The Gita is a central text in Hindu traditions, and commentaries on it express a range of philosophical-theological positions. Two of the most significant commentaries are by Sankara, the founder of the Advaita or Non-Dualist system of Vedic thought and by Ramanuja, the founder of the Visistadvaita or Qualified Non-Dualist system. Their commentaries offer rich resources for the conceptualization and understanding of divine reality, the human self, being, the relationship between God and human, and the moral psychology of action and (...) devotion. This book approaches their commentaries through a study of the interaction between the abstract atman (self) and the richer conception of the human person. While closely reading the Sanskrit commentaries, Ram-Prasad develops reconstructions of each philosophical-theological system, drawing relevant and illuminating comparisons with contemporary Christian theology and Western philosophy. (shrink)

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of diverse classical Indian texts. He argues for a 'phenomenological ecology' of bodily subjectivity in health, gender, contemplation, and lovemaking.

Thus one should define, in a double way, name and form in all phenomena of the three realms. …In this essay, we want to bring together two issues for their mutual illumination: the particular use of that hoary Indian dyad, "nāma-rūpa," literally, "name-and-form," by Buddhaghosa, the influential fifth-century Theravāda writer, to organize the categories of the abhidhamma, the canonical classification of phenomenal factors and their formulaic ordering;1 and an interpretation of phenomenology as a methodology. We argue that Buddhaghosa does not (...) use abhidhamma as a reductive ontological division of the human being into mind and body, but rather as the contemplative structuring of human phenomenology.... (shrink)

Drawing on a rich variety of Indian texts across multiple traditions, including Vedanta, Buddhist, Yoga and Jain, this collection explores how emotional experience is framed, evoked and theorized in order to offer compelling insights into human subjectivity. Rather than approaching emotion through the prism of Western theory, a team of leading Indian philosophers showcase the unique literary texture, philosophical reflections and theoretical paradigms that classical Indian sources provide in their own right. From solitude in the Saundarananda and psychosomatic theories of (...) disease in the Yogavasistha to female lament in Greek, Sinhala Buddhist and Sanskrit epic tales, their chapters reveal the range and diversity of the phenomena encompassing the English term 'emotion'. In doing so, they contribute towards a more cosmopolitan, comparative and pluralistic conception of human experience. Adopting a broad phenomenological methodology, this handbook reframes debates on emotion within classical Indian thought and is an invaluable resource for researchers and students seeking to understand the field beyond the Western tradition. (shrink)

The debates between various Buddhist and Hindu philosophical systems about the existence, definition and nature of self, occupy a central place in the history of Indian philosophy and religion.

Reading a passage in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata—the attempted disrobing of Princess Draupadī after her senior husband has gambled her away (after losing all his wealth, his brothers and himself)—I suggest that we see in her attitude and angry words an expression of contempt. I explore how contempt is a concept that is not thematized within Sanskrit aesthetics of emotions, but nonetheless is clearly articulated in the literature. Focusing on the significance of her gendered expression of anger and contempt, and the (...) positive acceptance of it in the text, I suggest that contempt can be understood as a transformative attitude in a woman (even a high-born one) towards iniquities in a patriarchal culture. (shrink)

Based on original translations of passages from the works of three major thinkers of the classical Indian school of Advaita (Sankara, Vacaspati and Sri Harsa), but addressing issues found in Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophers, this book argues for a philosophical position it calls 'non-realism'. This is the view that an independent, external world must be assumed if the features of cognition are to be explained, but that it cannot be proved that there is such a (...) world, independently of an appeal to cognition itself. This position is constructed against idealist denials of externality, realist arguments for an independent world and the sceptical denial of the coherence of cognition. (shrink)

Classical Indian schools of philosophy seek to attain a supreme end to existence--liberation from the cycle of lives. This book looks at four conceptions of liberation and the roles of analytic inquiry and philosophical knowledge in its attainment. The central motivation of Indian philosophy--the quest for the Highest Good--is situated in the analytic philosophical activity of key thinkers.

