Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India

Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India, by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. v + 204.

In the matter of the body, even comparative language—the very use of English today—is soaked through and through with the Cartesian version of the intuition of dualism: the idea that we are fundamentally a mind and a body that must be either related ingeniously, or else reduced to one another. Instead, by deliberately looking at genres that pertain to other aspects of being human, I seek to go deeper into texts that simply start elsewhere than with intuitions of dualism, even while being engrossed in the category of the experiential ‘body’ (in all its translational variety in Sanskrit and Pali). (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 11)

1. Introduction

Ram-Prasad’s Human Being, Bodily Being explores the manifestations of human experience through the category of bodiliness, a term he uses ‘to indicate the general human way of being present in experience, without unwittingly implying either an ontology of consciousness and materiality, or its overcoming’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 14). Classical Indian texts provide RamPrasad with fertile ground for developing a phenomenology that is not beholden to the Cartesian problematic of the ontological distinction between mind and body. Pre-modern Indian traditions explore at great length questions of what it is to be human in a world, aware of oneself and others, in light of assumptions and categories that fundamentally differ from those of Western Phenomenology. Ram-Prasad brings

these Indian traditions into conversation with Western Phenomenologists by picking up on the insistence of contemporary theorists such a Chris Nagel that ‘the core meaning of phenomenology is best understood as a discipline of thought rather than a theory of experience, knowledge, or consciousness—or, for that matter, “the body”’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 17, emphases in original). If phenomenology is a method designed to explore human experience in fine-grained detail, without importing assumptions about what will be found therein, then traditions outside the historical conditions within which Western Phenomenology developed provide exemplary conversation partners for advancing the phenomenological project. Much more than simply making this claim, Ram-Prasad’s work enacts it. Human Being, Bodily Being pushes forward contemporary discussions on human embodiment in multiple registers, and should serve as a touchstone for theorists interested in the mechanics of human experience.

Through his detailed studies of classical Indian works from four different genres—medicine, epic narrative, contemplative discipline, and erotic poetry—Ram-Prasad develops an ‘ecological phenomenology’ in which the ‘material constituents of the objective body whose boundaries and features vary, ambient features of the sensory range, affective artefacts in the environment, norms of conduct, and the dynamics of social identity’ form the relevant context for understanding human bodiliness (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 25). Human bodiliness is ‘the human being as that which is a subject through and as “body”—in terms of the interactive relationships between a dynamic range of contextualizing aspects of the world of the subject’ (RamPrasad 2018, p. 185). The different purposes of each of Ram-Prasad’s four texts provide distinctive insights into bodiliness, and will be of interest to philosophers from a number of disciplines.

Chapter One focuses on how the Caraka Sa:hita¯, an ancient Compendium (Sa:hita¯) of the a¯yurveda (loosely, the science of health and longevity) compiled by a figure named Caraka, understands bodily illness and health. Chapter Two seeks insight into gendered subjectivity through an analysis of an encounter in the Maha¯bha¯rata between Sulabha¯, a female ascetic, and King Janaka, a powerful ruler who has claimed to achieve spiritual transcendence even as he remains

embroiled in the affairs of his kingdom. Chapter Three indicates how Buddhagosa’s abhidhamma constitutes a phenomenological analysis of experience as it appears to a meditating subject rather than, as is often assumed, a catalogue of the metaphysical constituents of reality. Chapter Four turns to a section of S´r¯ı HarXa’s NaiXadhacarita that contains a dramatization of the story from the Maha¯bha¯rata of the wedding night of Nala and Damayant¯ı to examine the fluidity of human bodiliness in love. While Ram-Prasad suggests that his account of bodiliness emerges gradually from the texts taken together, he also indicates that each chapter may be read on its own as an independent study.

In the remainder of this review, I will focus on Chapters Two and Four. In these chapters, Ram-Prasad argues in part that patriarchal gender norms constrain the constitution of bodiliness within the contexts that they govern, but that the gender inversions present in each of the two works he studies provide glimpses of how interpenetrating bodies can subvert and refashion these norms. While I agree that these texts provide fascinating and under-utilized resources for examining the construction of gendered bodies, I find that they do not both provide positive models for empowered female bodiliness. Rather than seeing

these narratives as turning on gender, I see them as turning on questions regarding the ethical negotiation of bodiliness, especially in sexualized encounters. In the contest between Sulabha¯ and Janaka, we do indeed see a female protagonist gain the upper hand over a male in a male-dominated world, but she does so in a way that reinforces nonconsensual sexual subjugation as an appropriate mode of philosophical conquest. Both her methods and the outcome are highly problematic: she violates Janaka’s embodied integrity against his will and claims victory when she is able to ‘spend this night in this body of yours’ after reducing him to silence (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 95). In contrast, the story of Nala and Damayant¯ı celebrates an erotic encounter that is made possible by the continuous negotiation of an emerging world that the mutual intermingling of two bodily humans creates.

