Sonam Kachru, Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, considers himself a historian of philosophy without borders. His research centers on the history of philosophy in premodern South Asia, with particular emphasis on the history of Buddhist philosophy. His first book, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, discusses contributions to discussions of perception and experience made by the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, simultaneously exploring what it means to understand a work of philosophy from another time and another intellectual world. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Professor Kachru explores connections between Vasubandhu and other philosophers, influences for the book, and the work’s relevance to our contemporary world.
What is your work about?
My book is about an influential, but enigmatic work: The Twenty Verses by the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu who flourished in the late fourth to early fifth centuries C.E. (For one account of his philosophical career and contested legacy, listen to this episode of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast.)
Across many essays, and in two magisterial works, Vasubandhu contributed to thinking about action, persons, the structure of flows of experience, the unconscious, the metaphysics of intrinsic change, mereology, atomism, and much else. In The Twenty Verses he offers his thoughts on the nature of experience, initially with the help of mind-bending examples drawn from dreams and Buddhist cosmology. My book is an attempt to understand his choice of examples, and the view whose contours he explores with their help. The view roughly comes down to this: to have a world in view in experience is to be the kind of being that is fitted to the environment one’s actions have contributed to making—in perceptual experiences we are being put in touch with history, the history of what we have made of the world and what we have made of ourselves; or, to put the point differently, collective possibilities for experience are principally grounded in habituation to collective patterns of activity.
My book is about the understanding of experience on offer in this work. But it is also about the experience of understanding a work of philosophy from another time and, as it were, from another intellectual world. These two themes are threaded together to give the book its (hopefully) distinctive texture.
How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?
Much depends on context. At some times, I emphasize the continuity of Vasubandhu’s concerns with those of philosophers or problems that will be familiar to contemporary Anglophone philosophers; at other times, I emphasize discontinuities. I hope that the work will resonate with contemporary philosophers, though it is always a risk to emphasize what resists easy translation or assimilation, as I have tried to do in this book.
I should also say that I’ve set my back on an issue that has, for the most part, dominated the reception of Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses: is he, when all is said and done, declaring for some sort of idealism? (These concerns don’t begin with contemporary Anglophone philosophy. Premodern Indian philosophers have long debated such issues. Here follows a bibliographic point. For an up-close look, see Birgit Kellner and John Taber, “Studies in Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda Idealism I: The Interpretation of Vasubandhu’s Viṃśikā”; and, pulling back a bit when exploring the very idea of Buddhist idealism and its histories, see Daniel A. Arnold, “Buddhist idealism, epistemic and otherwise: Thoughts on the alternating perspectives of Dharmakīrti”; Bronwyn Finnigan, “Buddhist Idealism”; Matthew Kapstein, “Buddhist Idealists and their Jain Critics on Knowledge of External Objects.”)
Here’s a concern that has dominated the reception of Vasubandhu: can we fix or explain the nature of mental content by appealing to the causal influence of proximate, extra-mental objects? Just what are physical objects anyway? It’s true that Vasubandhu argues for restricting our descriptions of possible experiences to descriptions of presentations of content, eliding reference to objects as sources of (or as constraints on) content. That’s probably idealist enough for many. But my concerns in this book lie elsewhere—with the meaning of the categories “mind” and “experience” and the sense of what we are doing when trying to understand them.
Let me also say that if Vasubandhu is an idealist, he’s a peculiar one—in ways that might make him interesting. In the 19th and early 20th century Europe, his peculiarity would have made him more than interesting. He’d have been a celebrity of sorts. At least where the metaphysics of mind, memory, and time are concerned, he’d feel right at home—a perfect conversation-partner for William James, Henri Bergson, or Bertrand Russell.
Here’s why. For one thing, Vasubandhu’s mental events are not located in mental subjects; his streams of mental events are not identical with selves. He denies that we can capture how sequences of mental events unfold with the help of the categories of subjects and objects, whatever the appearances (from the inside of experiences) may suggest. Vasubandhu does not (a) identify mental events with mere experiential being. (He believes, instead, that we can and must revise our descriptions of experience using causal, and not merely phenomenological, re-descriptions.) He does not (b) identify existence with being perceived; nor does he (c) equate reality—or the ultimate—with the concrete existence of particulars, mental or physical (as he makes clearer in another work called Principled Exegesis). Denying (a) and (b) is consistent with his claim that we do not know our own minds, and that the factors individuating mental events and their content go beyond what is available to know when appealing to the phenomenal contents or apparent structure of any one individual’s experience. One implication of denying (c) for Vasubandhu is that what exists—as concrete particulars—need not exhaust the reality of mind, or its possibilities: what can be brought into being through philosophical praxis; moreover, “mind” (at least as we use the concept when describing what we are like now) does not offer the most perspicuous description of the forms of experience that can be brought into being.
