Columbia University Press Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism

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 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