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Book Review
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 un-
wittingly implying either an ontology of consciousness and materiality, or its
overcoming’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 14). Classical Indian texts provide Ram-
Prasad with fertile ground for developing a phenomenology that is not be-
holden to the Cartesian problematic of the ontological distinction between
mind and body. Pre-modern Indian traditions explore at great length ques-
tions 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 phenom-
enology 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

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2 Book Review

forward contemporary discussions on human embodiment in multiple regis-

ters, and should serve as a touchstone for theorists interested in the mech-
anics 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 envir-
onment, 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’ (Ram-
Prasad 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:hitā, an ancient Compendium
(Sa:hitā) of the āyurveda (loosely, the science of health and longevity) com-
piled 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 Mahābhārata between Sulabhā, a female ascetic,
and King Janaka, a powerful ruler who has claimed to achieve spiritual tran-
scendence even as he remains embroiled in the affairs of his kingdom.
Chapter Three indicates how Buddhagosa’s abhidhamma constitutes a phe-
nomenological 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 Śrı̄ HarXa’s NaiXadhacarita that
contains a dramatization of the story from the Mahābhārata of the wedding
night of Nala and Damayantı̄ to examine the fluidity of human bodiliness in
love. While Ram-Prasad suggests that his account of bodiliness emerges grad-
ually 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 bodili-
ness, especially in sexualized encounters. In the contest between Sulabhā and
Janaka, we do indeed see a female protagonist gain the upper hand over a

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Book Review 3

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
Damayantı̄ celebrates an erotic encounter that is made possible by the con-
tinuous 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 Sulabhā’s actions are paradigmatically unethical, whereas Ram-
Prasad’s reading of Nala and Damayantı̄ 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 Sulabhā’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 litera-
ture is sorely lacking examples and discussions of when sex goes right.
Ram-Prasad’s depiction of Nala and Damyantı̄ 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. Sulabhā and sexual violation as a tool of philosophical conquest

The encounter between Sulabhā and Janaka turns on the question of whether
or not a human being can achieve liberation, figured as a detached transcend-
ence 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. Sulabhā de-
cides 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 compel-
lingly argues that Sulabhā’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 Sulabhā 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 Sulabhā’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 rela-
tionship 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

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4 Book Review

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, Sulabhā 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 Sulabhā 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 Mithilā, 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 Sulabhā’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,
Sulabhā’s reasoned articulation of a human transcendence that moves
through, but is not dependent on, a particular gendered embodiment pro-
vides a powerful approach to thinking about the equality of human intellec-
tual 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 Sulabhā’s approach to Janaka, and
the way in which Sulabhā 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, Sulabhā uses her yogic powers to forcibly penetrate and remain
within Janaka’s consciousness. (The ability to enter another’s mind is a com-
monly 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

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Book Review 5

with his being’, Janaka rather quickly experiences Sulabhā’s presence within
him as an unwanted and nonconsensual sexual act involving a forced viola-
tion of his essential bodily limits (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 70). Ram-Prasad
summarizes: ‘His interpretation of her daring to bring their beings into con-
tact (bhāvaspars´a) is that it is a violation, whose sexual nature is eventually
brought out’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 75). Sulabhā keeps Janaka in this state
throughout their entire encounter; at the same time that she is giving dis-
course 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 communica-
tion for ethical sexual engagements provides a good window on the full
ethical consequences of Sulabhā’s approach. As an initial note, it seems
that Sulabhā’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 Sulabhā’s culpability. To begin with, although Janaka
initially reacts welcomingly to her advance, Sulabhā 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 inten-
tional 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,
Sulabhā 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 partici-
pation as is valid consent at the start’ (Kukla 2018, p. 88). Sulabhā’s actions
are close to an inversion of the structures that Kukla proposes for ethical
sexual engagement. Rather than making an invitation and opening negoti-
ations, Sulabhā acts on Janaka without any regard for his autonomy. Rather
than remaining attuned to Janaka’s growing discomfort throughout the en-
counter, she actively dismisses him. Rather than respecting his request to stop

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6 Book Review

and having plans for ethically exiting their encounter, she denies that she’s
doing anything wrong and continues.
Sulabhā’s actions display a remarkable combination of gaslighting, victim-
blaming, 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, Sulabhā 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). Ram-
Prasad sees Sulabhā’s ‘decisive rejection of sexuality ’ as justifying these ac-
tions; 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: Sulabhā’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. Sulabhā 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, bhāvābhāva) 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 conven-
tional—and thus, sexual—terms’ (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 91). It seems that
the lesson Sulabhā 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.

