Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India, Oxford, Oxford University Press, [2018], Paperback 2021
Phenomenology of the Body
This book discusses the ‘phenomenal ecology’1 of the human body—whatever that might mean. To help us understand this ‘phenomenon,’ Ram-Prasad selects ‘medical,’ ‘gender,’ ‘meditation,’ and ‘erotic’ phenomenology from The Caraka Samhita, a medical text; The Dialogue of Sulabha and Janaka in the Mahabharata, Santiparvan Chapter 308; Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga; and Nala and Damayanti’s Love/Making in Sri Harsha’s Naisadhacarita. After ‘situating Ecological Phenomenology’ in the Introduction and also providing a Western perspective, Ram-Prasad tries his best to help us understand what ‘Phenomenology of the Body’ actually is and says:
When I talk about ‘ecological phenomenology’ in this book, I refer to its two inseparable sides. One is as a method of analytically describing experience, in which context always matters and determines the way we can absorb a text’s particular set of descriptions. ‘Context’ in this methodological sense includes: the genre with its literary conventions and lexical registers, the stated purposes of the text, and the narrative or other locating devices by which the significance of the textual passages in question is foregrounded. Ecology here is hermeneutic and permits shifts of scope and constitution. By seeing the thematization of bodiliness in this hermeneutic—that is to say, as always emerging into our attention in terms of the generic contexts of the text in which it occurs—we are not bound to think of each account as a fundamentally incompatible theory of reality. (p. 24)
Though such ‘the thematization of bodiliness in this hermeneutic’ approach is common among Indian philosophers, the original text (scripture or literature) was not written with a hermeneutical approach in mind. That approach comes more from the experience of the author, though later commentators tried to present a hermeneutic approach with a ‘thematization’ of the text. But we Indians mostly prefer experience first and not much of a hermeneutic approach, which always remains an intellectual entertainment for philosophers in the past and academicians now.2
When this book was highly recommended by another ‘Chakravarthy’ who is also an Environmental Ecologist, I should have remained alert and not rushed to read it. Because as important as ecology is, it often remains an elitist topic of discussion—be it about the environment or the body. We common people often only hear about it without understanding. As Buddhaghosa correctly pointed out, a common person lives based on their experience:
“Buddhaghosa distinguishes between what occurs in experience (the ‘form’ of it) and some sort of thing (i.e., matter) outside of it, but because his attention—driven by the need to teach contemplative practice—is always on the experience: so much so that he is never concerned to come to conclusions about things other than as they are experienced.” (p. 128)
So naturally, based on my ‘experience’ in understanding the text [or a book, here ‘Bodily Being’], I remain very selective in sharing my reflections, not building any ‘hermeneutic thematization,’ but jumping from one point to another to serve my purpose rather than presenting a ‘systematic’ and cohesive review per se. I hope that this selective approach contributes to the overall understanding of the text despite its lack of systematic organization.
We human beings experience life beginning with our body. As we grow, our body (skin) begins to respond to the environment—both physical and mental—to understand that experience. Then the body begins to adapt itself according to not only its physical but also its mental needs. Any artificial separation between body and mind is impractical. Such dichotomies won’t help either the body or the mind to have a holistic life—if not a perfect life. What Ram-Prasad points out about Caraka Samhita, that ‘this text is probably the earliest to talk this way about “mind,” even if it is not clear about what it is proposing, could be extended to any study on the “mind”.’3
But what philosophy or phenomenology in this book, using various technical terms like mind, buddhi, ego, and atman, tries to analyze that part of the ‘body’ in its subtle form, will remain the domain of philosophers and phenomenologists, finally paralyzing life itself. What is more important for a common man is the question of ‘existence’ and not merely to ‘exist’:
“Our being human consists in our being such entities as undergo existence (and do not merely exist). For it to be—to use Thomas Nagel’s4 famous phrase anachronistically—‘something like it is to be’ human, our existence has to be bodily; it is neither just a set of physiological functions that mysteriously generates phenomenality, nor is it a bringing together of two metaphysical principles, one the physical locus (the body as physical) and the other the non-physical mind.”(p. 40)
Having shared the introduction to my reflection, let me now take few examples from this book to share my reflection. First about the body [health]. It is good that Ram Prasad begins from the body first.
