model as a
new beauty standard, versus a rail-thin fashion model, one does not change
the equation of body and personal value. Only the bodys size is different.

1. This article was originally presented at the American Academy o f Religions annual
meeting in 2013, in the Religion and Science Fiction group. I would like to express
my gratitude both to the conveners of that session for its inclusion, and to Edward
Bailey for his excellent and most welcome editorial suggestions which have brought
it to this point.

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, SI 2BX
434 Peter Herman
This article proposes that (1) there are resources within Buddhism to
counter this tendency, and that (2) Robert Kirkmans comic book series
The Walking Dead can be read through a Buddhist lens, to accomplish a
positive subversion of body-centric thinking in popular Western society.
The intent is not to cast Kirkman as a crypto-Buddhist. He writes his
stories as stories, of course, and not asjataka tales or sutras. The contention
here is that it is possible to engage in a constructive reading of these horror
comics for a socially progressive purpose by appealing to classical Buddhist
texts and forming a new hermeneutic.
This article will draw on three primary Buddhist texts: the Satipatthana
Sutta, Buddhaghosas Visudhimagga or Path o f Purification, and Santidevas
Guide to the Bodhisattva Way o f Life. It will also make an appeal to Julia
Kristevas notion of abjection, to help explain in some degree the contin
ued fascination with the revenant both in religion and in society.2
The Walking Dead as horror comic
First, though, a brief precis of the comics. Rick Grimes, a sherriffs deputy
in Kentucky, is shot in an attempt to apprehend an escaped prisoner. He
wakes up from a coma a month later in a deserted hospital. He has no idea
what has happened and goes to seek help. W hat he finds are revenants
human in appearance, but decaying rapidly and feeding on the flesh of
the living. As he attempts to find his wife and son, he meets with chaos,
destruction, and the apparent end of civilization. Serendipity intervenes,
however, and he does indeed reunite with his family, albeit only for a time.3
The story progresses for a while along the (somewhat expected) paths of
the survival horror sub-genre. People turn into zombies/revenants. Ten
sions over scarce resources escalate. The survivors whom we are following

2. This concept will be explored later in the current article. As a quick definition,
abjection or abject in this sense have nothing to do with the standard English
idiomatic usage of extreme or severe (e.g. abject poverty). Rather, in Kristevas
usage, it refers to a psychological paradox in which an object is detested or feared, yet
held close.
3. It is worth noting at this point that the term zombie is not generally used in The Walking
Dead. Tire figure of the zombie was originally one which appeared in literature about
and folklore from African diasporic religious traditions (e.g. the films White Zombie
or The Serpent and the Rainbow). The contemporary idea of the zombie comes from
George Romeros 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Romero himself referred to the
animated corpses in his films as ghouls.The second film in Romeros Living Dead series,
domestically titled Dawn of the Dead, was known internationally as Zombi. It is likely that
this translation has played a large part in the conflation of zombies and ghouls.

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

We Are The Walking Dead 435

turn to Rick as a leader. It is a role he is reluctant to accept. The instability