I draw on Rebecca Kukla’s (2018) work on ethical sexual negotiations to explore why Sulabha¯’s actions are paradigmatically unethical, whereas RamPrasad’s reading of Nala and Damayant¯ı serves as a welcome illustration of ethical sex. Ram-Prasad’s nuanced readings of these encounters demonstrate the power of his methodology of ecological phenomenology. Although I disagree with his moral valuation of Sulabha¯’s actions, I find much of value for understanding (un)ethical negotiation in his description of this episode. Moreover, as Kukla points out, contemporary philosophical literature is sorely lacking examples and discussions of when sex goes right. Ram-Prasad’s depiction of Nala and Damyant¯ı provides such a discussion. I further argue that attention to a particular strand of Indian philosophy of language grants additional insight into why ongoing negotiation is key to ethical interpersonal interactions.

2. Sulabha¯ and sexual violation as a tool of philosophical conquest The encounter between Sulabha¯ and Janaka turns on the question of whether or not a human being can achieve liberation, figured as a detached transcendence that sees all things as equal and removes any form of dependence on another, while still engaging in worldly affairs. Janaka claims that, since he has achieved such freedom, he can still rule his kingdom, amass wealth, and have sex while remaining

aloof from desires and consequences. Sulabha¯ decides to test Janaka’s claim by presenting herself to Janaka in the idealized form of a beautiful woman who is also a renunciant. Ram-Prasad compellingly argues that Sulabha¯’s choice reflects her understanding that her female form marks her for inevitable sexualization by powerful men, and so serves as a ‘gambit’ to undermine Janaka’s claim to transcendence (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 66). If Janaka reacts to Sulabha¯ as a sexualized woman, then he has not achieved the freedom that he claims.

Indeed, Janaka almost immediately figures their encounter as sexual. He is fascinated by the contrast between Sulabha¯’s young, beautiful form and her status as a renunciant. He questions her about her marital status and lineage. She uses his assumption that, as a woman, she must be defined by her relationship to a husband and a family to launch a discourse on the ontology of human bodiliness. She, like him and like all humans, is situated through a biological morphology that maps the constituents of human being, from mind and sensory capacities to the coarse physical features that constitute gender. This morphology correlates

with particular social constraints on action in the world, but does not remove for any human the possibility of freedom as transcendent detachment since rational capacities are integrated into all forms of human bodiliness. By placing her own life of renunciation, reason, and skilled debate within recognized social norms concerning the conduct and training of (paradigmatically male) sages, Sulabha¯ upends Janaka’s assumptions about the proper relationship between gendered bodies and rational capacities (Ram-Prasad 2018, pp. 92–94).

Having dispatched Janaka’s attempt to undermine her credibility, she moves to directly refute his claims of his own transcendence. According to Janaka’s own understanding of human freedom, one’s self is an entity who recognizes the sameness of self and other since the true self is beyond any distinctions. If Janaka were truly liberated, he would simply see Sulabha¯ as an equal, unmarked by gender or social affiliation. As she chides him:

Since you see your self within yourself by means of your self, why do you not, in exactly the same way, by means of your self, see your self in someone else? And if you are firmly resolved upon the sameness in your self and in another, why do you ask me ‘Who are you?’ And, ‘Whose are you?’ Why, King of Mithila¯, does someone who is freed from the pairs of opposites (such as, ‘This is mine and this is not mine’) ask, ‘Who are you, whose are you, and where do you come from?’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 85)

Janaka has fallen for Sulabha¯’s gambit. His reaction to her as a sexualized, socially situated woman as opposed to a fellow liberated being powerfully demonstrates that he lacks the transcendence that he has claimed. Moreover, Sulabha¯’s reasoned articulation of a human transcendence that moves through, but is not dependent on, a particular gendered embodiment provides a powerful approach to thinking about the equality of human intellectual capacities without dismissing bodily particularity or ceding the unmarked self to masculinist norms.

