144 chapter
distinction is seen in the various terms used by informants (such as bōdham,
buddhi and ōrmma) that translate as “consciousness” or “intellect” yet are treated
as distinct from “mind” (manas).
Śankara and his phenomenological views are known throughout Kerala
and India. Th e popular religious leader Sai Baba, whose photo can be seen
in homes and businesses in Kerala and other parts of India, promotes
Śankara’s philosophy that the true self is identical with the divine while other
contempor ary thinkers such as Vivekananda and Aurobindo have continued
to develop his Advaita Vedānta philosophy.
Similar distinctions between the self, consciousness and the body are raised
in a range of other works from fourth-century writings of Nyāya philoso-
phy, which informs the methods and epistemologies of ayurvedic medicine, to
the writings of the twentieth-century thinker, Sri Aurobindo.^5 Th is division
or continuum of experiential instruments—body, mind, consciousness and
ātman—can also be discerned in the contemporary narratives of people suff er-
ing possession and illness.
Th e distinctions between the material and tangible highlighted in these
works could also be described using the distinction between gross (sthūla)
and subtle (sūkshma) found in Indian philosophy and popular Hinduism.
Substances are evaluated on a scale that ranges from the more gross to the
more subtle (Marriott 1976) in which the subtle is more highly valued.
Tantric Hinduism features a three level distinction between gross (sthūla),
subtle (sūkshma) and supreme/transcendent (parā) (Brooks 1992) that may
more closely resemble the phenomenological continuum I describe where the
body is gross, bōdham/consciousness is subtle and ātman is transcendent.
Th e following comments by patients in Kerala depict an orientation to
experience that resembles the phenomenology outlined in these textual, philo-
sophical sources. In particular, Sanskritic terminology used in philosophical
texts, such as ātman, bōdham and manas, is employed in contemporary dis-
course in Kerala along with a variety of idioms that translate roughly as “con-
sciousness,” suggesting a fi nely parsed awareness of states related to this realm
of experience.
Bōdham, Manas and the Experience of Distress in Kerala
Intrigued by research on embodiment and its challenges to mind-body dual-
ism, I hoped to fi nd in India unique constellations of somatic idioms, forms of
expression that off ered an alternative to the modern, cosmopolitan, Western
tendency to express distress in psychological idioms, but I was frustrated by