The way Ram-Prasad highlights how patients were treated as ‘human’ rather than mere ‘physical objects’ in the past in India, particularly by Ayurveda, is worth noting, especially considering the present context of treatment worldwide—where, without any personal knowledge about a ‘PERSON,’ treatment is now given:
“The organic connections between different aspects of human subjectivity evident in this list show how the patient’s living presence is the locus of the physician’s examination. What we therefore have is not a way of combining two different epistemic approaches, namely, knowledge of the disease and of the sick person. Instead, we have a worldview in which there cannot be knowledge of the disease without the knowledge of the person—or to be more precise, the self-disclosure of the person. If the patient tells the physician how he or she lives, the latter can enrich the diagnostic process with that knowledge, since there is an intimate connection between how one lives and one’s afflictions. The very nature of what is required for diagnosis demonstrates that it happens in the phenomenological giving, taking, and mutual making between physician and patient. The presence of the patient is not that of a strictly physical object whose malfunctioning becomes the focus of medical attention. Instead, there is a subjective presence whose bodiliness is a matter of muscular exertion but also of cognitive focus, imbalances in the three bases of maladies (dosas—wind, bile, and phlegm) but also display of character, acknowledgment of private facts together with sensitivity to social conduct and epistemic capacity, as well as physiological response to medication.” (pp. 48-49)5
Next is about Mukti.
Though Ram-Prasad wants to view the dialogue between Sulabha and Janaka from a ‘gender’6 perspective, as per the context, Sulabha comes after hearing about Janaka, who ‘was making great claims in most extravagant language, which had become very widely known, about his having achieved in this life itself, even as a householder, ultimate liberation, moksha, and citing his personal example was pronouncing on what moksha truly was. [And] wanting to know if there was any truth in his claims, Sulabha resolved to visit him.’7
This is nothing but a scholarly twist who can super impose their own views divorced from the original context, though Ram Prasad also emphasis about the importance of context (see the quote from his book p. 24)
As per my habit, when I grab any book, even if I cannot understand the subject due to my limitations, I will somehow complete reading it to do justice to the money that someone paid to buy it. This is one among the few such books that I have read in my life. More than this, I cannot share what Ram-Prasad actually wants to convey, as it is beyond my intellectual phenomenal ecology to understand it. Of course, Ram-Prasad says something, but my mind, in its limited phenomenology of my ‘Body Being,’ fails to comprehend it. For example, he says, ‘To ask, critically, whether philosophers too quickly make the study of subjectivity an ontological quest; and demonstrate the productivity of reading subjectivity (specifically bodiliness) through a non-ontological methodology of fine-grained, analytic phenomenological description….’ (p.24). This is in English but sounds Greek and Latin to me. I won’t say Ram-Prasad fails to communicate; yes, he does it indeed with great skill as both a scholar and author with his academic phenomenology, but either I need another Sulabha to enlighten me as she attempted to do with Janaka. May be as women are indeed great in helping men in understanding several subtle issues in life as Subhala tries to do here. Anyhow leaving both Subhala and Janaka to continue their dialogue to settle down whether it is a gender issues as Ram Prasad claims, or related to mukti, let me come to my next point on Pleasure leaving the ‘mind’ of Buddhaghosha.
When I cannot understand this hermeneutic phenomenology of medical science or dialogue between a woman and man, as Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga on The Body in Contemplation is beyond my comprehension, let me come to the fourth topic in this Body Phenomenology: The Body in Love: Nala and Damayanti’s Love/Making in Sri Harsha’s Naisadhacarita. Ram-Prasad, taking the example of erotic love between Nala and Damayanti, finally comes down to earth for the reader to relax after phenomenological experiments with philosophers. However, it is noteworthy that the same Sri Harsha, the author of Naisadhacarita,8 also wrote the formidable and critical work of Advaita Vedanta, the Khandanakhandakhadya…. [p. 143] demonstrating how in India philosophy and practical life are not divided into watertight compartments.9
But the most challenging part for me is the conclusion. Though I tried my best to read it carefully, I still cannot comprehend it because I find it difficult to ‘situate myself,’ borrowing the words of Merleau-Ponty10, in the body phenomenology by Ram-Prasad. Because, as Ram-Prasad correctly points out, ‘Our body is not only set down or situated in space’…. always is in relation with life any philosophical or phenomenological study about the body, though helpful, cannot solve all the issues in life.11 Of course, Ram-Prasad, though a scholarly philosopher, also points out that to have a normal life in relationship with everyone, we even have to abandon consciousness as ‘to situate the subject of the correlation in a relation of difference, which is indeed one of exclusion in relation to corporeality…,’12 as he concludes in his final note:
…This results, therefore, in an approach to the Indic that is thematized through the modern West, but an analysis that shows how the Indic materials can lead to rich and productive consideration of experience. Within the framing, I therefore have not looked at how these texts {analysed in this book} have been studied by native commentators: they have many wonderful things to say, but they do not articulate the nature of bodiliness in health, gender, contemplative discipline, and erotic intersubjectivity through the theme of phenomenological analysis….—p. 186
In the end, Ramprasad’s discussion on the difference between Western thematization and Indic experience clearly illustrates how such phenomenological analysis can be beyond the reach of an everyday person like me. While I found the subject matter of this book incredibly interesting, I struggled to grasp its content due to the abundance of technical terms. Despite this, I am in awe of the intellectual phenomenology within the academic ecosystem of scholars like Ramprasad.
