Abstract

The subject of this extraordinary, demanding, and often moving book is being human. What it means to be such a being is here explored by means of scrupulous attention to ways in which "bodily being"--the author's term for how subjectivity may be expressed through contextually specific modes of embodiment--are drawn on, expressed, and transformed in what one might call different epistemic and experiential contexts found in premodern Indian thought in Sanskrit and Pāli.One of the most attractive things in this book is that, within its pages, Indian philosophy is found in a number of genres: in medical texts, in epic (in the...