Sutras & Stuff

Sutras & Stuff began in February 2020, just before the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic prompted everyone to stay inside, bake bread, and make podcasts. I was on research leave from Yale-NUS College and kept thinking about connections between my work and the contemporary world. I began Season 1 with no particular plan other than to tell short stories about interesting bits of Indian philosophy written in Sanskrit and how they relate to ordinary life, politics, popular culture, and technology. Episode 1: Threads compared the sutra style of Indian thought to Twitter, and, from then on, I was hooked.

Season 2 focused on Nyāya epistemology, and Season 3 discussed teaching Indian philosophy with faculty from Yale-NUS College. Season 4 takes listeners into Indian philosophy through Sanskrit loanwords—the season has been interrupted, but will continue in 2024–25.

The podcast is a labor of love and sometimes sporadic. For that, the author asks your forgiveness until a big podcasting network comes calling, trading ads for a consistent schedule and fancy audio editing

Taylor Swift says karma is her boyfriend, and Boy George sings about karma chameleons. In addition to “karma,” there are lots of other Sanskrit terms which have made their way into English: yoga, dharma, mantra, guru, Buddha, swastika, and more. In this season, we’ll focus on one word an episode to get a deeper understanding of what they meant in their original contexts, and how these meanings resonate today.

Episodes of Season Four will continue in 2024; stay tuned for more details. Subscribe anywhere you can download podcasts.