Notes
1 The notion of ecological phenomenology is consistent with the need to not presume that body is explanatorily self-evident, and instead to think of it as whatever is yielded contingently within the parameters of any particular account of experience. An ecology is a continuous and dynamic system of interrelationships between elements, in which the salience accorded to some type of relationship clarifies how the elements it relates are to be identified. The spatial version of this is a natural and compelling metaphor (by which we live), but emotions are ecological without being spatial, as are other ways of being, such as illness. This should be remembered so as to not let the structure of metaphor get in the way of the deeper methodological point that ecological phenomenology seeks to articulate.—p. 23
2 …no doubt there is an intuition shared by Western and Indian philosophical traditions that there is a manifest subjectivity which appears to have a puzzling relationship with all that it is a subject of. When the nature of that subjectivity is delineated, there are persistent questions both about how it occurs at all, which is to say, how its presence is reflexive; and what its objects are and how they come to be its objects. These are the questions of traditional philosophy, Indian and Western….—p. 19
3 From this outline of what is meant by ‘mind’, it is clear that the Caraka Samhita is not making the distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ with which we are familiar in our contemporary folk-language with its roots in the popular reception of Cartesian dualism. Rather, ‘mind’ (manas) is a particular functional constituent of the entire bodily complex (‘raasi’, an assemblage) of the human subject, a separate organ for cognition, that has unity (ekatva) specific to each bodily complex and, unlike the five senses, not directly observable (being ‘subtle,’ ‘fine’ or ‘minute’ (anu)). There is no systematic exploration of a theory of manas here, in contrast to philosophical systems like Nyaya or the Buddhist Abdhidamma what were developing at the time, although there is a fascinating suggestiveness to the terse statements on offer. If the earliest layers of both Vaisesika and Nyaya systems do not conceptualize the manas as an inner sense organ, but the next extant layer of both—which is just after the last redaction of Caraka Samhita—do, then this text is probably the earliest to talk this way about ‘mind’, even if it is not clear about what it is proposing. But for our purposes, it is sufficient to note that, when it talks of ‘mind’, it means an inner sense organ, which is therefore not on the other side of a putative divide from the body just is simply part of it.—p.38
4 Nagel, Chris 2012 ‘Phenomenology Without “Body”?’, Studia Phaenomenologica XII: 17-33. [In the text it is ‘Thomas’ Nagel and in the Bibliography as ‘Chris’. No further reference available for Studia…..—db]
5 Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar’s writing about the ‘Health and Healing: Dying and Death’, [pp. 107-133] further could help us to understand this even now the way patients are treated in, The Indians Portrait of a People, New Delhi, Penguin Books, [2002] , 2009
6 Almost all debates in the Mahabharata have enigmatic conclusions, the opposing sides are often left in a delicate balance, and even if one side appears to win, subsequent events problematize the previous debate and leave the eventual outcome open-ended again. In this episode, Sulabha is clearly declared the winner, leaving Janaka nothing to say. If we think of the dialogues of the Mahabharata schematically as being only about the major doctrinal questions within some single overarching but hidden metanarrative on the intellectual hegemony of brahmin composers and redactors, then we can read this dialogues as imply about the debate between householders and renouncers over the style of life appropriate for spiritual transcendence. But the Mahabharata is full of counter-narratives, subversions, and so many exceptions that exceptions do not so much prove a rule as prove to be the rule. This episode is one of many in which a strong, articulate, and characterful woman challenges the masculinist order. The subtlety of this episode comes through its not being presented directly as a dialogue on gender between a man and a woman, as is the case in many famous dialogues between husbands and wife. The doctrinal debate is given as one between householder and renouncer but the composers of the text choose the renouncer to be woman. This immediately makes the debate one over gender, all the more powerful for emerging from within the elaborately constructed social site in which it occurs rather than as the explicit focus of discussion. We see this powerful woman in the context of an abstract debate, and my attempt in this chapter is to treat the episode as being particularly important precisely because the renouncer (who turns out to have been born into a kingly family too) is a woman of such ability. It is worth noting too that in one of the earlier chapters of this Book (12.18), which comes under the sequence concerned with the Instructions on Kingly Dharma (as opposed to the much larger number of chapters devoted to the Dharma of Freedom), a King Janaka has one other engagement with an articulate woman: in this short chapter, his (unnamed) wife and Queen, seeing him taking on the trappings of renunciation, castigates him for abandoning his duties as a king and hourseholder!—p. 62