and insecurityindeed the precariousnessof life after the collapse of civi
lization are constantly highlighted. Interesting, however, although the early
issues of the comic deal with the dead, as the story goes deeper and deeper,
we see fewer of the dead: increasingly the menace comes from the living.
M uch as in Romeros genre-defining film, the above-mentioned Night o f
the Living Dead, the actual cause of the outbreak is never discussed. Kirk-
man has stated outright that the origins of the outbreak are unimportant
to the series itself...never will we see the whole picture (Kirkman 2008,
27). W h at is powerfully clear, however, is that one need not come into con
tact with one of the dead to become a zombie/revenant oneself. Everyone
who dies now, comes back hungry for the flesh of the living. As Rick puts it
in a moving declaration at the end of one chapter in the story: WE are the
walking dead. This is an essential point. Viewers are not concerned with
the mechanics of the outbreak, or whether society could have lasted more
than a month under this kind of crisis. Rather, they are reminded that the
crisis was always present: it is not external to, but endemic to, being human.
Before returning to the notion o f how such a bleak and apparently pes
simistic story can be the source of uplift and liberation, however, it may
be helpful to review the particular Buddhist resources that will be brought
to bear on this reading. So, having the comics in front o f us, at least in
this attenuated form, we now briefly review three specific instances that
have resonance from within Buddhism. These are Buddhaghosas Visud-
dhimagga, the Satipatthana Sutta, and the Bodhicaryavatara o f Santideva.
The Path of Purification: Charnel Ground 1
Composed by Buddhaghosa, the Visuddhimagga gives the basis for much
o f contemporary Theravadin Buddhist practice. It offers a summation and
exegetical interpretation o f the tipitaka, through the Abidhamma m ethod
ology contained therein. W h at concerns us at present is not the specifically
Theravadin practices writ large, but one specific type of ascetic practice
described in Chapter 2, paragraphs 64-68 (Buddhaghosa 1976, 76-78).
This ascetic practice is termed the charnel-ground dwellers practice. This
ascetic practice involves living in a charnel ground o f decaying and burn
ing bodies and avoiding human contact, not going into homes, not eating
foods which are favored or enjoyed by non-hum an animals, not traveling
to the charnel ground by any main road, and so on. As so often, there are
several grades o f this practice (about which more will be said shortly), and
likewise o f possible breaches.

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

436 Peter Herman

The benefits o f this practice are said to be that the practitioner:

acquires mindfulness of death; he [sic] fives diligendy; the sign of foul
ness is available; greed for sense desires is removed; he constantly sees the
bodys true nature; he has a great sense of urgency; he abandons vanity of
health, etc.; he vanquishes fear and dread; non-human beings respect and
honour him; he fives in conformity with [the principles of] fewness of
wishes, and so on. (Buddhaghosa 1976,77)
Mindfulness of death, no greed for sense desire, the true nature of the
body, the abandonment of various vanities, are the key benefits o f interest
in this context. W hile it is o f course possible to interpret this practice as
one o f bodily mortification on the grounds, for instance, that the body
is inherently impure, filthy, to be used and discarded as rubbish, etc. that
would not actually be in keeping with appropriate understanding o f emp
tiness: such an interpretation reifies the body, in a non-Buddhist way (to
paint with a very broad brush).
For what we must keep in front o f us is the deconstruction o f the body
as the locus of personal worth. Reading through the numerous negations,
we see this text expressing the view that attachment to the body increases
greed for sense desire. It makes one blind to the bodys true nature that
is, to the emptiness of the body. The body has no inherent existence:
its existence is dependent on causes and conditions which are themselves
dependent on other causes and conditions. This regression can be seen in,
for example, the necessity of parents to exist, in order for any to exist. In
order for parents to exist, grandparents must exist (or have existed), etc.
Further than even this, no human life is possible without water, air, or food.
Since the body cannot exist without these things, it is considered to have
no intrinsic or inherent existence, but, rather, is the composite o f aggre
gates. The charnel ground dwellers practice is one intended to bombard
the perceiving self with sense data (i.e. the smell o f rotten and burning
flesh, the sight o f decaying bodies, the sounds o f carrion-eaters), to rein
force classical Buddhist notions o f the insubstantiality o f the body and the
unsuitability o f it as the locus o f personhood at all.

The Way o f Mindfulness: C harnel G round 2

Despite its centrality in Theravada practice, the previous sections Visud-
dhimagga is not, canonically, a ^>/z-Buddhist scripture. The Satipatthana
Sutta, however, is. Its invocation here is to show that the attainments o f the
charnel-ground dweller are not exclusively reserved for those who would
undertake such an extreme practice.