We perform conceptual acts throughout our daily lives; we are always judging others, guessing their intentions, agreeing or opposing their views and so on. These conceptual acts have phenomenological as well as formal richness. This paper attempts to correct the imbalance between the phenomenal and formal approaches to conceptualization by claiming that we need to shift from the usual dichotomies of cognitive science and epistemology such as the formal/empirical and the rationalist/empiricist divides—to a view of conceptualization grounded in the Indian (...) philosophical notion of “valid cognition”. Methodologically, our paper is an attempt at cross-cultural philosophy and cognitive science; ontologically, it is an attempt at marrying the phenomenal and the formal. (shrink)

This book presents a collection of essays, setting out both the special concern of classical Indian thought and some of its potential contributions to global philosophy. It presents some key arguments made by different schools about this special concern: the way in which attainment of knowledge of reality transforms human nature in a fundamentally liberating way. It then goes on to look in detail at two areas in contemporary global philosophy - the ethics of difference, and the metaphysics of consciousness (...) - where this classical Indian commitment to the spiritually transformative power of knowledge can lead to critical insights, even for those who do not share its presuppositions. Close reading of technical Indian texts is combined with wide-ranging and often comparative analysis of philosophical issues, to derive original arguments from the Indian material through an analytic method that is seldom mastered by philosophers of non-western traditions. (shrink)

Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia Willett interact in this exchange with different aspects of Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s book Human Being, Bodily Being. Through “constructive inter-cultural thinking”, they seek to engage with Ram-Prasad’s “lower-case p” phenomenology, which exemplifies “how to think otherwise about the nature and role of bodiliness in human experience”. This exchange, which includes Ram-Prasad’s reply to their interventions, pushes the reader to reflect more about different aspects of bodiliness.

The dramatic title Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India, while accurate enough in some respects, does not do justice to this subtle, densely argued, technically demanding, and often astonishingly wide-ranging book by Parimal Patil. The traces of the doctoral thesis that it was in a previous life are still there, evident in the concern to explain methodology to inquisitorial examiners and the reluctance to let any footnote go by if it can possibly be included. That said, (...) it is a powerfully realized book. Against a Hindu God is structured in such a way as to gradually focus in on the subject of the core third chapter that gives the book its name, Ratnakīrti’s argument in the .. (shrink)

Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory is a conceptually ambitious book, because it seeks to articulate a program and a position so novel that there is scarcely any extant literature to draw on. The reader with a background in the study of Hinduism and Indian philosophy is likely to be puzzled by the juxtaposition of topics indicated by the title of the book. But what Jonathan Edelmann is setting out to do is to create an area (...) of work in the study of Hindu thought that is almost entirely missing in comparison to the work that has been done on Christianity : how should a person or community committed to a particular sacred... (shrink)

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in (...) which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’. (shrink)

(2003). Non-violence and the other A composite theory of multiplism, heterology and heteronomy drawn from jainism and gandhi. Angelaki: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 3-22.

Liberalism and pluralism are seen as being in tension in liberal Western nation-states, while multiculturalism, as a policy of resource allocation to minority groups, has been the standard response to pluralization. This limits the pluralist potential of a constitutional liberalism. The fusion of a liberal theory of autonomous individuality with a pluralist theory of multiple belonging has to look beyond multicultural policy in order to enhance liberal commitments to citizens through pluralist provisions. An analysis of the Indian Constitution's Fundamental Rights, (...) as a normative document, shows that the citizen can be understood as an autonomous individual given identity through belonging to a plurality of groups. Consequently, rights are taken to accrue to all citizens equally as autonomous individuals, but also by virtue of their belonging to groups, with special provisions made available for vulnerable ones. Rights for a plurality of vulnerable groups should not be seen as illiberal additions but integral to the conception of liberalism. If such a view of citizenship were to be integrated into the liberal constitutions of irreversibly pluralizing Western democracies, then a pluralistic constitutional patriotism could be fostered amongst members of vulnerable groups, while demonstrating that standard liberal rights guarantee equal citizenship for all. (shrink)

Arindam Chakrabarti is something of a connoisseur's philosopher, best appreciated by those who know him. Books by him have not piled up over the years of his lengthy career, books which might have made their way into the obtuse consciousness of departments of Western philosophy, which might have made Indian thought somehow sensible to those comfortable with the norms of the dominant Anglo-American analytic tradition. Yet there is hardly anyone working today who was so thoroughly trained in that Anglo-American tradition, (...) who also has at his command a wonderful range of Sanskrit philosophical materials, and is so well-positioned to write such... (shrink)