7 Chaturvedi Badrinath, The Women of the Mahabharata: The question of Truth’ (Hyderabad, Orient Blac swan Pvt. Let. 2008, pp. 130-147, p. 131)] See my article on this: https://dayanandbharati.in/sulabha-and-janaka-who-actually-is-the-true-renouncer/:
8 …the twelfth-century composition, the Naisadhacarita (traditionally the last of the genre of the ‘great poem’ (mahakavya) in Sanskrit literature…. Is sustained in the sense that it speaks of their [Nala-Damayanti], not in vignettes, but as a continuous narrative; and while naturally it has tropic resonances with that great mahakavya which too has a sustained treatment of the erotic relationship, Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, it is entirely confined to the earthly love of two human beings (even if they have extraordinary qualities that hint at the divine) and without any of the cosmogonic significance of its predecessor’s story of the divine couple, Siva and Parvati.—p. 142
9 However, like all other advaitians who cannot reconcile such down to earth experience with real life, which according to them belongs to the realm of maya try to explain away easily such writings from an author who wrote on Advaita:
…It is another matter as to what he {Sri Harsa in Naisadhacarita }meant by the claim that the erotic life is metaphysically possible and structurally compatible with the cognitive attainment of self-realization; for he seems to stand against the role of strict renunciation of all social values (thus, the first three of the four ends {viz. dharma, Artha, kama and moksha}) that had been asserted strongly by most previous Advaitins. Again, for our purposes, we only need to keep in mind that social and moral norms too are enfolded into the forms of experience—even the erotic….—p. 157
10 …While the intersubjective aspect of ecological phenomenology will naturally dominate this discussion, it is important to start with the general point that an ecological reading does share with certain strands of the Phenomenological tradition a commitment to thinking of subjectivity in terms of its world. Merleau-Ponty was clear about such a commitment. The world is ‘the permanent horizon of all my cogitations and as a dimension with respect to which I never cease to situate myself.’38 [Merleau-Pnty, Maurice 1962 Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans). London: Routledge (1945 Phenomenologie de la Perception. Paris: Galimard).—p. 153
11 Our body is not only set down or situated in space, placed side by side with other bodies, or other things. It is also intertwined with them, and interlacing of those within it. It thus constitutes (p. 153) a place made from flesh which no longer greatly resembles Descartes’ partes extra partes space. But this is not simply due to the fact that it is a body; it is rather because it always is in relation with. And that which philosophy lacks, even more than a thought about the body, is a thought about our body-soul as being essentially relation-with. [ a part as an external thing to another part Explanation: It means that things exists alongside, beyond each other, exterior to each other.]—pp. 153-154
12 …It is not the case that because we have a body we belong to the world. On the contrary, it is insofar as we belong to the world that we have a body. This reversal implies that the meaning of the body must be derived from the meaning of belonging. But, as well, the vocabulary of consciousness must be abandoned, since to speak of consciousness is to situate the subject of the correlation in a relation of difference, which is indeed one of exclusion in relation to corporeality. Conceived through an exclusionary difference, consciousness immediately stops us from finding the possible foundation of belonging.—p. 155
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India, Oxford, Oxford University Press, [2018], Paperback 2021
Phenomenology of the Body
