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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.

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’.

Introduction Brian Black and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Part 1: Encounter 1 Sources of Indian secularism? Dialogues on Politics and Religion in Hindu and Buddhist Traditions Brian Black 2 Dialogues with Solitary Buddhas Naomi Appleton 3 Refutation or Dialogue? Samkara's Treatment of the Bhagavatas J.G. Suthren Hirst 4 'We Resort to Reason': The Argumentative Structure in Ven katoana tha's Sesivarami ma mosa Elisa Freschi 5 'Speakers of Highest Truth': Philosophical Plurilogues About Brahman in the Early Upanisads Jessica Frazier Part 2: Transformation 6 Outer and Inner Dialogues as Transformative Disciplines in the Yogavasistha James Madaio 7 Being Human, Dialogically Lynn Thomas 8 Dialoguing the Varkari Tradition Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach 9 Convincing the King: Jain Ministers and Religious Persuasion through Dialogue Jonathan Geen Part 3: Interpretation 10 Careful Attention and the Voice of Another Maria Heim 11 Mahabharata Dialogues on Dharma and Devotion with Krsna and Hanuman Bruce M. Sullivan 12 Models of Royal Piety in the Mahabharata: The Case of Vidura, Sanatsujata and Vidura James M. Hegarty 13 Dialogue in Extremis: Valin in the Valmiki Ramayana Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Afterword Laurie L. Patton

In this paper, we want to bring together two issues for their mutual illumination: (i) the particular use of that hoary Indian dyad, “nāma-rūpa”, literally, “name-and-form by Buddhaghosa, the influential 5 th c Theravāda writer, to organize the categories of the abhidhamma, the canonical classification of phenomenal factors (dhammas) and their formulaic ordering; 1 and (ii) 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 as the contemplative structuring of that human’s phenomenology. This phenomenological methodology expressed in his application of nāma-rūpa is expressed as a set of contemplative practices; we compare this approach to some of the processes explicated within the 20 th c Western Phenomenological tradition’s predominantly metaphysical teleology. We suggest that Buddhaghosa’s use of nāma-rūpa should be seen as the analytic by which he understands how experience is undergone, and not his account of how some reality is structured. We can learn from Buddhaghosa something about both how experience is to be analyzed, and how that analysis has a clarificatory purpose not tied to the espousal of any particular ‘view’ of reality.

The conclusion sums up the book chapter by chapter and observes how each exemplifies the idea of ecological phenomenology. Together they form a wide-ranging depiction of it as a disciplined methodology with the potential to be applied to other genres and other saliences to do with the bodily nature of being human. If the idea of ecological phenomenology as a way of thinking about the nature of experience and its analysis has emerged with any plausibility from this book, then that would be the most encouraging sign that thinking across cultures (rather than always defending why and how one might and should) is comprehensible and worth undertaking.

The Introduction outlines the various chapters. It then situates the question of ‘body’ in the modern Western philosophical tradition following Descartes, and argues that this leaves subsequent responses to come under one of three options: metaphysical dualism of body and subject; any anti-dualist reductionism; or the overcoming of the divide. Describing the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty as a potent example of the third strategy, the Introduction then suggests his philosophy will function as foil to the ecological phenomenology developed and presented in the book. Moreover, one approach within the Western Phenomenological tradition, of treating phenomenology as a methodology for the clarification of experience (rather than the means to the determination of an ontology of the subject) is compared to the approach in this book. Since classical India, while understanding dualism, did not confront the challenge of Descartes (for better or for worse), its treatment of body follows a different trajectory.

