Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade Review[A] remarkable exploration of how Buddhism, at its most profound, invites us to get into other beings’ heads. -- CONSTANCE KASSOR * Lion's Roar *
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. -- Wendy Doniger, author of
The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in MythOther 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. -- Jay L. Garfield, Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, Smith College and the Harvard Divinity School
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.' -- Janet Gyatso, author of
Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern TibetAttending 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. -- Evan Thompson, author of
Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and PhilosophySonam 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. -- Roy Tzohar, author of
A Yogācāra Buddhist Theory of MetaphorKachru comprehensively examines Vasubandhu’s exploration of the mind. Scholars of Buddhism in particular will have much to gain here. * Religious Studies Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Presentation, Objects, Representations
2. How Not to Use Dreams
3. The Place of Dreams
4. Cosmology for Philosophers
5. Making Up Worlds
6. Transparent Things, Through Which the Past Shines
7. Waking Up and Living Asleep
Conclusion: The Future of Past Systems of Possibility
Appendix:
The Twenty Verses of Vasubandhu in Translation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