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It is possible that the biological morphology that Sulabhā 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 Sulabhā presents it, however, her position is hopelessly entangled in
norms that actively justify using sexual violation as a tool of domination. If
we read Sulabhā 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 Sulabhā: if she has in fact
attained true freedom, then her actions do not actually have any conse-
quences. 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 respon-
sible 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 inten-
tional, 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 Mahābhārata (Ram-Prasad 2018,
p. 63), then we need to look elsewhere to develop an empowered understand-
ing of gendered phenomenology that neither denies the significance of dif-
ferent 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 Mahābhārata, that
develop such a position. Sulabhā’s disregard of another’s right to maintain

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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 incred-
ible complexity of all forms of human bodiliness—including female bodili-
ness—in the Mahābhārata: ‘[T]he Mahābhārata 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 Mahābhārata, the story of
Nala and Damayantı̄, 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 Śrı̄ HarXa’s account of Nala and Damayantı̄’s courtship and wed-
ding 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 world-
creating. (See Bronkhorst 2019 for an overview.) Whether language is identi-
fied 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 Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition articulates a particularly powerful under-
standing of the relationship between language and world creation. Within the
framework of a revised version of BhartPhari’s four levels of vāc (Padoux
1990; Torella 2008), Pratyabhijñā Śaivas use the Mı̄mā:sā theory of the eter-
nality of the phonemes to account for how the inherent meaningfulness of
the constituents of language undergirds all signification (Torella 2004), and
the Buddhist Dharmakı̄rti’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

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Book Review 9

determinate awarenesses, structured by subject and object. Note that con-

sciousness 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 remain-
ing itself (Ratié 2017).
This process of consciousness’ self-delimitation is particularly relevant to
the question of how communication creates bodily experiences. Following
Dharmakı̄rti, the Pratyabhijñā Śaiva 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 deploy-
ing 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, expect-
ations, 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 Dharmakı̄rti
sees apoha as ultimately falsifying reality by positing real similarities where
none in fact exist, the Pratyabhijñā Śaivas are able to rely on the ultimate
identity of consciousness and vāc to provide the causal input necessary to
create determinate experiences that still retain their connection to the larger
potencies of language. For the Pratyabhijñā Śaivas, different types of per-
ceivers 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 Pratyabhijñā Śaivas, 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 differ-
ently, 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 negoti-
ation 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

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onto another person, denying the other person their status as a creative agent.
Violation of consent results in the explicit destruction of another’s articula-
tion of their own boundaries. When the initial violation of consent is ex-
tended and coupled with an explicit rejection that any wrong is occurring, it
renders the other person, as Sulabhā 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 lan-
guage 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 Damayantı̄’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 Damayantı̄ 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 Damayantı̄ 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
Damayantı̄ 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 Damayantı̄’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 self-
realization. At the beginning of their lovemaking, Damayantı̄ 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
Damayantı̄’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.

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Book Review 11

He can know this because of their previous communication, which he ac-

tively reflects on in this moment of heightened passion. Even firm in this
knowledge, however, he moves slowly and carefully, checking in with
Damayantı̄ 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 re-
lationship. It is as if, in the contemporary standardized kink language of in-
scene communication, Nala had read a ‘yellow’ from Damayantı̄’s move-
ments, pulled back to seek more information, and allowed Damayantı̄ 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).
Śrı̄ 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 Damayantı̄’s breast
onto Nala’s (Ram-Prasad 2018, p. 173, p. 182). The Pratyabhijñā Śaiva 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 phe-
nomenology 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 prob-
lematic 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

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12 Book Review

convincingly argue that phenomenologists should be looking at Indian trad-

itions, 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 Śabda Reader: Language in Classical
Indian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press)
Dunne, John 2011. ‘Key Features of Dharmakı̄rti’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, André 1990. Vāc: the Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu
Tantras (Albany: State University of New York Press)
Prueitt, Catherine 2017. ‘Shifting Concepts: The Realignment of
Dharmakı̄rti on Concepts and the Error of Subject/Object
Duality in Pratyabhijñā Śaiva 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)
Ratié, 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 Pratyabhijñā and the Logical-
Epistemological School of Buddhism’, in Teun Goudriaan
(ed.), Ritual and Speculation in Early Tantrism: Studies in
Honor of André Padoux, 327–345 (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press)

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Book Review 13

—— 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 Śaiva 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 Yogācāra 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

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