Ram-Prasad’s exploration of this position is nuanced and fruitful. However, this is not all that there is to Sulabha¯’s approach to Janaka, and the way in which Sulabha¯ uses the discourse of transcendence to dismiss Janaka’s own bodily autonomy indicates that there may be a significant problem with her articulation of this position. At the beginning of their debate, Sulabha¯ uses her yogic powers to forcibly penetrate and remain within Janaka’s consciousness. (The ability to enter another’s mind is a commonly listed attainment that comes as the result of intense yogic practice in classical Indian traditions. Ram-Prasad recommends that readers who do not accept the actual possibility of such an action treat this as akin to the use of possible worlds in analytic philosophy (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 92).) She will argue that there would be nothing wrong with this action if Janaka were liberated as he claims to be. Although the narrator states that Janaka initially ‘merely smiled, and, keeping his being distinct from hers, received her being with his being’, Janaka rather quickly experiences Sulabha¯’s presence within him as an unwanted and nonconsensual sexual act involving a forced violation of his essential bodily limits (Ram-Prasad

2018, p. 70). Ram-Prasad summarizes: ‘His interpretation of her daring to bring their beings into contact (bha¯vaspars´a) is that it is a violation, whose sexual nature is eventually brought out’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 75). Sulabha¯ keeps Janaka in this state throughout their entire encounter; at the same time that she is giving discourse on the morphology of human bodiliness and the nature of freedom, in his mind, she is bodily raping him.

Rebecca Kukla’s (2018) focus on the importance of ongoing communication for ethical sexual engagements provides a good window on the full ethical consequences of Sulabha¯’s approach. As an initial note, it seems that Sulabha¯’s actions (granting as Ram-Prasad does that her yogic ability is real) constitute a nonconsensual violation of Janaka’s bodily limits and autonomy under even the most minimal ‘no means no’ take on consent. The violation, however, goes deeper than this, and demonstrates the ways in which the harm involved in even a straightforward case of consent violation is best captured through a negotiation model. Kukla emphasizes that there is far more to ethical sexual encounters than an initial moment defined by one (paradigmatically male) party requesting sex and another (paradigmatically female) party either consenting to or denying that request (Kukla 2018, pp. 78–79). Kukla’s frame recentres the focus on the full process of ethically initiating, maintaining, and exiting sexual encounters.

Kukla’s insistence that more than the first moment matters forecloses the possibility of seeing Janaka’s initial reaction (his smile, his accepting her into his being) as establishing a once-and-for-all form of consent that would mitigate or dismiss Sulabha¯’s culpability. To begin with, although Janaka initially reacts welcomingly to her advance, Sulabha¯ denies him the ability to discuss the terms of their interaction. Her move into Janaka’s essence is not preceded by any kind of negotiation. Ram-Prasad reads this as an intentional and necessary decentring of the male gaze (Ram-Prasad 2018, pp. 70– 73). I am highly hesitant to endorse the idea that counter-objectification is the only way for a woman to exercise autonomy in a male-dominated world. It certainly does not lend itself

to ethical sexual interactions. Even more, Sulabha¯ mocks Janaka’s later statements that he is no longer comfortable with their contact, refusing to withdraw even after Janaka has explicitly asked her to do so. As Kukla indicates, ‘The ability to exit an activity without pressure, coercion, or ambiguity is just as important to autonomous participation as is valid consent at the start’ (Kukla 2018, p. 88). Sulabha¯’s actions are close to an inversion of the structures that Kukla proposes for ethical sexual engagement. Rather than making an invitation and opening negotiations, Sulabha¯ acts on Janaka without any regard for his autonomy. Rather than remaining attuned to Janaka’s growing discomfort throughout the encounter, she actively dismisses him. Rather than respecting his request to stop and having plans for ethically exiting their encounter, she denies that she’s doing anything wrong and continues.

