Human Being. Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India.

• Author: Selby, Martha Ann

Human Being. Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India. By CHAKR.WARTHI RAM-PRASAD. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. viii + 204.

In Human Being, Bodily Being, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad proposes to situate the body within philosophical discourse through the study of "explorations of experience that bring to the fore the nature and role of the body." He proceeds with four "case studies"--taking us through an interesting range of Sanskrit and Pali materials on medicine, gender, contemplation, and love--in order to look at "the body" as "a conceptual category in the understanding of experience in a myriad of ways in Indian texts" (p. 1). Correctly remarking that there is no "Cartesian shock" in Indian thought about the body (p. 5), Ram-Prasad approaches "the matter of the body obliquely, through how explorations of subjectivity occur in different genres of classical Indian writing" (p. 10), hoping to "develop a fruitful way of doing comparative and mutually illuminating philosophy" (p. 11).

The whole book is prismed through the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and asks questions concerning the relationality of "body" and "mind-subject." While there has been much ink spilled on the subject of mind and embodiment in Western philosophical contexts (James Dewey, William James, and more recently, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, especially Johnson's 2007 book. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding [Univ. of Chicago Press]), Ram-Prasad examines "how 'body' is expressed in the experiential world of the Indian imagination" (p. 13) by exploring notions of "bodiliness" coupled with the concept of "ecological phenomenology" (p. 26).

Ram-Prasad's writing is quite dense, and the claims that he makes, which are important for those of us who work on texts in the South Asian classical world, could have been made much more simply. For example, in the first chapter, devoted to the body in the Ayurvedic classic Caraka-samhita, the prose reads like a first draft, a plotting-out of ideas rather than what we might expect from a piece of polished text. As a result, the claim-making proceeds in fits and starts, and the writing itself is very self-conscious: Ram-Prasad seems to be afraid to make any moves. He concentrates on the sutra- and sarira-sthanas of the text (on "fundamentals" and "on the body," respectively), writing that in the Caraka-samhita "we see a striking way to handle the relationship between the fluid generality of...