Human being, bodily being : phenomenology from classical india / Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human body (Philosophy).

Human body in literature.

Indian literature--History and criticism.

Indian literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

viii, 204 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary:

"Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of classical Indian texts that deal with bodily subjectivity. Examining four texts from different genres - a medical handbook, epic dialogue, a manual of Buddhist practice, and erotic poetry - he argues for a 'phenomenological ecology' of bodily subjectivity in health, gender, contemplation, and lovemaking. 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 paradigm of ecological phenomenology obviates the need to choose between apparently incompatible perspectives of the human. The delineation of body is arrived at by working back phenomenologically from the world of experience, with the acknowledgement that the point of arrival - a conception of what counts as bodiliness - is dependent upon the exact motivation for attending to experience, the areas of experience attended to, and the expressive tools available to the phenomenologist. Ecological phenomenology is pluralistic, yet integrates the ways experience is attended to and studied, permitting apparently inconsistent intuitions about bodiliness to be explored in novel ways. Rather than seeing particular framings of our experience as in tension with each other, we should see each such framing as playing its own role according to the local descriptive and analytic concern of a text."-- Provided by Publisher's website.

Contents:

1 The Body in Illness and Health: The Caraka Samhita p. 27

Situating the Text: Medicine, Body, History p. 27

Human Agency as the Frame for Medicine p. 30

The Subject as the Complex of Natural Elements p. 34

The Bodily Subject and the Transcendental Self p. 40

Diagnosis: Phenomenology in-between Physician and Patient p. 45

The Well Body: The Subject and Virtuous Life p. 50

The Body in a Medical Version of Ecological Phenomenology p. 54

2 The Gendered Body: The Dialogue of Sulabha and Janaka, Mahabharata, Santiparvan chapter 308 p. 58

A Narrative on Gendered Phenomenology p. 58

The Story and Its Possibilities p. 60

Reading the Text through Sulabha p. 65

The Body as the Frame of Dialogue p. 67

The Mode of Conversation p. 69

The King's Speech: Being a Man, Being a Woman, in a Man's World p. 73

Sulabha on Rational Normativity: Ungendered Equality? p. 76

Sulabha on the Ontogenetic Body: Sex Properties between Biology and Construction p. 80

The Claim for an Ungendered Neutrality: Janaka's Paradigm of the Metaphysical Self p. 84

The Torments of the King, or the Immanence of Masculinist Power p. 87

Freedom: A Woman's Agency, a Particular- Human Path p. 89

Concluding Puzzle p. 97

3 The Body in Contemplation: Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga p. 99

Contemplative Practice and Ecological Phenomenology p. 99

The Bodily Human Being: The Phenomenological Emergence of the Self in Question p. 101

The Visuddhimagga p. 108

A Brief Introduction to Concentration Practice and Its Purpose p. 110

Contemplating the Corpse: The Ecology of the Meditative Object p. 113

Attentiveness to the Living Body: Between Revulsion and Concentration p. 118

The Fungibility of Bodily Categories: The Lesson from Breathing p. 123

Re/constituting Bodiliness I: Understanding as Practice p. 125

Re/constituting Bodiliness II: Formation (rüpa) p. 128

Re/constituting Bodiliness III: Cognition (vinnana) and Other Aggregates p. 132

Ecological Phenomenology in Contemplative Practice p. 140

4 The Body in Love: Nala and Damayanti's Love/Making in Sri Harsa's Naisadhacarita p. 142

Bodiliness and the Erotic p. 142

The Naisadhacarita p. 143

Some Remarks on the Narrative Context of Love and Lovemaking p. 146

To Begin With: Lover Unmet, Love Reciprocated p. 148

The Ecology of Erotic Phenomenology: General Considerations p. 153

Social Order in a Capacious Ecology p. 155

The 'World' of the Lovers p. 157

Touch, Vision, and the Other Senses: The Erotic as Multimodal p. 162

Lovemaking as Questioning Oneself p. 169

Percolating Subjectivity: Modesty and Other Bodily States p. 170

The Contingency of the Heterosexuate p. 174

The Sense of What Body Is: On Boundaries and Their Limits p. 176.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [187]-197) and index.

Other Format:

Electronic version: Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Human Being, Bodily Being.

ISBN:

0198823622

9780198823629

OCLC:

1017604305