Sulabha¯’s actions display a remarkable combination of gaslighting, victimblaming, paternalism, and claims that her superior realization renders her immune from ethical consequences. As she tells Janaka—while still engaging in the act he is experiencing as rape—‘If you are completely free, what wrong did I do you when I made entry into you with my essence? There is a special stricture in the rules for ascetics: They must dwell in an empty house. What violation did I commit, and to whom, when I came to stay in this empty house?’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 90). Having hollowed out his bodily subjectivity, Sulabha¯ treats Janaka as an empty shell to be used and discarded at will: ‘As an almsman might dwell for one night in an empty house in a city, so I will spend this night in

this body of yours…Having slept well sheltered, pleased, I will go on the morrow’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 95). RamPrasad sees Sulabha¯’s ‘decisive rejection of sexuality’ as justifying these actions; since the encounter is in no way erotic to her, Janaka simply reveals his own limitations when he reads it as a sexual violation (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 95). The episode ends with the narrator’s approving statement that Janaka had been silenced by ‘these reasoned and significant statements’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 95). Silence is interpreted as consent and philosophical victory: Sulabha¯’s ability to blamelessly remain in the empty house that was Janaka indicates that she was right to challenge his claims to transcendence, that her account of human bodiliness and freedom is correct, and that she does no wrong by violating him.

This is not an accident of the narrative. Sulabha¯ justifies her actions using precisely the frame of the transcendent sage who is beyond the opposites of self and other. She turns Janaka’s experience of rape on its head, claiming that she is doing no wrong. Rather, that he experiences her actions as unwanted shows that he lacks realization: concerning the nature of freedom, she tells him that ‘you did not really learn that lesson, or you learned it wrongly, or you learned something that merely seemed to be the lesson, or you learned some other lesson instead’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 90). She makes clear that he

has learned the wrong lesson because ‘I have no attachment to my own body, how could I be attached to another’s. You should not say such a thing about someone like me who is freed…There is no mixing of social orders in the passionless (de-attached, bha¯va¯bha¯va) union of one who is freed—who knows unity and separateness—with another who is freed’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 89, p. 92). As Ram-Prasad summarizes, ‘Janaka’s unfreedom is evident in his receiving that proximity in conventional—and thus, sexual—terms’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 91). It seems that the lesson Sulabha¯ is teaching Janaka is that since he has no control even over his own bodily boundaries, he is certainly not transcendently free. A liberated person can neither commit violations nor be violated. If Janaka experiences her actions otherwise, that’s on him.

It is possible that the biological morphology that Sulabha¯ articulates could stand as an inspiration for an independent position in ongoing discussions about the relationship between sex, gender, and reason. Ram-Prasad is right to see new approaches to gendered bodiliness emerging from classical Indian texts. As Sulabha¯ presents it, however, her position is hopelessly entangled in norms that actively justify using sexual violation as a tool of domination. If we read Sulabha¯ as concerned with the effect of her actions on others, then it is possible that she sees Janaka as trapped in a dangerous and deep-seated delusion about his own freedom, and that she thinks that the only way to knock him out of it is through a visceral experience of his own limitations. However, I take it as axiomatic that it is not possible to rape someone for their own good. No matter how delusional someone is, violating their bodily integrity is never an appropriate tool for showing them the error of their ways.

The text offers a different avenue for exonerating Sulabha¯: if she has in fact attained true freedom, then her actions do not actually have any consequences. The impact of her actions on Janaka is simply beside the point, at least for her. This is the interpretation that Ram-Prasad offers: ‘It is because her freedom consists in not being bound to the material states that determine the bodily being of humans that she has the power to subvert the boundaries of those material

states… For her, “taking on” a beautiful form, or bringing her cognitive essence into contact with Janaka’s are variations on a theme’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 92). This is also highly problematic. A view of what it means to be human that allows for forms of bodiliness that are not responsible for their violations of others does not lead to an ethical model for gendered embodiment. If anything, the trope of the transcendent sage could provide a powerful tool for misogynist systems that seek to deny justice and autonomy by denying that a crime has even occurred.

In this way, although I agree with Ram-Prasad that ‘this episode permits viewing as an enactment of the ecology of sexist containment and the intentional, agentive reconfiguration of gendered phenomenology as freedom’, I caution that a freedom that includes the ability to transgress the limits of others’ embodied selves with impunity does not provide a positive ethical foundation (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 68). A woman who breaks out of sexist containment is not a moral exemplar if she uses her freedom to violate others. If this encounter is ‘the most strikingly supportive and unambiguous narrative of a woman’s autonomy’ in the Maha¯bha¯rata (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 63), then we need to look elsewhere to develop an empowered understanding of gendered phenomenology that neither denies the significance of different forms of human embodiment nor traps women in stereotypes that reduce their autonomy.