There’s something deeply pragmatic about this. Vasubandhu is committed to thinking of experiential content as grounded in habituation. And consistent with this, he thinks that we transform ourselves, and the nature of our experience—its phenomenology and functional profile—by internalizing a view of what, prior to philosophical analysis and practice, has been true of experience as we have known it; but the categories (and descriptions) provided by philosophy cannot and (thank goodness!) need not be thought to hold beyond the limit provided by the fungibility of experience. Does this sit well with his being described as an idealist of any sort? I’m not sure. No doubt, there are (and will continue to be) many Vasubandhus. All of them worth speaking to, the peculiar idealist as well as the pragmatist, and others besides. But the Vasubandhu who interests me most is the one who thinks of experience as grounded in habituation and as fungible; the one who treats philosophy as an endless, possibility-disclosing and experience-shaping praxis, emphasizing all the while the radical vulnerabilities involved in our being persons embedded in particular worlds.
Who has influenced this work the most?
If one thinks of influence as Harold Bloom did, as having to do with relationships between texts and not persons, I would be flattered if my work were thought of in connection with the conversations one can get going by reading these three books together: Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities; B. K. Matilal’s Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge; and David Shulman’s More than Real: A History of Imagination in South India.
For what it is worth, I was reading and re-reading Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (with The Twenty Verses increasingly seeming to me like the labyrinthine, mysterious House featured in the novel); and I was listening to a lot of Vijay Iyer. Though perhaps more importantly, as I was finishing my book I read and re-read my teacher Steven Collins’ posthumously released Wisdom as a Way of Life, in which he contends that “Buddhism should be studied philosophically, literarily, and ethically using its own vocabulary and rhetorical tools.” I hope that something of its humanizing spirit may be found in Other Lives as well.
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to?
The ancient Indian philosopher Yājñavalkya once described the person as alternating between dream and waking, like a great fish in a river travelling between two banks, now closer to one, now another (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad IV.3.18; you can read more about this in Evan Thompson’s wonderful Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy). I would have liked to include more about the long history of thinking of persons in terms of regions of beings and alternating (and alternative) contexts of experience in Indian Philosophy as a deep context for Vasubandhu’s views. And I’d have liked to include some comparison; for example, comparing Vasubandhu’s virtual realism and the salience of alternating contexts of experience, with Nietzsche, who (in the translation of Judith Norman) said: “What we experience in dreams, as long as we experience it often enough, ends up belonging to the total economy of our soul just as much as anything we have ‘really’ experienced” (Beyond Good and Evil, remark §193). But most of all, I should also have liked to bring Vasubandhu into conversation with non-European interlocutors. As Bryce Huebner has shown me, Vasubandhu’s views resonate with families of West African philosophical views on mind in context (as discussed in the wonderful essay “Behavior as Mind in Context” by Adams, Salter, Pickett, Kurtiş, and Phillips), as well as with Maori cosmologies of time (as discussed by Makere Stewart-Harawira in The New Imperial Order: Indigenous Responses to Globalization). I should have done more to facilitate such comparisons and conversations, and hope that others will do so.
In a companion work (under contract) for the wonderful Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies, I hope to make good on this omission, while also emphasizing on behalf of Vasubandhu the upshot of his cosmological arguments: namely, our epistemic, semantic, and existential fragility as persons. In her brilliant dissertation, “The Fragile Estate: Essays on Luminosity, Normativity and Metaphilosophy,” Amia Srinivasan, adapting E. R. Dodds’ phrase “the fragile estate of man,” discusses our fragility in the sense that “our knowledge—of our own minds, of whether we are in violation of the epistemic and ethical norms, and of the philosophical truths themselves—is hostage to forces outside our control.” For Vasubandhu, as I hope to show, our fragility can manifest in connection with what we know of our own minds, in what we think we (and others) mean, and in our vocabularies and judgments regarding who, at any given time, we really are. I’ve come to think that this is one of the more important contributions of his work.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
We are at a breaking point for humans. Helpfully, Vasubandhu’s twinning of mind and world has an ethical charge. He helps me see that the world we are in is not given. We have contributed to its making, even as we contribute to its unmaking. And he helps me to see that we can be otherwise, reminding me to ask: what worlds do our actions contribute to making? What sorts of lives, with what range of experiences, do we enable or exclude by our characteristic patterns of action and inaction? Never mind this book. “What is far more important,” filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki once said in a phantom speech intended to have been given at the Japan Foundation Award for 2005, “is that this world continues to exist, far, far, behind the screen, in a place invisible to the eye, way beyond the left and right edges of the screen, where the sun is shining, and animals, plants, and humans are alive.”
Sonam Kachru
Sonam Kachru is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His research centers on the history of philosophy in premodern South Asia, with particular emphasis on the history of Buddhist philosophy. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism is my first book.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
