About the Book
What does it mean to be human? /, Yantra examines ancient Indian narratives about robots and mechanically constructed beings to explore how their Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist authors approached this question. Making translations of many of these texts available in English for the first time, author Signe Cohen argues that they shed considerable light on South Asian religious notions of humanity, self, and agency. She also documents connections between ancient and modern responses to the ethical problems of what precisely constitutes a sentient being and what rights such a being should have. Situated at the intersection of humanities and bioethics, this cross-disciplinary study will be of interest to scholars of South Asian languages and literature as well as specialists in religion and technology.
About the Author
"Cohen's book reveals the fascinating story of androids and automata in ancient and medieval India through sources that are almost completely unknown today. Drawing connections between areas and times that most people consider unrelated, it presents a hidden history of the overlaps between the deep past and imagined futures, between religion and technology, and between Asian and Mediterranean civilizations."
Introduction
This is a book about robot tales from ancient India, stories about mechanically constructed androids embedded in archaic Hindu and Buddhist texts composed in Sanskrit and Pali. The fact that there are stories about automata in ancient Asian texts may come as a surprise to many readers. When we think of robots and androids, we usually think of an imagined future, rather than the past: Star Wars, Star Trek, Bladerunner, Battlestar Galactica, or the works of Isaac Asimov. But tales of artificially constructed humans can be found in old texts from many parts of the world; ancient Egyp-tians, Greeks, and Romans wrote about statues that moved and spoke, humans forged out of metal, and mechanical birds. Ancient texts from India, Tibet, China, and Mongolia describe mechanical men and women so lifelike that people mistake them for humans, artificially constructed geese and elephants, and programmed killer robots. Medieval western European texts tell of deadly androids guarding tombs, talking brass heads, and mechanical leopards, while medieval Muslim engineers not only fantasized about moving mechanical men but also gave detailed instructions for how to make them, using intricate forms of clockwork. Actual automata were made in early modern Europe, including mechanical musicians playing lovely little melodies and a lifelike little eighteenth-century automaton boy writing over and over, "I think, therefore I am," playfully challenging Descartes with a stroke of the pen held in his chubby little robotic hand.