This book discusses the ‘phenomenal ecology’1 of the human body—whatever that might mean. To help us understand this ‘phenomenon,’ Ram-Prasad selects ‘medical,’ ‘gender,’ ‘meditation,’ and ‘erotic’ phenomenology from The Caraka Samhita, a medical text; The Dialogue of Sulabha and Janaka in the Mahabharata, Santiparvan Chapter 308; Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga; and Nala and Damayanti’s Love/Making in Sri Harsha’s Naisadhacarita. After ‘situating Ecological Phenomenology’ in the Introduction and also providing a Western perspective, Ram-Prasad tries his best to help us understand what ‘Phenomenology of the Body’ actually is and says:
When I talk about ‘ecological phenomenology’ in this book, I refer to its two inseparable sides. One is as a method of analytically describing experience, in which context always matters and determines the way we can absorb a text’s particular set of descriptions. ‘Context’ in this methodological sense includes: the genre with its literary conventions and lexical registers, the stated purposes of the text, and the narrative or other locating devices by which the significance of the textual passages in question is foregrounded. Ecology here is hermeneutic and permits shifts of scope and constitution. By seeing the thematization of bodiliness in this hermeneutic—that is to say, as always emerging into our attention in terms of the generic contexts of the text in which it occurs—we are not bound to think of each account as a fundamentally incompatible theory of reality. (p. 24)
Though such ‘the thematization of bodiliness in this hermeneutic’ approach is common among Indian philosophers, the original text (scripture or literature) was not written with a hermeneutical approach in mind. That approach comes more from the experience of the author, though later commentators tried to present a hermeneutic approach with a ‘thematization’ of the text. But we Indians mostly prefer experience first and not much of a hermeneutic approach, which always remains an intellectual entertainment for philosophers in the past and academicians now.2
When this book was highly recommended by another ‘Chakravarthy’ who is also an Environmental Ecologist, I should have remained alert and not rushed to read it. Because as important as ecology is, it often remains an elitist topic of discussion—be it about the environment or the body. We common people often only hear about it without understanding. As Buddhaghosa correctly pointed out, a common person lives based on their experience:
“Buddhaghosa distinguishes between what occurs in experience (the ‘form’ of it) and some sort of thing (i.e., matter) outside of it, but because his attention—driven by the need to teach contemplative practice—is always on the experience: so much so that he is never concerned to come to conclusions about things other than as they are experienced.” (p. 128)
So naturally, based on my ‘experience’ in understanding the text [or a book, here ‘Bodily Being’], I remain very selective in sharing my reflections, not building any ‘hermeneutic thematization,’ but jumping from one point to another to serve my purpose rather than presenting a ‘systematic’ and cohesive review per se. I hope that this selective approach contributes to the overall understanding of the text despite its lack of systematic organization.
We human beings experience life beginning with our body. As we grow, our body (skin) begins to respond to the environment—both physical and mental—to understand that experience. Then the body begins to adapt itself according to not only its physical but also its mental needs. Any artificial separation between body and mind is impractical. Such dichotomies won’t help either the body or the mind to have a holistic life—if not a perfect life. What Ram-Prasad points out about Caraka Samhita, that ‘this text is probably the earliest to talk this way about “mind,” even if it is not clear about what it is proposing, could be extended to any study on the “mind”.’3
But what philosophy or phenomenology in this book, using various technical terms like mind, buddhi, ego, and atman, tries to analyze that part of the ‘body’ in its subtle form, will remain the domain of philosophers and phenomenologists, finally paralyzing life itself. What is more important for a common man is the question of ‘existence’ and not merely to ‘exist’:
“Our being human consists in our being such entities as undergo existence (and do not merely exist). For it to be—to use Thomas Nagel’s4 famous phrase anachronistically—‘something like it is to be’ human, our existence has to be bodily; it is neither just a set of physiological functions that mysteriously generates phenomenality, nor is it a bringing together of two metaphysical principles, one the physical locus (the body as physical) and the other the non-physical mind.”(p. 40)
Having shared the introduction to my reflection, let me now take few examples from this book to share my reflection. First about the body [health]. It is good that Ram Prasad begins from the body first.
