A Response to Mark Singleton's Yoga Body

A Response to Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body by James Mallinson James Mallinson - jim@khecari.com December , [is is a revised version of a paper given at the American Academy of Religions conference in San Francisco on th November .] Firstly I would like to thank Stuart and Mark for inviting me to take part in this discussion, and to thank and congratulate Mark for a wonderful piece of work, which for me has made sense of something I little understood. I study traditional yoga primarily through texts and fieldwork amongst Hindi-speaking ascetics. My domain of inquiry is thus quite distinct from the anglophone modern yoga studied by Mark and with which I am altogether unacquainted. But I had often wondered how the ubiquitous modern postural yoga had come to take the form it has. In particular I could not understand how sūrya namaskār had become so integral to yoga when it is nowhere to be found in the sources I work with. Mark has answered my questions. For me, as a philologist, the eureka moment in reading Yoga Body came just a few pages from the end when it is suggested that the modern As. tāṅga yoga gets its name not from . Patañjali’s eight-fold yoga but from the as.tāṅga da n davat pra nām, the “stick-like prostra. .. . tion” in which eight parts of the body are to touch the ground. As I have said, I am no expert on modern yoga. I would therefore like to contribute to this discussion by summarising my thoughts on pre-modern physical yoga practice in India and inviting others to comment on its continuities and discontinuities with modern postural yoga. Mark’s analysis of pre-modern yoga, which is in the main accessible only through texts, was limited by the inadequacy of philological studies of those texts. Over the course of the last years I have been seeking to delimit and analyse the corpus of Sanskrit texts on hathayoga and I shall now say a few words about the conclusions I have . drawn concerning yoga’s physical practices. Until about a thousand years ago, in the context of yoga the Sanskrit word āsana referred to seated postures for meditation (as the word itself, which means “seat” or “throne”, implies) and not the more complicated physical postures with which it is now associated. en, in texts written in the th or th centuries, we find the first instances of āsana referring to non-seated poses (and not long afterwards āsana is likewise used to refer to non-seated postures in the contexts of sex, wrestling and armed combat, as well as of fighting elephants - this is evinced by the early th-century Mānasollāsa, the th- to th-century Mallapurāna e first . and the early th-century Maithilī Varnaratnākara). . descriptions of non-seated āsanas called as such in the context of yoga are found in Pāñcarātrika Samhitās. e earliest, that in the c. tenth-century Vimānārcanākalpa, describes . mayūrāsana, the peacock. e slightly later Ahirbudhnyāsamhitā adds kukkutāsana, the . . cockerel, and kūrmāsana, the tortoise; the verses describing these three āsanas were used to compile Svātmārāma’s seminal th-century work, the Hathapradīpikā. (And here I note . in passing that the c. th-century Matsyendrasamhitā also teaches mayūra, kukkuta . . and kūrma āsanas, but unlike those in contemporaneous Pāñcarātrika works they are all seated postures: contrary to the received opinion reiterated in Yoga Body, non-seated yogic āsanas appear to have developed outside of Śaivism. Furthermore, and this is something I believe to be worthy of further investigation, these Pāñcarātrika Samhitās are canonical works of . Śrīvais. navism, the tradition of which Krishamacharya and some of his pupils were adher. ents, and with which some of the Hindi-speaking ascetic practitioners of hathayoga with . whom I have lived are also connected.) It is during the same period, in codifications of the practices of what was called hatha. yoga, that we find other physical yoga techniques, namely the hathayogic mudrās, also . being taught for the first time. But the appearance of textual descriptions of physical yoga practices does not mean that those practices were invented then. We find descriptions of ascetic physical practices in texts composed a thousand or more years earlier and many of them show a marked similarity with the techniques of hathayoga. ere is no time to go into . the details now, but forerunners of both the mudrās and āsanas of hathayoga are mentioned . in the Pali Canon, in early Jain works, in the Mahābhārata and in dharmaśāstric works such as the Vaikhānasasmārtasūtra. Ascetics are said to sit in vīrāsana, an unidentified but by implication uncomfortable seated posture, and utkatāsana, a squatting position. ey . are also said to spend long periods inverted, or standing on two or one legs, or holding their arms in the air. Although the ascetics who used these techniques were also associated with the practice of yoga, the physical techniques themselves were not. ey are techniques of tapas, asceticism, and early hathayoga is a codification of the physical practices of these ascetics, . practices whose main aim was to assist in the sublimation of bindu, semen, the vital essence of the body whose preservation was key to the cultivation of ascetic power. us, as it name makes clear, hathayoga was originally associated with asceticism, and . it is to this day. Only last week at the Nāth monastery at Jwalamukhi in Himachal Pradesh I heard a Nāth tapasvī being praised as an exemplary hath . yogī because of his mastery of the ascetic practices of sitting surrounded by fire in the hot season and immersed in cold water in winter; no mention was made of skill in āsana, prānāyāma and so forth. . e reason for the composition of the hathayogic corpus, for the sudden codification . of these ascetic practices, was that they