Other Lives - by Sonam Kachru (Paperback)

About the 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.

Book Synopsis

Human experience is not confined to waking life. Do experiences in dreams matter? Humans are not the only living beings who have experiences. Does nonhuman experience matter? The Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, writing during the late fourth and early fifth centuries C.E., argues in his work The Twenty Verses that these alternative contexts ought to inform our understanding of mind and world. Vasubandhu invites readers to explore experiences in dreams and to inhabit the experiences of nonhuman beings--animals, hungry ghosts, and beings in hell.

Other Lives offers a deep engagement with Vasubandhu's account of mind in a global philosophical perspective. Sonam Kachru takes up Vasubandhu's challenge to think with perspective-diversifying contexts, showing how his novel theory draws together action and perception, minds and worlds. Kachru pieces together the conceptual system in which Vasubandhu thought to show the deep originality of the argument. He reconstructs Vasubandhu's ecological concept of mind, in which mindedness is meaningful only in a nexus with life and world, to explore its ongoing philosophical significance. Engaging with a vast range of classical, modern, and contemporary Asian and Western thought, Other Lives is both a groundbreaking work in Buddhist studies and a model of truly global philosophy. The book also includes an accessible new translation of The Twenty Verses, providing a fresh introduction to one of the most influential works of Buddhist thought.

Review Quotes

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 Tibet

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.--Evan Thompson, author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

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 Myth

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.--Jay L. Garfield, Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, Smith College and the Harvard Divinity School

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.--Roy Tzohar, author of A Yogācāra Buddhist Theory of Metaphor

About the Author

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.