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Yoga Powers and Religious Traditions Knut a Jacobsen yoga powers and religious traditions 1 INTRODUCTION YOga POWERS AND REligiOUS TradiTIONS Knut A Jacobsen This book is about a neglected topic in the research on yoga andS outh Asian meditation traditions: the yoga powers, the extraordinary capacities that, according to many South Asian religious traditions, are gained by the yoga practice of meditation and concentration Yoga powers are forms of extraordinary knowledge, such as awareness of previous rebirths, knowing the minds of others, seeing distant and hidden things, and remarkable abilities such as the power to become invisible, enter others’ bodies, fly through the air, and to become dis- embodied for a period of time, which are traditionally thought to be attained as yogins progress in their practice This is not a minor issue in the textual traditions of yoga A large part of the Yogaśāstra (YŚ), that is, the combined Yogasūtra (YS) and the Vyāsabhāṣya (VB) (also called Yogabhāṣya), the foundation text of the Yoga system of reli- gious thought (the Yoga darśana or Pātañjala Yoga), is devoted to the yoga powers and one of its four chapters is named after the powers (the third chapter, the Vibhūtipāda) This book started as a panel at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago in November 2008 1 The purpose of the panel was to compare the yoga powers in different South Asian traditions of yoga and meditation, to investigate the role of the powers in the origin of yoga, their position in the development of different yoga traditions and their influence on the religious traditions inS outh 1 The contributions of the panelists (Bradley S. Clough, David V. Fiordalis, Knut A Jacobsen, Lloyd W Pflueger, David Gordon White) have been included in the book Several other authors were invited to contribute chapters to the book to expand on Pātañjala Yoga (Christopher Key Chapple, Stuart Ray Sarbacker) and to cover some of the areas that were not dealt with by the panel such as the yoga powers in the Mahābhārata (Angelika Malinar), in Chinese Buddhist texts (Ryan Richard Overbey), in Jainism (Kristi L Wiley), in Haṭha yoga traditions (James Mallinson, Sthaneshwar Timalsina), in Tantric Śaiva traditions (Somadeva Vasudeva), in hagi- ographies (Patton Burchett, Antonio Rigopoulos) and in some contemporary move- ments and traditions (Ramdas Lamb, Jeffrey J Kripal) 2 knut a jacobsen Asia Was yoga originally a method to attain supernormal powers or were the powers added to traditions that attempted to attain salvific liberation (mokṣa) by means of meditation and knowledge? To what degree were conceptions of the divine in South Asia influenced by the idea of yoga powers? And to what degree were yoga powers shaped by conceptions of divinity? How were conceptions of the divine shaped by the idea of yoga powers? What is the religious meaning of the pow- ers? How do the yoga powers differ in the various traditions and what are the similarities? Also, how are the yoga powers to be distinguished from other traditions of superhuman powers? When are powers yoga powers and when are they tantric powers? Terminology To attempt to answer some of these questions, attention needs to be paid at the outset to the terminological variety for the yoga powers in the textual traditions Several Sanskrit terms are used for the yoga powers In the Yogasūtra a number of different Sanskrit words are used for the powers attained by yoga practice: jñāna (‘knowledge’ and ‘extraordinary knowledge’), aiśvarya (‘mastery’), siddhi (‘accomplish- ment’, ‘attainment’), and vibhūti (used only as the title of the third chapter; ‘pervading’, ‘omni-presencing’; for this translation, see the chapter by David Gordon White in this volume) Jñāna is the word most commonly used for yoga powers in the Yogasūtra,2 and vibhūti is used in the title of the chapter that deals with the powers Siddhi (in plural siddhayaḥ) is used to refer to yoga powers in the Yogasūtra 4 1 3 In the Mahābhārata, bala (‘power’, ‘might’) is perhaps the word used most often as a designation for yoga powers In haṭhayoga works a term used frequently is guṇa Somadeva Vasudeva, in his chapter in this book, notes that in some Tantric Śaiva textual traditions yoga powers are called guṇāṣṭaka, and in these texts the word siddhi does not denote yoga powers per se In the Indian Buddhist texts the com- mon term for the yoga powers is iddhi (Pāli) (and its Buddhist Sanskrit equivalent ṛddhi [‘accomplishment’]), and abhiññā (‘higher knowl- 2 Gerald James Larson and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, eds , Yoga: India’s Phi- losophy of Meditation (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass 2008), 124; and chapters in this book by Stuart Roy Sarbacker, Chris Chapple, and Lloyd Pflueger 3 The word siddhi is also used in a non-technical sense in Yogasūtra 2 43, 2 45, and 3 37 (kāyendrasiddhir, ‘perfection of the body and sense-organs’, samādhisiddhi, ‘perfection of concentration’, and siddhayaḥ ‘perfections’ [of the senses]) .
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