The way Ram-Prasad highlights how patients were treated as ‘human’ rather than mere ‘physical objects’ in the past in India, particularly by Ayurveda, is worth noting, especially considering the present context of treatment worldwide—where, without any personal knowledge about a ‘PERSON,’ treatment is now given:
“The organic connections between different aspects of human subjectivity evident in this list show how the patient’s living presence is the locus of the physician’s examination. What we therefore have is not a way of combining two different epistemic approaches, namely, knowledge of the disease and of the sick person. Instead, we have a worldview in which there cannot be knowledge of the disease without the knowledge of the person—or to be more precise, the self-disclosure of the person. If the patient tells the physician how he or she lives, the latter can enrich the diagnostic process with that knowledge, since there is an intimate connection between how one lives and one’s afflictions. The very nature of what is required for diagnosis demonstrates that it happens in the phenomenological giving, taking, and mutual making between physician and patient. The presence of the patient is not that of a strictly physical object whose malfunctioning becomes the focus of medical attention. Instead, there is a subjective presence whose bodiliness is a matter of muscular exertion but also of cognitive focus, imbalances in the three bases of maladies (dosas—wind, bile, and phlegm) but also display of character, acknowledgment of private facts together with sensitivity to social conduct and epistemic capacity, as well as physiological response to medication.” (pp. 48-49)5
Next is about Mukti.
Though Ram-Prasad wants to view the dialogue between Sulabha and Janaka from a ‘gender’6 perspective, as per the context, Sulabha comes after hearing about Janaka, who ‘was making great claims in most extravagant language, which had become very widely known, about his having achieved in this life itself, even as a householder, ultimate liberation, moksha, and citing his personal example was pronouncing on what moksha truly was. [And] wanting to know if there was any truth in his claims, Sulabha resolved to visit him.’7
This is nothing but a scholarly twist who can super impose their own views divorced from the original context, though Ram Prasad also emphasis about the importance of context (see the quote from his book p. 24)
As per my habit, when I grab any book, even if I cannot understand the subject due to my limitations, I will somehow complete reading it to do justice to the money that someone paid to buy it. This is one among the few such books that I have read in my life. More than this, I cannot share what Ram-Prasad actually wants to convey, as it is beyond my intellectual phenomenal ecology to understand it. Of course, Ram-Prasad says something, but my mind, in its limited phenomenology of my ‘Body Being,’ fails to comprehend it. For example, he says, ‘To ask, critically, whether philosophers too quickly make the study of subjectivity an ontological quest; and demonstrate the productivity of reading subjectivity (specifically bodiliness) through a non-ontological methodology of fine-grained, analytic phenomenological description….’ (p.24). This is in English but sounds Greek and Latin to me. I won’t say Ram-Prasad fails to communicate; yes, he does it indeed with great skill as both a scholar and author with his academic phenomenology, but either I need another Sulabha to enlighten me as she attempted to do with Janaka. May be as women are indeed great in helping men in understanding several subtle issues in life as Subhala tries to do here. Anyhow leaving both Subhala and Janaka to continue their dialogue to settle down whether it is a gender issues as Ram Prasad claims, or related to mukti, let me come to my next point on Pleasure leaving the ‘mind’ of Buddhaghosha.
When I cannot understand this hermeneutic phenomenology of medical science or dialogue between a woman and man, as Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga on The Body in Contemplation is beyond my comprehension, let me come to the fourth topic in this Body Phenomenology: The Body in Love: Nala and Damayanti’s Love/Making in Sri Harsha’s Naisadhacarita. Ram-Prasad, taking the example of erotic love between Nala and Damayanti, finally comes down to earth for the reader to relax after phenomenological experiments with philosophers. However, it is noteworthy that the same Sri Harsha, the author of Naisadhacarita,8 also wrote the formidable and critical work of Advaita Vedanta, the Khandanakhandakhadya…. [p. 143] demonstrating how in India philosophy and practical life are not divided into watertight compartments.9
But the most challenging part for me is the conclusion. Though I tried my best to read it carefully, I still cannot comprehend it because I find it difficult to ‘situate myself,’ borrowing the words of Merleau-Ponty10, in the body phenomenology by Ram-Prasad. Because, as Ram-Prasad correctly points out, ‘Our body is not only set down or situated in space’…. always is in relation with life any philosophical or phenomenological study about the body, though helpful, cannot solve all the issues in life.11 Of course, Ram-Prasad, though a scholarly philosopher, also points out that to have a normal life in relationship with everyone, we even have to abandon consciousness as ‘to situate the subject of the correlation in a relation of difference, which is indeed one of exclusion in relation to corporeality…,’12 as he concludes in his final note:
…This results, therefore, in an approach to the Indic that is thematized through the modern West, but an analysis that shows how the Indic materials can lead to rich and productive consideration of experience. Within the framing, I therefore have not looked at how these texts {analysed in this book} have been studied by native commentators: they have many wonderful things to say, but they do not articulate the nature of bodiliness in health, gender, contemplative discipline, and erotic intersubjectivity through the theme of phenomenological analysis….—p. 186
In the end, Ramprasad’s discussion on the difference between Western thematization and Indic experience clearly illustrates how such phenomenological analysis can be beyond the reach of an everyday person like me. While I found the subject matter of this book incredibly interesting, I struggled to grasp its content due to the abundance of technical terms. Despite this, I am in awe of the intellectual phenomenology within the academic ecosystem of scholars like Ramprasad.
