About

Sonam Kachru is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, specializing in the history of premodern South Asian philosophy and literature, with a particular emphasis on Buddhist philosophy. His work explores the ways in which the histories of philosophy and literature in premodern South Asia are integral to the humanities. His first book, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, examines how a 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. Kachru is currently completing a premodern history of artificial intelligence, which investigates what the history of Buddhist philosophy can teach us about artificial minds, and this work is under contract with Yale University Press. His other projects include a manuscript exploring the history of the humanities in medieval South Asia, focusing on how poetry and philosophy became disciplines of thought and experience, and how their nature, relationships, and values were defined and contested over time. Kachru continues to translate the lyrical archive of Lalla of Kashmir and poems from the valley. He is committed to integrating South Asian concepts, arguments, textual practices, and experiences into undergraduate teaching, offering courses on Indian and Buddhist philosophy, as well as courses that frame the humanities through South Asian perspectives. His public engagements include delivering talks on topics such as poetry, Indian humanities, and Buddhist history, and he has held fellowships and leadership roles at Yale, including being a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow and co-director of the Yale Program for the Study of Global Antiquity.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Visual arts
• Literature
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Theology
• Epistemology
• Linguistics
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Lalla of Kashmir

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• <i>Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu’s Metaphysics</i> , by Monima Chadha

  Mind · 2024-08-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu's Metaphysics, by Monima Chadha Get access Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu's Metaphysics, by Monima Chadha. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. x + 222. Sonam Kachru Sonam Kachru Yale University, U.S.A sonam.kachru@yale.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, fzae049, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzae049 Published: 24 August 2024

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• <i>In Dialogue with the Mahābhārata</i>. By Brian Black

  The Journal of Hindu Studies · 2024-01-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article In Dialogue with the Mahābhārata. Brian Black Get access In Dialogue with the Mahābhārata. By Brian BlackLondon and New York: Routledge, 2021. ISBN: 978-036-743814-2, pp. 228. $42.36 (paperback). Sonam Kachru Sonam Kachru Yale University, New Haven, USA sonam.kachru@yale.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Hindu Studies, hiad035, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiad035 Published: 09 January 2024

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• Correction to: Seeing in the Dark: of Epistemic Culture and Abhidharma in the Long Fifth Century C.E.

  Journal of Dharma Studies · 2023-06-23

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• Minds in Motion and Introspective Minds

  Journal of Consciousness Studies · 2023-09-30 · 1 citations

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  Buddhist philosophers provide several toolkits for exploring the relationship between meditation and introspection. Drawing on some of their tools, we explore three models of mind, which offer different ways of thinking about the possibility of introspection: an entirely mindful observer, who introspectively experiences 'pure consciousness'; a thin mind, which avoids appealing to a witness or observer of mental episodes by positing a form of reflexive selfawareness; and a thicker mind, which is active, historically situated, and dependent upon an ecological and social context. We then explore practical and theoretical models of a thicker mind, which suggest that meditation is not simply a matter of representing mental episodes and then using these representations for online behavioural control. Drawing upon these models, we close by proposing that meditation should be understood as a practice of mental cultivation, which requires a more radical reconceptualization of knowing a mind.

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• Engaging metacognitive practices

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Neuroscience

  It is sometimes suggested that meditation must provide access to deeper levels of reality or risk being irrelevant to philosophy, if not antithetical to philosophy. For, whereas philosophy uses thought and observation to get at truth, meditation may involve the mere manipulation of thought with alethically idle mechanisms aimed at non-philosophical ends – a problem of relevance. It may even involve contrived illusions for therapeutic ends – a problem of epistemic costliness to meditation. This disjunctive dilemma is both contemporary and pre-modern. This chapter pushes against this disjunction, appealing to meta-philosophical perspectives from premodern India, resisting two ideas: that meditation must either have an epistemological role or no philosophical role at all, and the picture of philosophy on which the above dilemma rests. This chapter proposes the view that meditation can involve varieties of metacognitive engagement with a range of contents and cognitive experiences that may be transformative in different ways and pursued to different ends. Depending on how one defines philosophical practice, some uses of the above metacognitive exercises can be relevant to philosophy, though we get different models for relevance based on whether we look to ancient philosophy as a way of life in Greece and India or contemporary academic philosophy.

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• The Milindapañha

  2022-06-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  My goal is practical: how shall an intelligent reader make use of the remarkable – though forbidding – work, The Questions of Milinda (Milindapañha)? The Pāli work can seem discouragingly heterogenous. My guide is intended to overcome that, seeking to facilitate productive (and even potentially transformative) encounters with the text. It is divided into two parts, each part emphasizing distinct ways of approaching (sometimes overlapping parts of) the work. In Part One, we will consider how to think about two features that are said to make the discourse (kathā) of Nāgasena aesthetically captivating (citra), the use of illustrative examples and arguments. In Part Two, we shall explore a small section of the work which constitutes a complete dramatic unit, so to speak, and one which is worthy of being taken up “as a work of art,” to borrow T.W. Rhys Davids’ characterization. As I read it, the text contains a drama concerned with the nature, salience, and even tragedy of thought. I conclude with a discussion of the text’s own meta-poetic suggestions for readers and the practice of wise reasoning as a way of reading and a way of life.

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• Other Lives

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2021 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  • Literature

  In his The Twenty Verses , the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu invites readers to explore experiences in dreams and to inhabit the experiences of nonhuman beings—animals, hungry ghosts, and beings in hell. Sonam Kachru provides a deep engagement with Vasubandhu’s account of mind in a global philosophical perspective.

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• The Mind in Pain: The View from Buddhist Systematic and Narrative Thought

  2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Dream Argument

  The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion · 2021-11-16

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Reading this sentence, can you entertain the thought that you might be dreaming? Arguments from dreaming typically try to astonish one into entertaining just such a thought. But they may do so in different ways and to different ends. In this entry, we tour some of the major types of arguments that have been offered on the basis of dreams, exploring arguments found in Classical and early modern Europe as well as arguments from Classical Chinese, Indian, and Islamic philosophy.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jane Mikkelson

  5 shared

• Sanjukta Poddar

  Institute of Child Health

  4 shared

• Bruce Kugle

  British Library

  4 shared

• Romila Shulman

  British Library

  4 shared

• Neeladri Bhattacharya

  4 shared

• Munis Ernst

  British Library

  4 shared

• Scott Kaviraj

  British Library

  4 shared

• S. U. Khan

  British Library

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Philosophy of Religions

  University of Chicago

  2015

Awards & honors

• Whitney Humanities Center Fellow (2023-2024)