IISER MOHALI

Abstract: Human beings understand themselves and their world through stories. Stories preserve experiences, interpret suffering, shape identities and offer ways of responding to the uncertainties of everyday life. Within the Indian philosophical tradition, Buddhist narratives provide a distinctive mode of inquiry in which philosophical questions are not separated from lived experience. Rather, stories become occasions to examine suffering, impermanence, selfhood, desire, responsibility and the possibility of ethical transformation.

This lecture explores selected Buddhist narratives as philosophical encounters with the question of how we understand the self and how that understanding shapes the way we live. The discussion moves from narrative to philosophical reflection and from philosophical reflection to ethical life. Buddhist philosophy becomes an inquiry into truth that is inseparable from ethical transformation, compassion and the art of everyday living.

Speaker Bio :Dr. Ambuj Sharma is a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy, Post Graduate Government College for Girls, Sector 11, Chandigarh, where he has been serving since March 2019. Prior to this, he taught Philosophy at Dev Samaj College for Women, Ferozepur City, Punjab, from 2002 to 2019. His interdisciplinary research interests span Philosophy of Education, Pedagogy, Social and Political Philosophy, Identity and Otherness, Gender Studies, Caste and Indian Intellectual Traditions. He is the author of Unravelling Gandhi’s Alternative Modernity: A Philosophical Debate on Caste and Gender (2018) and has published in peer-reviewed academic journals. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi (2014). Dr. Sharma has contributed to academic and curriculum development through his association with the Post-Graduate and Under-Graduate Boards of Studies in Philosophy, Panjab University; the Curriculum Development Committee, Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh; and the State Focus Group for NEP 2020 Position Papers, SCERT, Himachal Pradesh. He has organised more than 30 national and international conferences, seminars, and workshops. Committed to experiential and dialogical learning, he has established Philosophical Societies at both institutions, creating sustained platforms for student engagement and facilitating more than 180 student seminars. He currently supervises four doctoral researchers, and has delivered 50+ invited lectures and presented research at numerous national and international seminars and conferences.