The fourth chapter focuses on Canto XVIII of Śrī Harṣa’s twelfth-century poem, the Naiṣadhacarita, which celebrates the post-marital lovemaking of Nala and Damayantī, the hero and heroine whose courtship constitutes the main part of the composition. The lovers are robustly themselves and yet re-formed by the other; affect is generated by the hidden and deeply personal motivation of the two people, and yet also runs across and between them, drawing us another map of subjectivity and the limits of bodiliness altogether. The prefigured body is integral to the conventional depiction of heterosexuality; and yet, even within its conventions—most strikingly, perhaps, for working within such conventions—Śrī Harṣa leads us to ponder the (nearly) everyday changes to bodily sense and boundaries. An erotic phenomenology emerges, which is not bound by the ontological fixation of sexual identity but is a lyrical exploration of what makes up humans in love.

This chapter is on the Caraka Saṃhitā (1st–2nd century CE), focussing on The Ordinary Person, within the Section on Body. Here, the text steps back from actual medical issues to explore exactly who the human being is that is the subject of treatment. The text’s explicit objective is the healthy and long life, and while it strives to articulate the nature of illness and health, it perforce expresses what it is to be a (healthy or ill) person. Within that expression is contained a view of the human being as a bodily being. Such a bodily being is constituted ecologically, by a network of reflexive phenomenological states that occur across (i) a compositional material locus (the narrowly construed ‘body’), (ii) the clinical interaction of physician and patient (which are lines of intersubjective affect), and (iii) a normative social life of conduct (that influence the very constitution of the whole human).

This chapter follows the process by which a highly detailed account of the human being as bodily being emerges through a series of contemplative practices described in the fifth century by Buddhaghosa in The Path of Purification, a Theravada Buddhist manual. In the first three practices studied, meditation practices are described that disrupt intuitions about the stability of subject and objects, intuitions held to lead to entanglement in suffering. The monk seeking disentanglement comes to be attentive of the way that an apparent sense of isolation of human from environment and of separation of subject from material body is dissolved. The fourth practice addresses the constitution of phenomenology, by analysis of experience through the abhidhamma categories taught by the Buddha. What results is a creative destabilization of any fixed tripartite ontology of subject–body–world, leaving a methodologically sustained practice of treating the human as a phenomenologically dynamic system of analytic categories.

This chapter deals with an episode in The Book of Peace of the Mahābhārata in which a spiritually powerful yet protean almswoman, Sulabhā, encounters a King Janaka. It enquires into what Janaka’s declamation against Sulabhā says about masculinist ideas of gender, body, and normativity, and how her responses lay out considerations about gender—how her bodily appearance determines her reception, an account of being human that accepts but renders contingent the bodily marks of sex, an outline of spiritual transcendence that is deliberately universalistic, and a tantalizing glimpse of how she has worked with and through her gendered bodily presence to attain a socially significant emancipation from those normative limits. The framing within the story, which is sympathetic to her and leaves her unambiguously victorious, prompts certain considerations about the potential for this story about gendered experience to contribute to contemporary discussions about the role of gender in bodily identity.

Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja offer diametrically opposed readings of a phrase from verse 13.12 of the Bhagavadgītā, in their respective commentaries on this authoritative (but ‘remembered’ (sṃrti) and not sacred ‘heard’ (śruti)) text. The interpretive originality they show in their exegesis indicates some significant features of what can be called ‘Hindu theology’. These features have contemporary relevance in outlining a Hindu theological method for today. In contrast to the medieval tradition, to be a theologian of such material carries certain commitments to readership and community today, but not necessarily to faith. An idea of Hindu theology can be developed that permits a range of readers and writers to participate in such an enterprise, for both pragmatic and humanistic reasons.

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 inte...

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 a number of 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 also looks 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.

In a bold and complex book that refers to rigorous and close exegesis but progresses through cultivated intuition, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, locates himself—and asks his readers to place themselves—in a place at once secure and vulnerable, liminal and yet centered, the place at which traditions blur at their boundaries and insights grace us from all directions. I imagine that it can be an unsettling and off-putting read to anyone for whom faith is an undaunted rejection of multiple traditions and theology a xenologically bound discipline. But for those who look at the diversity of the human condition in wonderment and seek theological methods suitable for that diversity, it offers many lessons; these may be unsettling, but in a way that sharpens their own balance, and quickens their own search. The book as a whole seeks to provide a programmatic but grounded case for the discipline of comparative theology, which is in many ways a relatively recent field in the academy.