Notes
1 The notion of ecological phenomenology is consistent with the need to not presume that body is explanatorily self-evident, and instead to think of it as whatever is yielded contingently within the parameters of any particular account of experience. An ecology is a continuous and dynamic system of interrelationships between elements, in which the salience accorded to some type of relationship clarifies how the elements it relates are to be identified. The spatial version of this is a natural and compelling metaphor (by which we live), but emotions are ecological without being spatial, as are other ways of being, such as illness. This should be remembered so as to not let the structure of metaphor get in the way of the deeper methodological point that ecological phenomenology seeks to articulate.—p. 23
2 …no doubt there is an intuition shared by Western and Indian philosophical traditions that there is a manifest subjectivity which appears to have a puzzling relationship with all that it is a subject of. When the nature of that subjectivity is delineated, there are persistent questions both about how it occurs at all, which is to say, how its presence is reflexive; and what its objects are and how they come to be its objects. These are the questions of traditional philosophy, Indian and Western….—p. 19
3 From this outline of what is meant by ‘mind’, it is clear that the Caraka Samhita is not making the distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ with which we are familiar in our contemporary folk-language with its roots in the popular reception of Cartesian dualism. Rather, ‘mind’ (manas) is a particular functional constituent of the entire bodily complex (‘raasi’, an assemblage) of the human subject, a separate organ for cognition, that has unity (ekatva) specific to each bodily complex and, unlike the five senses, not directly observable (being ‘subtle,’ ‘fine’ or ‘minute’ (anu)). There is no systematic exploration of a theory of manas here, in contrast to philosophical systems like Nyaya or the Buddhist Abdhidamma what were developing at the time, although there is a fascinating suggestiveness to the terse statements on offer. If the earliest layers of both Vaisesika and Nyaya systems do not conceptualize the manas as an inner sense organ, but the next extant layer of both—which is just after the last redaction of Caraka Samhita—do, then this text is probably the earliest to talk this way about ‘mind’, even if it is not clear about what it is proposing. But for our purposes, it is sufficient to note that, when it talks of ‘mind’, it means an inner sense organ, which is therefore not on the other side of a putative divide from the body just is simply part of it.—p.38
4 Nagel, Chris 2012 ‘Phenomenology Without “Body”?’, Studia Phaenomenologica XII: 17-33. [In the text it is ‘Thomas’ Nagel and in the Bibliography as ‘Chris’. No further reference available for Studia…..—db]
5 Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar’s writing about the ‘Health and Healing: Dying and Death’, [pp. 107-133] further could help us to understand this even now the way patients are treated in, The Indians Portrait of a People, New Delhi, Penguin Books, [2002] , 2009
6 Almost all debates in the Mahabharata have enigmatic conclusions, the opposing sides are often left in a delicate balance, and even if one side appears to win, subsequent events problematize the previous debate and leave the eventual outcome open-ended again. In this episode, Sulabha is clearly declared the winner, leaving Janaka nothing to say. If we think of the dialogues of the Mahabharata schematically as being only about the major doctrinal questions within some single overarching but hidden metanarrative on the intellectual hegemony of brahmin composers and redactors, then we can read this dialogues as imply about the debate between householders and renouncers over the style of life appropriate for spiritual transcendence. But the Mahabharata is full of counter-narratives, subversions, and so many exceptions that exceptions do not so much prove a rule as prove to be the rule. This episode is one of many in which a strong, articulate, and characterful woman challenges the masculinist order. The subtlety of this episode comes through its not being presented directly as a dialogue on gender between a man and a woman, as is the case in many famous dialogues between husbands and wife. The doctrinal debate is given as one between householder and renouncer but the composers of the text choose the renouncer to be woman. This immediately makes the debate one over gender, all the more powerful for emerging from within the elaborately