Sonam Kachru specializes in the history of premodern South Asian philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on Buddhist philosophy. One day soon, he stubbornly hopes, the histories of philosophy and literature in premodern South Asia will be seen to be an integral part of the humanities. As they should be. (For a personal version of this commitment, see this manifesto.)
His first book, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, takes up the ways in which one premodern Buddhist philosopher, Vasubandhu of Peshawar, used descriptions of experiences in dreams and non-human forms of life in thought experiments to rethink the relationship between mind and world. For more about Other Lives, which was written with a commitment to global philosophical outlook and with particular attention to a possibly connected ancient world, see this précis, or this review.
He is currently completing a premodern history of AI, a study of what the history of mind (as revealed through the history of Buddhist philosophy) can teach us about artificial minds, including our own. The book is currently under contract with Yale University Press.
Other book projects include a plea for the humanities, centering the history of humanities in South Asia. To Weary of Painting the World, a manuscript in preparation, explores the history of the humanities in medieval South Asia, asking: How did poetry and philosophy become disciplines of thought and experience? And how was their nature, relationship, and value defined and contested over time?
He continues to translate the lyrical archive of Lalla of Kashmir, and poems from the valley in his other life.
For a sense of what Kachru hopes to contribute to undergraduate teaching at Yale, see 5 Questions with Sonam Kachru, an interview with Daevan Mangalmurti. Along with courses on Indian and Buddhist philosophy (such as Madhyamaka, Buddhist Metaphysics, and Fear, Suffering, Anger, Love: Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy of Mind), Kachru teaches courses imagining what the humanities might look like when framed with the help of South Asian concepts, arguments, textual practices, and experiences: he teaches The Bhagavad Gita: Lessons from Indian Humanities for the End of the World; and, thinking with women (human and non-human; historical and fictional) from the history of Indian Philosophy, Philosopher Queens of Hinduism and Buddhism.
For those who prefer audio: ‘Making Sense of the Sense in Endings’ was delivered at the Memorial Symposium for Steven Collins at the University of Chicago (Nov 15-16, 2018); “The Truth about Poetry” at Smith College (Feb 15, 2023); and in this episode about the Buddhist ruler Asoka from the podcast Sacred and Profane, Kachru, in conversation with Hosts Martien Halvorson-Taylor and Kurtis Schaeffer, discusses Asoka, about whose cosmopolitan and ethical vision he has also written elsewhere.
Kachru has been a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow (2023-2024); and with Laura Nasrallah, he is co-director of Archaia, the Yale Program for the Study of Global Antiquity, and a co-founder of the South Asian Humanities Initiative at Yale.