were being made available for the first time to a wider, non-ascetic audience. e texts encode the teachings of a variety of ascetic orders and the ascetic is still said to be the ideal practitioner of hathayoga, but it is stated ex. plicitly that its practice is beneficial to all. Over the subsequent centuries the practice of hathayoga continued relatively unchanged among ascetic practitioners (bar the superimpo. sition of tantric physiology in the course of hathayoga’s appropriation by the forerunners of . the Nāth sampradāya), but in its textual formulations its aims became more aligned with . those of householders, with health benefits coming to the fore. More overtly householderoriented works such as the c. th-century Śivasamhitā even foreshadowed modern yoga . by promising a beautiful body and the ability to attract members of the opposite sex. Another foreshadowing of modern yoga evinced by the texts of the hathayogic corpus . was in the way in which āsana became the rubric under which all physical practice of so- teriological value came to be included. us the well-known śavāsana or “corpse pose”, for example, was originally a samketa or “secret [meditational] technique” of layayoga, not . an āsana; similarly the hathayogic viparītakara nī . . mudrā became sarvāṅgāsana; and the ancient “bat-penance” in which the ascetic suspends himself upside-down became, in the th-century Jogpradīpakā, the tap-kar āsan. In Yoga Body it is implied that āsana practice was of little importance in the pre-modern era but our sources in fact suggest otherwise. e notion of - or even lakh - āsanas dates to at least the th century, and, contrary to Mark’s assertion (p. ), citing Gudrun Bühnemann, that the depictions of āsanas in an manuscript of the Jogpradīpakā are unique, we find depictions of a yogi in different āsanas in a manuscript of a Persian yoga text, the Bahr al-Hayt, which was written and illustrated in . Travellers’ reports from the early medieval period onwards highlight the practice of āsana by ascetics, usually seeing it as a form of tapas or self-mortification, and towards the end of the pre-modern period we find textual descriptions of or more āsanas in a variety of yoga manuals. e same period saw the incorporation of teachings on non-seated āsanas from early works on hathayoga in the new Yoga Upanisads, showing that they were not beyond the pale of the . . orthodox, as has been suggested by a variety of scholars. As Mark points out in Yoga Body, the number of basic gymnastic or contortionist postures that the body can assume is finite and similarities between yogic āsanas and such postures as practised in the West cannot be put down to influence either way. But one feature of certain styles of modern postural yoga identified by Mark as an innovation brought in under the influence of modern Western gymnastics does set it apart from pre-modern yoga: the linking of āsanas into sequences. With a couple of anomalous and trivial exceptions it is clear from textual sources, travellers’ reports and my own fieldwork among ascetic yogis today that in traditional yoga practice āsanas, like the poses held by ascetics mentioned in the Mahābhārata and other ancient texts, are to be held for relatively long periods and that no fixed order is prescribed for their practice. Such a conclusion is unsurprising in the light of the implication of sedentariness expressed by the word āsana itself. In order to be sure, however, that there are not Indian precedents for the sequences of postures I suggest that traditional wrestling exercises and the training regimes of militant ascetics need to be examined more thoroughly. Now, to wrap up this brief hotchpotch of comments. Mark’s book has been a catalyst for occasionally vituperative arguments over “who owns yoga”. Without wishing to add fuel to the fire, I would like to note here the strong anti-sectarianism displayed by most of the texts of hathayoga. By way of example, let me quote from the c. th-century . Dattātreyayogaśāstra, the first text to teach a systematised hathayoga: . brāhmana . h. śramano . vāpi bauddho vāpy ārhato 'thavā| kāpāliko vā cārvākah. śraddhayā sahitah. sudhīh|| . yogābhyāsarato nityam. sarvasiddhim avāpnuyāt| Whether a Brahmin, an ascetic, a Buddhist, a Jain, a Skull-Bearer or a materialist, the wise man who is endowed with faith and constantly devoted to the practice of yoga will attain complete success. Elsewhere, in the chapter on yoga in the th-century Śāradātilaka, after four contrasting definitions of the metaphysics of yoga’s goal, its method is taught, a method that works irrespective of conceptions of the ultimate reality. Prior to the medieval adoption of Yoga as one of the six darśanas - an orthodox attempt to co-opt yoga’s newfound popularity the concept of “yoga philosophy” was an oxymoron: yoga was - and, for most, remained a practical method of achieving liberation that was open to all, irrespective of philosophy or theology. e composition of the corpus of texts on hathayoga is symptomatic of this univer. salism. In a development which, by freeing the individual from the clutches of priestly intermediaries and the exclusivity of cultic initiation, foreshadowed the development of the bhakti sects, these texts make the methods and aims of yoga available to all, not just to ascetics or initiates of tantric cults. us the composers and compilers of the first texts to teach physical yoga would have no problem with practitioners of Christian yoga or the like. Indeed it is the antisectarianism of these texts that allowed them to be borrowed from by the orthodox compilers of the Yoga Upanisads or translated by scholars at Mughal courts. . I wish I had more time: there is so much more in Yoga Body to reflect upon. I would like to finish by once again congratulating Mark on his landmark work. ank you.