constructed social site in which it occurs rather than as the explicit focus of discussion. We see this powerful woman in the context of an abstract debate, and my attempt in this chapter is to treat the episode as being particularly important precisely because the renouncer (who turns out to have been born into a kingly family too) is a woman of such ability. It is worth noting too that in one of the earlier chapters of this Book (12.18), which comes under the sequence concerned with the Instructions on Kingly Dharma (as opposed to the much larger number of chapters devoted to the Dharma of Freedom), a King Janaka has one other engagement with an articulate woman: in this short chapter, his (unnamed) wife and Queen, seeing him taking on the trappings of renunciation, castigates him for abandoning his duties as a king and hourseholder!—p. 62
7 Chaturvedi Badrinath, The Women of the Mahabharata: The question of Truth’ (Hyderabad, Orient Blac swan Pvt. Let. 2008, pp. 130-147, p. 131)] See my article on this: https://dayanandbharati.in/sulabha-and-janaka-who-actually-is-the-true-renouncer/:
8 …the twelfth-century composition, the Naisadhacarita (traditionally the last of the genre of the ‘great poem’ (mahakavya) in Sanskrit literature…. Is sustained in the sense that it speaks of their [Nala-Damayanti], not in vignettes, but as a continuous narrative; and while naturally it has tropic resonances with that great mahakavya which too has a sustained treatment of the erotic relationship, Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, it is entirely confined to the earthly love of two human beings (even if they have extraordinary qualities that hint at the divine) and without any of the cosmogonic significance of its predecessor’s story of the divine couple, Siva and Parvati.—p. 142
9 However, like all other advaitians who cannot reconcile such down to earth experience with real life, which according to them belongs to the realm of maya try to explain away easily such writings from an author who wrote on Advaita:
…It is another matter as to what he {Sri Harsa in Naisadhacarita }meant by the claim that the erotic life is metaphysically possible and structurally compatible with the cognitive attainment of self-realization; for he seems to stand against the role of strict renunciation of all social values (thus, the first three of the four ends {viz. dharma, Artha, kama and moksha}) that had been asserted strongly by most previous Advaitins. Again, for our purposes, we only need to keep in mind that social and moral norms too are enfolded into the forms of experience—even the erotic….—p. 157
10 …While the intersubjective aspect of ecological phenomenology will naturally dominate this discussion, it is important to start with the general point that an ecological reading does share with certain strands of the Phenomenological tradition a commitment to thinking of subjectivity in terms of its world. Merleau-Ponty was clear about such a commitment. The world is ‘the permanent horizon of all my cogitations and as a dimension with respect to which I never cease to situate myself.’38 [Merleau-Pnty, Maurice 1962 Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans). London: Routledge (1945 Phenomenologie de la Perception. Paris: Galimard).—p. 153
11 Our body is not only set down or situated in space, placed side by side with other bodies, or other things. It is also intertwined with them, and interlacing of those within it. It thus constitutes (p. 153) a place made from flesh which no longer greatly resembles Descartes’ partes extra partes space. But this is not simply due to the fact that it is a body; it is rather because it always is in relation with. And that which philosophy lacks, even more than a thought about the body, is a thought about our body-soul as being essentially relation-with. [ a part as an external thing to another part Explanation: It means that things exists alongside, beyond each other, exterior to each other.]—pp. 153-154
12 …It is not the case that because we have a body we belong to the world. On the contrary, it is insofar as we belong to the world that we have a body. This reversal implies that the meaning of the body must be derived from the meaning of belonging. But, as well, the vocabulary of consciousness must be abandoned, since to speak of consciousness is to situate the subject of the correlation in a relation of difference, which is indeed one of exclusion in relation to corporeality. Conceived through an exclusionary difference, consciousness immediately stops us from finding the possible foundation of belonging.—p. 155
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