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.

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.

kara, Vacaspati, and Padmapada to draw the larger conclusion that Advaita is will- ing to allow for multiple, context-variant senses of 'I,' in contrast to both a Naiyayika like Gadhadhara 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— avidya¯—as the cause of suffering. But Saha notes that the classical consensus on suf- fering 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 exis- tence. Sanukara'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 Sanukara as an arch-conservative proponent of brahminical values—tends to see the Advaitin as a social reformer. In the essay above, he sees Sanukara as teaching precisely the social lesson against discrimination when he talks of suffering. Saha returns to this theme in ''Sanukara and Varna Distinctions in Hinduism.'' He puts for- ward the argument that since Sanukara held that all social distinctions were not ulti- mate (paramarthika), and since class/varna distinctions are social ones while liberat- ing knowledge is ultimate, varna is irrelevant to liberation. How those traditionally excluded from brahminical philosophy will respond to this generosity is another matter.

(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.

with the more famous of them and suggest that these stories work with different conceptions of childhood. The thematic unity required for this examination was given by taking these conceptions to form a continuum of autonomy, from least to most. The first conception took childhood (and early youth) to be conceptually and socially dependent on adulthood, the second took it to lie in a dialectic tension with adulthood, and the third took it to be intrinsically independent from it. The young Rama, the Tamil Murukan, and the child Krsna represented these conceptions, respectively. Worryingly, and sadly, such theoretical naivete was swiftly exposed by some reflection. I seemed to have committed myself to several problematic and difficult programs when undertaking what had seemed a simple and narrative based interpretation of some elements of popular Hindu devotionalism. It is my intention eventually to recognize the issues involved but to proceed in the hope that the interesting aspects of the stories can be brought out, in an essay of this modest scope and scale, without an elaborate theoretical underpinning. In an attempt to let the stories speak for what I have in mind without the constant accompaniment of theory, I shall first explore the Hindu myths, with only the few intuitive remarks on childhood and youth that I wanted originally to make.

Many years ago, Bimal Matilal (1986) noted (as, for some twenty-five years, he did in many other instances), an interesting parallel between classical Indian and contemporary western philosophy in which the case of the former might illuminate issues in the latter. It was the so-called raven paradox or the paradox of confirmation. Matilal suggested, briefly, that the formulation of a proper inference, as given by the Buddhist logician, Dinnaga might solve the paradox spotted by Carl Hempel. Joerg Tuske's recent paper (1998) treats the issue and makes a more extended comparative study. The bulk of his paper is taken up with a description of Hempel's paradox, its possible solution (following Lipton, 1991: 109-113) through the use of Mill's method of agreement and difference, and a clear account of the development of inference from Nyaya through Dinnaga and Dharmakirti. The concluding section on how Diniiaga's theory of inferential signs solves the paradox, following criticism of Matilal's own short comments, is suggestive but perhaps too brief.

For Yogācāra-Madhyamaka, enlightenment is free of the mistaken conceptual construction of subject and objects of desire. The Buddha's awakening was a state purified of concepts, without desire and suffering. But, subsequently, he compassionately taught of awakening, and teaching is conceptual. Can enlightenment be both cognitively pure and concept-utilizing? To secure cognitive purity while teaching, the philosophers argue that the enlightened person is cleansed of desire for subject and objects, rather than strictly free of concepts of subject and objects. To secure teaching after the attainment of pure cognition, they allow conceptuality, so long as it is free of desire.

Cet article constitue la deuxieme partie d'une etude sur la connaissance et l'action, deux moyens pour atteindre la liberation et qui opposent Bhātta Mīmāmsā et Advaita Vedānta au sujet de la preeminence a accorder a l'un ou a l'autre element. Ici, l'A. montre comment la destinee humaine, habituellement consideree comme une liberation, a trait a la maniere dont l'action et la connaissance sont mises en valeur par les deux ecoles precitees.