Fortunately, there are many other resources in classical Indian traditions, including those that work within the narrative space of the Maha¯bha¯rata, that develop such a position. Sulabha¯’s disregard of another’s right to maintain their own bodily autonomy is neither the last nor the only nor the hegemonic

understanding of sexual ethics in the epic text. Ram-Prasad notes the incredible complexity of all forms of human bodiliness—including female bodiliness—in the Maha¯bha¯rata: ‘[T]he Maha¯bha¯rata is full of counter-narrative, subversions, and so many exceptions that exceptions do not prove a rule as prove to be the rule’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 62). Chapter Four in his own book explores an expansion of another episode from the Maha¯bha¯rata, the story of Nala and Damayant¯ı, that provides a far more powerful account of ethical sexual engagement.

3. Negotiation, language, and bodiliness transformed

Kukla laments the narrow focus in much of contemporary literature on ways in which sexual autonomy is blocked and positions her focus on ‘how sexual negotiation can enable sexual agency, pleasure, and possibilities, as well as how it can lead to harm’ as a corrective (Kukla 2018, p. 71). Ram-Prasad’s reading of S´r¯ı HarXa’s account of Nala and Damayant¯ı’s courtship and wedding night provides a welcome account of ethical, fulfilling sex that accords well with her model. I expand on Kukla’s focus on sexual communication and Ram-Prasad’s ecological erotic phenomenology by bringing a particular strand of classical Indian philosophy of language to bear on the question of how negotiations create the space for the ethical intermingling of self and other.

As is well-known, many Indian traditions consider language to be worldcreating. (See Bronkhorst 2019 for an overview.) Whether language is identified with the stuff of reality itself, as in many Vedic traditions (for example, Shulman 2012), or is seen as a practical tool that constitutes our everyday worlds even as it falsifies how things really are, as in many Buddhist traditions (for example, Tzohar 2018), the intersubjective experience of ourselves in relation to our worlds is fundamentally bound up with language. Seen in light of language as world-creating, sexual communication matters because it allows humans, in all their intersubjective bodiliness, to mutually guide the dynamic of constituting the boundaries of selfhood within an intimate sphere.

The Pratyabhijn˜a¯ S´aiva tradition articulates a particularly powerful understanding of the relationship between language and world creation. Within the framework of a revised version of BhartPhari’s four levels of va¯c (Padoux 1990; Torella 2008), Pratyabhijn˜a¯ S´aivas use the M¯ıma¯:sa¯ theory of the eternality of the phonemes to account for how the inherent meaningfulness of the constituents of language undergirds all signification (Torella 2004), and the Buddhist Dharmak¯ırti’s apoha (exclusion) theory to account for how language in the everyday world is nonetheless fully conventional (Torella 1992). The

transition between eternal and conventional forms of language occurs when nondual consciousness, which is understood as the potential for the manifestation of any and all worlds, limits itself in order to produce determinate awarenesses, structured by subject and object. Note that consciousness here is not the same as mind in the Cartesian mind/body dualism. Both the material and the mental aspects of reality are equally delimitations of consciousness, which has the capacity to manifest both while still remaining itself (Ratie´ 2017).

This process of consciousness’ self-delimitation is particularly relevant to the question of how communication creates bodily experiences. Following Dharmak¯ırti, the Pratyabhijn˜a¯ S´aiva tradition claims that the way that humans conceptualize their experience always involves excluding large swaths of causally available perceptual data. The judgments based on this exclusion shape experience at a fundamental level; even merely identifying an object with something that has been experienced previously involves deploying concepts. These concepts emerge only after embodied conditions and habituated patterns of thoughts and actions lead individuals to selectively ignore aspects of their experience that do not conform to their goals, expectations, and desires. A

determinate experience is not the result of interaction between stable entities, but rather is simply what’s left when patterns of embodied thought and action lead one to gloss over all the other ways in which one’s experience could be parsed (Dunne 2011). Although Dharmak¯ırti sees apoha as ultimately falsifying reality by positing real similarities where none in fact exist, the Pratyabhijn˜a¯ S´aivas are able to rely on the ultimate identity of consciousness and va¯c to provide the causal input necessary to create determinate experiences that still retain their connection to the larger potencies of language. For the Pratyabhijn˜a¯ S´aivas, different types of perceivers carve away various slices of the ultimate to form concepts, and these concepts continuously generate and are generated within subject/ object structured conventional worlds (Prueitt 2017).