The great eleventh-century figure, Rāmānuja, belonged to the Śrīvaiṣṇava community that worshiped the divine as Viṣṇu-with-Śrī, the Lord-and-Consort. But he also embarked on a project to develop an interpretation of the first-century Vedāntasūtra, which presented the supposedly core teachings of the major Upaniṣads, traditionally the last segment of the sacred corpus of the Vedas. Rāmānuja sought to reconcile the devotional commitments of Śrīvaiṣṇavism—which was built on the human yearning for the divine that was incomprehensibly Other while graciously accessible—with the conceptual (...) demands of the Vedānta in which a profound identity between the individual self (ātman) and the impersonal, ultimate explanatory principle (brahman) was taught. This reconciliation of difference and identity came to be called “Qualified Nondualism.” In his earliest work, the Vedārthasaṃgraha, one of the ways Rāmānuja points to reconciliation is through identifying a single state of consciousness as both cognition of nonduality (the Vedāntic project) and the emotionally valent experience of happiness (the supreme expression of the human encounter with the divine). It does not seem that he systematically pursues this conception of how a state can be both cognitive and affective, and such an analysis will require independent philosophical analysis. Thus, this article argues that if a state of consciousness were indeed both cognitive and affective in this way, we would have a full explanation for how the devotional approach of a human being to Viṣṇu-with-Śrī can also be the self’s realization of identity with brahman. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Studies in Advaita Vedanta: Towards an Advaita Theory of ConsciousnessChakravarthi Ram-PrasadStudies in Advaita Vedanta: Towards an Advaita Theory of Consciousness. By Sukharanjan Saha. Kolkata: Jadavpur University, 2004. Pp. 231.Studies in Advaita Vedanta: Towards an Advaita Theory of Consciousness, by Sukhar-anjan Saha, is a collection of papers each of which has something to say about consciousness in Advaita, although some of the papers have a rather tenuous connection to (...) this theme. Saha brings to bear a lifetime of study of Advaita and its philosophical contexts in these essays. The one notable lacuna in his approach is the tendency to ignore virtually all contemporary literature on Advaita, and to concentrate almost entirely on the original Sanskrit texts themselves—although he is clearly at home in a variety of modern philosophical techniques. His views are, in themselves, interesting and carefully spelled out.In "The Many Faces of the 'I,' " Saha draws on well-known uses of aham in Śaṅkara, Vācaspati, and Padmapāda to draw the larger conclusion that Advaita is willing to allow for multiple, context-variant senses of 'I,' in contrast to both a Naiyāyika like Gadhādhara and Western thinkers like Husserl."Advaita Analysis of Suffering" is an elegant and surprising essay. Much of it appears to be a fairly general survey of the manner in which different Hindu and Buddhist thinkers identify a positive cognitive error in understanding reality—avidyā—as the cause of suffering. But Saha notes that the classical consensus on suffering is not an empirical statement; there are ordinary success stories, after all. He then ingeniously uses this fact to show that suffering is something structural to existence. Śaṅkara's example of someone who feels "I am fair-complexioned" is a smug indication of the suffering brought to bear on others who are not, in a society that favors fair complexion. Suffering, Saha argues, is socially relative; it relates to value structures more than mere physical discomfort. If all were of the highest or lowest varna, there would be neither pride nor striving, neither bragging nor lamenting. The metaphysical discussion on suffering, it turns out, is really a commentary on Hindu society.Saha heroically—in the light of modern, especially Western scholarship, which sees Śaṅkara as an arch-conservative proponent of brahminical values—tends to see the Advaitin as a social reformer. In the essay above, he sees ś an.kara as teaching precisely the social lesson against discrimination when he talks of suffering. Saha returns to this theme in "Śaṅkara and Varna Distinctions in Hinduism." He puts forward the argument that since Śaṅkara held that all social distinctions were not ultimate (pāramārthika), and since class/varna distinctions are social ones while liberating knowledge is ultimate, varna is irrelevant to liberation. How those traditionally excluded from brahminical philosophy will respond to this generosity is another matter. [End Page 107]In "Inner Sense and Higher Order Consciousness," Saha usefully explains how Nyāya takes an awareness of awareness to be a matter of inner sense, while Advaita denies this. It is sometimes hard to follow him through the essay, as it is not always clear what is being argued. But the contours of the standard Nyāya and Advaita positions on putative higher-order consciousness are laid out competently. The Nyāya position is clear enough, in that the higher-order awareness is an inner perception, with the mind playing the role of an 'inner' organ for the self. So the self becomes conscious of an object through the mind, and that act of consciousness itself becomes an object of the mind; in the latter instance, the mind functions to generate a higher-order consciousness, taking the first mental state as its object. This is relatively clear, but puts a great burden on Nyāya to give a cogent theory of mind, such that the idea of the mind as an inner sense organ becomes persuasive. But this challenge lies beyond the scope of Saha's essay.Gradually, Saha's argument emerges. Advaita takes the mind to be separate from consciousness, which is the untouched ātman. So, there may well be mental... (shrink)