L'A. traite du debat qui se deroule, dans les traditions brahmaniques classiques, entre les Mīmāmsakas et les Advaitins concernant la liberation et les moyens pour y parvenir. Dans ce premier article, il montre qu'une grande partie du debat consiste a savoir, en ce qui concerne l'action et la cognition, quel mode est dominant ou subordonne. Puis il considere le probleme general du fonctionnement de l'action et de la connaissance dans la transformation de la vie ordinaire en un seul mouvement pour aborder le theme de la liberation.

The problem which seems to remain with the Advaitin's non-realist account is that in giving up both the robust realist use of existenthood and the strong idealist use of cognitive verification, he seems to have weakened the connection between what must be the case and what is experienced. In explaining the nature of cognition, the realist says that existenthood (objects ontologically independent of cognition)must be the case; the idealist says that existenthoodmust not be the case. But in saying that existenthood and non-existenthood are both outside the purview of the explanation of cognition, and then further, in saying that there is only a weak connection — of coherent assumption or best justification through confirmation — between objects and cognition, in other words, refusing to say whatmust be the case, is the non-realist not making his ontology acutely contingent on the current features of cognition? Is his ontology not, in this sense, provisional upon current cognition? As any reader even glancingly acquainted with Advaita would see straightaway, that understanding of ontology as aprovisional state (samv\(\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{r} \)tti-sattā) is precisely what the Advaitin has striven to establish. We must leave the examination of the purpose of this effort for another occasion.

Indian thought conceives of life in four normative stages: of student, householder, forest-dweller and renouncer. A metaphysical theory related to the conception of life-stages is that of the ends or purposes of life: appropriate conduct, material well-being, physical satisfaction and liberation. The theory of the ends of life is reconstructed here in the light of contemporary philosophical discussions about the meaning of life. The first three ends are part of a world-oriented attitude; the last end, of world-transcending contemplation. Among age-neutral and age-specific ways of relating life stages and life ends, that of taking old age as the time for the renunciatory stage is important and is examined in the context of the two main theories of meaning: world-oriented and world-transcending. Old age is secondary to earlier stages in a world-oriented theory, more significant in the world-transcendent one. However, both theories, seen independently, are paradoxical. In a synthesis, the world-transcendence of renunciation in old age is paramount in Indian thought, but worldly action is significant because renunciation depends on the richness of the life renounced. This reconstruction of an ancient ideal is offered as a philosophical paradigm for transculturally relevant attitudes to life in old age.

The section we have examined is a persuasive and sustained demolition of the realist strategy of deriving an invariable concomitance between the existenthood of the world and the system of validation (a system accepted by both parties as being the regulator of epistemic activity). This leaves the Advaitin with an absence of invariable concomitance. This is where the Advaitin wants to be. On his view, the absence of this concomitant dependence of the system of validation on an ‘existent’ world points to the possibility that the cognized world is not that independent world which Nyāya takes to be the determinate reality. If that world is not philosophically proven to be so independent, then there is at least aprima facie case for the Advaitic soteriological claim that it is Brahman alone which is ultimately real, even though the commonly cognized world allows of coherent epistemic activity. It is fair to say that such a view is established by the failure of the opponent to prove invariable concomitance between inquiry, validation and an independent world. It is the inability of the opposing view to prove a metaphysical claim which itself points to the nature of the Advaitic position; the position, that is, which suspends the need to make an ontic commitment to the extrinsic world as a determinate reality. Whether the critique of the Nyāya concept ofsattā takes us to the refutation of the Nyāya concept of a determinate world (and whether the Advaitic rejection ofsattā is of a piece with the concept of an ‘indeterminate’ world) is another issue, dealt with in detail by Śrī Har $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s} $$ a elsewhere in his book, but beyond the purview of this paper.