In short, for the Pratyabhijn˜a¯ S´aivas, reality is inherently suffused with language. The infinite potential of language to express any and all possible worlds is delimited by a process of exclusion through which the boundaries of self and other are created. These boundaries are ossified as concepts, which then form the basis for meaning in the everyday world. The division of a moment of awareness into subject and object arises precisely by carving away aspects of the potentialities of language that are deemed irrelevant to one’s goals and desires. This carving happens at a number of levels, and people within their conventional worlds are by and large not aware of the initial impulse animating even the most mundane experiences. However, since the concepts through which experience is formed can always be delimited differently, it is possible to radically alter one’s world by changing what is excluded moment to moment in the desire-driven construction of self and other.

In this light, sexual communication, as the mutually articulated negotiation of the interpenetration of self and other, calls upon the world-creating capacity of language to refigure bodily boundaries. Failure to negotiate results in the unilateral imposition of one’s own conception of another’s identity onto another person, denying the other person their status as a creative agent. Violation of consent results in the explicit destruction of another’s articulation of their own boundaries. When the initial violation of consent is extended and coupled with an explicit rejection that any wrong is occurring, it renders the other

person, as Sulabha¯ rendered Janaka, silent, shamed, and without the capacity to maintain the integrity of their own selfhood. Looking at sexual communication in this context provides further support for Kukla’s focus on negotiations because: (1) both sexual fulfilment and sexual harm are intimately dependent on whether or not the involved parties communicate effectively; (2) for ethical sex, this communication must be ongoing since worlds are created moment by moment through language; and (3) the language in question here is not just a matter of literal spoken words, but reaches into nonliteral or metalanguage, bodily gesture, intuition, and even basic forms of perceptual discrimination.

Ram-Prasad’s description of Nala and Damayant¯ı’s courtship and wedding night provides a concrete example of this kind of mutually fulfilling sexual communication that results in the creative refashioning of the boundaries of self and other. As Ram-Prasad describes, Nala and Damayant¯ı grow in their love for each other through a form of mediated conversation that allows them to express themselves fully: after hearing of each other second-hand, Nala is able to employ a messenger in the form of a golden goose to carry each of their thoughts directly to the other, largely unfettered by patriarchal norms (Ram-Prasad

2018, pp. 148–51). This allows, contra gender expectations, for Nala to display longing vulnerability and Damayant¯ı to openly affirm her desire for Nala. Their relationship thus starts with a ‘sincerity of mutual commitment [that is] assured through the manner in which Nala and Damayant¯ı come to feel for each other…To a messenger, to a third party of neutral status, much could be said frankly’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 151, p. 169). The dramatic articulations of consent that follow—Nala’s presenting himself and Damayant¯ı’s choosing him at her bridal contest, the marriage ceremony itself, and the consummation of the marriage on their wedding night—are moments of an ongoing process that is opened up by the creative power of honest communication.

The fact that their relationship exists in this larger negotiated context opens up new possibilities for exploration, playfulness, pleasure, and selfrealization. At the beginning of their lovemaking, Damayant¯ı becomes shy through remembering how immodestly she behaved by declaring herself openly for Nala. When she withdraws from him, he questions himself about the terms of their relationship: ‘He suspected a lack of love in her— she who looked away only in blushful shyness. Then recalling her feelings for him, discovered when a messenger to her, he did away with his alarm’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 170). Nala is right in how he reads Damayant¯ı’s shyness: she has retreated not because of a lack of interest, but because she is overwhelmed by worry that her desires are not appropriate.

He can know this because of their previous communication, which he actively reflects on in this moment of heightened passion. Even firm in this knowledge, however, he moves slowly and carefully, checking in with Damayant¯ı to ensure that his invitation is welcomingly accepted: ‘She bent low with modesty and he kissed her on her forehead. She unbent a little and he kissed her on her cheeks. She was emboldened, he smiled and instantly kissed her mouth’ (quoted in Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 164). This interaction continues the call, response, and coming together that has defined their relationship. It is as if, in the contemporary standardized kink language of inscene communication, Nala had read a ‘yellow’ from Damayant¯ı’s movements, pulled back to seek more information, and allowed Damayant¯ı to ease into an enthusiastic ‘green’ (Kukla 2018, p. 87).

