Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism

Sonam Kachru

Published by Columbia University Press 2021

Other Lives

Mind and World in Indian Buddhism

Sonam Kachru

https://doi.org/10.7312/kach20000

Overview
Contents

About this book

In his The Twenty Verses, the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu invites readers to explore experiences in dreams and to inhabit the experiences of nonhuman beings—animals, hungry ghosts, and beings in hell. Sonam Kachru provides a deep engagement with Vasubandhu’s account of mind in a global philosophical perspective.

Author / Editor information

Sonam Kachru is assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His research centers on the history of philosophy with a particular focus on the history of Buddhist philosophy and literature in South Asia.

Reviews

Roy Tzohar, author of A Yogācāra Buddhist Theory of Metaphor:
Sonam Kachru's volume provides a philosophically profound and philologically rigorous analysis of Vasubandhu's concept of mind as inextricably tangled with the concept of world and other forms of life. The outcome is intellectually stunning. Kachru's account of Vasubandhu's notion of intentionality is revisionary, and his reconstruction of the deep context of his thought—showing Buddhist cosmology to be both philosophically valuable and necessary—will change the way we approach these materials in the future.

Evan Thompson, author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy:
Attending to dreams on one side and non-human lives on the other, Kachru elegantly illuminates Vasubandhu's astonishing vision of the unfathomable, inextricable intertwining of minds and worlds. A marvelous book.

Janet Gyatso, author of Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet:
With exceptional imagination and boldness, this book steps inside the logic of one of the leading philosophers in Buddhist history. Sonam Kachru offers us a stunningly novel account of Vasubandhu’s thought and his appreciation of the fundamental entanglement of mind, world, and embodied experience. This is one of the very few works in modern Buddhist Studies that is simultaneously utterly fluent in the relevant philology, cosmology and history of ideas, and yet able to think with its object of study in ways that speak to pressing philosophical challenges today. Not the least of the latter would be the very possibility of experiencing the world from perspectives other than what we consider to be 'our own.'

Jay L. Garfield, Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, Smith College and the Harvard Divinity School:
Other Lives is both erudite and graceful. Sonam Kachru provides a compelling reading of Twenty Verses, a persuasive account of Vasubandhu's understanding of experience, and a profound analysis of what it is to inhabit a world. If you care about Buddhist philosophy or consciousness, this beautiful book is mandatory reading.

Wendy Doniger, author of The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth:
Sonam Kachru has the uncanny ability to translate some of the deepest and thorniest questions in Indian philosophy—about consciousness, transmigration, dreams (questions whose scholarly labyrinths he brilliantly navigates and sequesters in the extensive notes)—into prose so lucid and inspired that one can read it like a Robert Frost poem or a folktale. He breaks into the mind of one philosopher, Vasubandhu, to open up a wide world of mind-boggling imagination that is at the same time very close to the bone of our deepest shared human concerns about reality and death.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. PRESENTATION, OBJECTS, REPRESENTATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2. HOW NOT TO USE DREAMS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
3. THE PLACE OF DREAMS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
4. COSMOLOGY FOR PHILOSOPHERS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
5. MAKING UP WORLDS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	109
6. TRANSPARENT THINGS, THROUGH WHICH THE PAST SHINES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
7. WAKING UP AND LIVING ASLEEP Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF PAST SYSTEMS OF POSSIBILITY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
APPENDIX: THE TWENTY VERSES OF VASUBANDHU IN TRANSLATION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: September 8, 2021
ISBN: 9780231553384