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

We Are The Walking Dead 437

This particular sutta (Skt. sutra) has the Buddha giving his monks
instructions in mindfulness. During their discussion of viewing the body
as body, he offers the following advice:
Again, monks, a monk considers this body as though he were looking at a
body left in a charnel ground, one, two, or three days dead, bloated, livid,
and festering:.. .a monk considers this body as though he were looking at a
body left in a charnel ground, eaten by crows, hawks, vultures, dogs, jackals,
or other animals...a monk considers this body as though he were looking
at a body left in a charnel ground, a skeleton with flesh and blood, held
together with sinews...a skeleton with no flesh but smeared with blood
and held together with sinews...a skeleton without flesh or blood, held
together with sinews...disconnected bones scattered around, a hand-bone
here, a foot-bone here, a leg-bone here, a rib-bone here, a hip-bone here, a
back-bone here, the skull here.. .white bones looking like shells.. .piled-up
bones, more than a year old.. .rotten crumbling bones: This body is of the
same nature, of the same constitution, it has not got beyond this.
(Gethin 2008,141)
This gives us a more intense description of what it might mean to dwell
in the charnel ground. We are rather explicitly told of the sights, smells,
and sounds.
Again, the intention here, is not simply to develop revulsion, as we might
understand it, but to develop non-attachment. Revulsion implies the neg
ative pole of attachment: the thing that is horrible, still has meaning and
reality. By examining more closely the bodys decomposition, we can see
that it already is the rotten crumbling bones left over from the hawks,
vultures, dogs, jackals, or other animals. If it is not now in such a state,
only the passage of time stands between its health and its decay. It is, as
the Buddha taught, in the very nature of all things that are composed, to
decompose.
It is worthwhile at this point to recall that sutras are often used as medi
tation guides. Therefore, the repeated visualizations of the quotation above
may indeed be intended as a kind of mental performance. As we recite
these phrases, we imagine these sights. We imagine our own bodies decay
ing in such a fashion. We imagine ourselves as the dead. In this way, we do
not need to undertake the charnel-ground dwellers practice, physically:
we have a mental construction of the charnel ground will suffice for our
spiritual attainments.
Let us visit one final Buddhist text before returning to The Walking Dead
(by way of Julia Kristeva). Our last Buddhist text does not specifically deal

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

438 Peter Herman

with the charnel ground. Rather, it presumes the readers familiarity with
such imagery and pushes forward to a vivid application o f charnel ground
meditation and imagery.
Guide to the Bodhisattvas Way o f Life: W e are the W alking D ead
In view o f the notion o f the body in these Buddhist texts, w hat comes from
Indian sage Santideva is not surprising: we look at the body and see beauty,
but the destiny o f the body is to decay. The Bodhicaryavatara, or Guide to
the Bodhisattva Way o f Life, deals w ith the perfection of Buddhist practice.
As such it is more of an instruction manual than the Visuddhimagga, but,
like Buddhaghosas work, it is not said to be authored by the Buddha.
D uring the eighth chapter, on the perfection o f meditation, Santideva
chastises his reader for the readers lust after physical pleasure and beauty:
She is nothing but bones, indifferent and impersonal. Why do you not
resort to emancipation, fully embracing it to your hearts content? / Either
you have seen that bashfully lowered face before as being lifted up with
effort, or you have not seen it as it was covered by a veil. / Now, that face
is revealed by vultures as if they are unable to bear your anxiousness. Look
at it! Why are you fleeing away now? / Jealous one, why do you not protect
what was guarded from the glances of others, as it is being eaten now? /
Seeing this mass of flesh being eaten by vultures and others, should you
worship othersfood with wreaths of flowers, sandalwood paste, and orna
ments? [...] You had this passion for it even when it was covered, so why
do you dislike it when it is uncovered? If you have no use for it, why do you
caress it when covered? (Santideva 1997,94-95)
However gruesome the description, the passage underscores what has
been said above. The body is not to be venerated in itself: what it is, is (or
soon enough will be) the food o f carrion-eaters. The ridiculousness o f our
attachm ent to the body is simply highlighted when discussed in terms of
a lovers veil being lifted by vultures.
Again, however, it must be remembered that puritanical revulsion at sen
sual life is not the intended result o f this analysis. The result is intended
to be a clear understanding that the body per se is not considered to have
intrinsic existence, being a mere composite of many aggregates. The nature
o f the composed is to decompose. Therefore, if we put our selves into our
bodies, we become carrion. As we do not wish this to be the case, we must
agree that the body is not the locus of the self as such.
This will become crucial, as we return to the notion o f the horror comic,
albeit through a compound lens o f Buddhist categories and post-Lacanian
literary theory and psychoanalysis.