Dialogue is a recurring and significant component of Indian religious and philosophical literature. Whether it be as a narrative account of a conversation between characters within a text, as an implied response or provocation towards an interlocutor outside the text, or as a hermeneutical lens through which commentators and modern audiences can engage with an ancient text, dialogue features prominently in many of the most foundational sources from classical India. Despite its ubiquity, there are very few studies that explore this (...) important facet of Indian texts. This book redresses this imbalance by undertaking a close textual analysis of a range of religious and philosophical literature to highlight the many uses and functions of dialogue in the sources themselves and in subsequent interpretations. Using the themes of encounter, transformation and interpretation - all of which emerged from face-to-face discussions between the contributors of this volume - each chapter explores dialogue in its own context, thereby demonstrating the variety and pervasiveness of dialogue in different genres of the textual tradition. This is a rich and detailed study that offers a fresh and timely perspective on many of the most well-known and influential sources from classical India. As such, it will be of great use to scholars of religious studies, Asian studies, comparative literature and literary theory. (shrink)

Contemporary consciousness studies, where it is not explicitly religious, is mostly physicalist. Theories of self and consciousness in classical Hindu thought can easily be seen to contribute to religious issues in consciousness studies. But it is also the case that there is much in that that can be useful within broadly physicalist parameters of study as well. The Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya schools, while having (nonphysicalist) soteriological goals for the metaphysical self, nonetheless provide theories of its relationship with consciousness that allow (...) for interpretative strategies that can make their theories relevant to a broadly physicalist study of consciousness. Advaita Vedānta cannot be so interpreted, but its inquiry into the nature of consciousness can provide material for a fundamental critique of the project of objectifying consciousness. (shrink)

Classical Indian debates about ātman—self—concern a minimal or core entity rather than richer notions of personal identity. These debates recognise that there is phenomenal unity across time; but is a core self required to explain it? Contemporary phenomenologists foreground the importance of a phenomenally unitary self, and Udayana's position is interpreted in this context as a classical Indian approach to this issue. Udayana seems to dismiss the body as the candidate for phenomenal identity in a way similar to some Western (...) philosophers. He also provides some inkling of how alternative ways of defending phenomenal unity without self fail. A criticism of some Western phenomenological theories of self is that they do not explain how unity is provided by the ‘mineness’ of cognition. Udayana's suggestion that a sort of agency provides such an explanation can be developed as an original argument for a phenomenally unitary self. (shrink)

The subject of this extraordinary, demanding, and often moving book is being human. What it means to be such a being is here explored by means of scrupulous attention to ways in which "bodily being"--the author's term for how subjectivity may be expressed through contextually specific modes of embodiment--are drawn on, expressed, and transformed in what one might call different epistemic and experiential contexts found in premodern Indian thought in Sanskrit and Pāli.One of the most attractive things in this book (...) is that, within its pages, Indian philosophy is found in a number of genres: in medical texts, in epic (in the... (shrink)

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad's delightful and challenging little book does not fit easily into the standard categories available for academic excursions into philosophy. It is, to simplify, a venture in constructive philosophical theology, centered on questions of being and selfhood, which takes the form of a reflection upon the Bhagavad-gītā commentaries written by two of India's leading philosopher/theologians, Śaṅkara (c. 8th century CE) and Rāmānuja (c. 11th century CE). While Ram-Prasad does try to argue for the best readings of (...) Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja, the book should not be misunderstood as a "merely" historical work. Ram-Prasad looks to the classical thinkers, and indeed the ancient text of the Bhagavad-gītā itself, for enduring insights into the nature of being. It speaks to a number of sub-disciplines within philosophy, including metaphysics, history of philosophy, Indian philosophy, philosophy of religion, and comparative philosophy/theology. (shrink)

In the matter of the body, even comparative language—the very use of English today—is soaked through and through with the Cartesian version of the intuition of dualism: the idea that we are fundamentally a mind and a body that must be either related ingeniously, or else reduced to one another. Instead, by deliberately looking at genres that pertain to other aspects of being human, I seek to go deeper into texts that simply start elsewhere than with intuitions of dualism, even (...) while being engrossed in the category of the experiential ‘body’. (shrink)