The mutuality of their interactions allows each to embody aspects of the other, first in terms of playful inversions of gender norms, and then in terms of a melting and reconstitution of their interpersonal boundary. As their lovemaking deepens, their moans, gestures, and caresses are no less forms of communication than their most prosaic interactions, and Ram-Prasad rightly emphasizes that their experience of their surroundings bleeds into and is forever changed by their encounter (Ram-Prasad 2018, pp. 157–61). S´r¯ı HarXa represents their bodily intermingling through the play of sweat and ornamentation, and, most evocatively, the transfer of saffron drawings, lovingly painted in celebration of the wedding day, from Damayant¯ı’s breast onto Nala’s (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 173, p. 182). The Pratyabhijn˜a¯ S´aiva theory of language suggests how mutual communication continues to shape shared worlds beyond articulated language use. Instead of standing apart as two subjects independently carving out slices of an external world, they move into deeper forms of language that allow mutually sculpted selves and worlds to arise. Here again the importance of Ram-Prasad’s ecological phenomenology comes in, for the lovers do not forget the world or themselves in their embrace. Rather, erotic phenomenology brings to the fore how humans, as bodily beings, always exist in larger enacted ecologies. 4. Conclusion

Human Being, Bodily Being makes a striking contribution to phenomenology as a whole: there are traditions that are friendly to the phenomenological project of providing a nuanced, careful, and rich understanding of human bodily experience, but that are not subject to the Cartesian mind/body problematic or its overcoming. Ram-Prasad draws on the historical particularity of the phenomenological method while unabashedly (and correctly) pointing out: ‘None of the Western material studied here…generally sought to frame the philosophical enterprise of phenomenological analysis as being one about a culturally circumscribed

subject…I take these classical Indian texts to be equally concerned about human beings as such, as being intrinsically about the human condition’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 185). If all this book did were convincingly argue that phenomenologists should be looking at Indian traditions, it would still be a valuable contribution to contemporary discourse. But the book does far more than this. Each of the four chapters provides compelling explorations of different types of bodily being; their contributions to particular subfields stand on their own independent of any methodological considerations. My discussion of ethical sexual communication presents merely one area in which Human Being, Bodily Being should spark new conversations.

References

Bronkhorst, Johannes 2019. A S´abda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press) Dunne, John 2011. ‘Key Features of Dharmak¯ırti’s Apoha Theory’, in Siderits Mark, Tom J.F. Tillemans, and Arindam Chakrabarti (eds.), Apoha: Buddhist Nominalism and Human Cognition, 84– 108 (New York: Columbia University Press)

Kukla, Rebecca 2018. ‘That’s What She Said: The Language of Sexual Negotiation’, in Ethics 129 (1): 70–97

Padoux, Andre´ 1990. Va¯c: the Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras (Albany: State University of New York Press) Prueitt, Catherine 2017. ‘Shifting Concepts: The Realignment of Dharmak¯ırti on Concepts and the Error of Subject/Object Duality in Pratyabhijn˜a¯ S´aiva Thought’, in The Journal of Indian Philosophy 45 (1): 21–47 Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi 2018. Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Ratie´, Isabelle 2017. ‘Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta on the Freedom of Consciousness’, in The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy Online <https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199314621.013.27>

Shulman, David Dean 2012. More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press)

Torella, Raffaele 1992. ‘The Pratyabhijn˜a¯ and the LogicalEpistemological School of Buddhism’, in Teun Goudriaan (ed.), Ritual and Speculation in Early Tantrism: Studies in Honor of Andre´ Padoux, 327–345 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) —— 2004. ‘How Is Verbal Signification Possible: Understanding Abhinavagupta’s Reply’, in The Journal of Indian Philosophy 32 (2): 173–188

—— 2008. ‘From an Adversary to the Main Ally: The Place of BhartPhari in the Kashmirian S´aiva Advaita’, in Mrinal Kaul and Ashok Aklujkar (eds.), Linguistic Traditions of Kashmir: Essays in Memory of Pa>nit Dinanath Yaksha, 508–524 (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld in association with Harabhatta Shastri Indological Research Institute Jammu)

Tzohar, Roy 2018. A Yoga¯ca¯ra Buddhist Theory of Metaphor (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press) University of British Columbia CATHERINE PRUEITT catherine.prueitt@ubc.ca doi:10.1093/mind/fzz052