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

We Are The Walking Dead 439
Breaking the body with broken bodies
Thus far, the present argument (that the body is not the locus of the self
as such, and that this has parallels in Buddhist thought) m ight seem to
have little to do with The Walking Dead. This article proposes a constructive
reading, however, based on the above, which states that in an age without
charnel grounds, in which death is a sanitized medical process, we resort
to fiction to play out a dark fantasy o f the body and of dying. The Buddhist
tools discussed above give us the possibility of using this dark fantasy even
for ends that are socially progressive.
French theorist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva deals with a phenomenon
she calls the abject or abjection in her work Powers o f Horror: an Essay on
Abjection. She describes the abject as something difficult to grasp, yet unde
niably a part of us. Specifically discussing a childs revulsion to a particular
food, proffered by its parents, she remarks, M ute protest of the symptom,
shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic
system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become inte
grated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects (Kristeva 1982,
3). In other words, despite the knowledge that the food may be nourishing,
there is a revulsion to it. This can be expressed as an act of individuation, of
course. It also carries with it the ambivalence of existence: in order to exist,
there must be the possibility that we do not exist. True depends on false, etc.
From the rejection o f food as expression o f the abject, Kristeva moves to
the body, in tones similar to the Buddhist texts above, calling the corpse
that which has irremediably become [hr] a cropper, is cesspool and
death... A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of
decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death... I would
understand, react, or accept (Kristeva 1982, 3). The corpse-nature o f the
body is, in her terms, what we thrust aside in order to five. O ur relationship
to it is one o f abjection. We are horrified, yet cling tightly to it. Abjection
accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in
a new guise, at the time o f their collapse (Kristeva 1982, 17). She marks
out defilement, exclusion, and purification as three stages or modes o f this
working out vis-a-vis religious structures and abjection. Returning, then,
to the pertinence of our particular zombie comic book, we have a religious
and theoretical apparatus w ith which to examine it.
W h at does it mean to say that we can read The Walking Dead as a charnel
ground meditation, and that doing so can help us break cycles o f social
oppression vis-a-vis constructions of the body? How is this comic book

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

440 Peter Herman

in any way Buddhist? To reiterate, it is not necessary to presume that Kirk-

man had Buddhism at all in m ind when writing this story. Yet, authorial
intent aside, the specifics o f this horror story have some resonance with the
Buddhist views of the body expressed above.
First and foremost is the particular stylization o f the creatures in the
books. They look like decaying hum an bodies. Theirs is a physiognomy of
decay. W h en our living survivors encounter them, the dead are not pos
sessed o f supramundane strength. Rather, they are delicate and somewhat
easily broken. That is to say, they behave like decaying corpses: they are
in the process of a very literal de-composition. Second, and related to this,
is that Kirkman has refused any explanation o f why this outbreak has
occurred. H e does not believe it is central to telling his story. W e have,
then, creatures which still obey most o f the laws o f physics (bracketing out
any ideas o f resurrection, for the purposes of the current discussion) and
about whose origin we cannot but speculate.
Because o f this second characteristic, the one thing which can be said of
the creatures is that we are them , separated only by the passage of time.
As surely as hum an beings must die, so too hum an beings in this fictional
world will become walkers. There is no immunity to this disease, and
there is no escape. The Buddhist examination o f the categories living
and dead, us and them , suggests itself at this point. In other words,
the distinction between the two groups is nothing more and nothing less
than linguistic convention. W e can recall Santidevas sarcastic tone in ask
ing why we are so horrified by these creatures, when we so longed for their
embrace when, a mom ent ago, they were on the other side o f this linguistic
distinction.
O ur answer to that why is found in Kristevas concept of abjection. We
view the corpse as the abject. It is that which both is and cannot be us.
The corpse does not simply signify, but (theatrically) is, death: our death. It
is that which awaits each o f us. W e recoil from it in simultaneous recogni
tion and horror, knowing that the fact o f death makes fife itself possible.
This knowledge mocks the boundaries we seek to reify. The Buddhist texts
above further destabilize these boundaries.
How, then, can any of this be used against social oppression? Inasmuch
as we do not have access to charnel grounds any more, we have, potentially
(if not observably!), lost the ability to muse on our state following the de
composition of our body. We have, in consequence, been able to reify the
body as the locus of the self. This alone is enough to cause concern over our
possibility of enlightenment, within the auspices o f our Buddhist frame-

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

We Are The Walking Dead 441

work. Even worse than this, however, is the fact that we have doubled our
investment in the body. It is not any body which can be the locus o f the
self, after all. It must be a particular body. It must have a particular shape
and size, skin tone, color o f hair or eye, muscle tone, etc.
Space prohibits a full exposition of the varied ways in which the beauty
myth has been deployed as means o f social control, and the reactions and
resistances to it. For it is too im portant a subject to relegate to a footnote,
yet it is pressingly necessary to this discussion. The difficulty, ironically, with
so many o f the forms of resistance to this type o f social control is that they
seek to invert, rather than subvert, the paradigm or myth that is deemed to
be oppressive. W e seek to answer those who would denigrate the selves
that are enfleshed in the bodies o f the less thanwhether that less is
aesthetic, or based on physical ability, skin tone, or the type and number
o f genitalia, etc with the argument that we are all as much as the next.
This side o f the argument is still participating in the very structures it seeks
to critique. Selfhood, in this case, can indeed be attained, when, and if,
ever, all bodies are acceptable: but it is still based on the body.
These Buddhist texts reveal a different way forward. They show us an
understanding o f the person which is not dependent on a self equated
indeed, equivocatedwith a body. They show us that it is in the nature o f
the body, to decay. So, if the body is the locus of the self, let alone if the two
are identical, then it becomes the nature of the self also to decay. As we do
not wish to assent to this notion, we end up seeking selfhood elsewhere.
These texts, however, come from a context in which the natural pro
cess o f death was not managed in the same fashion as we currently do in
the West. W e do not have recourse to a charnel ground: many o f us may
never have seen a single corpse. (Even if we have seen one, it may have
been chemically preserved and painted in order to appear as lifelike as pos
sible.) Yet, through the lens o f Kirkmans dark fantasy o f social collapse
and destruction, we just might find a new way to conceive o f the body
(albeit that this new way is very old indeed). So, lacking a physical char
nel ground, we m ight turn instead to one constructed in a world o f pulp
horror. In this way, we can read The Walking Dead as a meditation on the
bodys decay and, by doing so, seek to subvert the narrative which tells us
that the perfect body is the locus o f the authentic self.
References
Buddhaghosa, Bhadantacariya. 1976. The Path o f Purification (Visuddhimagga).
Translated by Bhikku Nyanamoli. San Francisco, CA: Shambhala.

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

442 Peter H erm an

Gethin, Rupert. 2008. Sayings o f the Buddha: N ew Translations from the Pali
Nikayas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kirkman, Robert. 2008. Letter Hacks. The Walking Dead 54: 27.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers o f Horror: A n Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon
S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

Copyright of Implicit Religion is the property of Equinox Publishing Group and its content
may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright
holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.