OCTAGONAL METAMORPHOSIS MODERN HAṬHA YOGA IN TRANSITION by Klas Nevrin Contents ABBREVIATIONS................................................................................................................ 3 1 INTRODUCTION..................................................................................... 4 1.1 PREAMBLE............................................................................................................... 4 1.2 AIMS AND PURPOSES.......................................................................................... 6 1.3 INTERPRETATIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS ........................................... 7 1.4 ARRANGEMENT..................................................................................................... 9 2 HISTORY OF YOGA.............................................................................. 11 2.1 VEDIC ORIGINS.................................................................................................... 11 2.2 YOGA IN THE UPANIṢADS AND THE BHAGAVAD GĪTĀ.......................... 13 2.3 THE YOGASŪTRA................................................................................................ 16 2.4 THE YOGA VĀSIṢṬHA ........................................................................................ 19 2.5 THE YOGA UPANIṢADS..................................................................................... 22 2.6 TANTRISM AND HAṬHA YOGA....................................................................... 24 2.7 THE RISE OF MODERN YOGA .......................................................................... 28 2.8 THE SHIVANANDA TRADITIONS.................................................................... 34 2.9 THE KRISHNAMACHARYA TRADITIONS...................................................... 37 2.10 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 44 3 PERSPECTIVES....................................................................................... 46 3.1 BAKHTIN’S DIALOGISM..................................................................................... 46 3.2 DIALOGICAL ANALYSIS..................................................................................... 50 3.3 TENSION-FIELDS ................................................................................................. 56 3.4 TURNING TOWARD OR AWAY FROM THE WORLD?................................. 60 4 TRADITION AND IDENTITY ............................................................ 64 4.1 SYSTEMATIZATION OF TRADITION .............................................................. 64 4.2 THE CATEGORY OF YOGA ................................................................................ 66 4.3 IDENTITY............................................................................................................... 73 4.4 THE MODERN WORLD....................................................................................... 79 4.5 THE THERAPEUTIC PARADIGM...................................................................... 84 5 MYSTICISM AND EXPERIENCE ....................................................... 87 5.1 VIEWS OF MYSTICISM ....................................................................................... 87 5.2 BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE............................................................... 91 5.3 EXPERIENCE......................................................................................................... 94 5.4 EXPERIENTIAL TENSIONS IN CLASSICAL YOGA...................................... 101 APPENDIX......................................................................................................105 BIBLIOGRAPHY...........................................................................................107 ii ABBREVIATIONS BhG Bhagavad Gītā BṛU Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad BrS Brahmasūtra ChU Chāndogya Upaniṣad JV Jīvanmuktiviveka KaU Kaṭha Upaniṣad M Mokṣopāya TaiU Taittirīya Upaniṣad VB Vyāsabhāṣya YV Yogavāśiṣṭha YS Yogasūtra 3 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 PREAMBLE The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium.1 - Mikhail Bakhtin In the infinite language of events and situations, eternally changing, but plain to the truly attentive, transcendence speaks to our hearts at the essential moments of personal life.2 Revelation seizes the human elements at hand and recasts them: it is the pure shape of the meeting.3 – Martin Buber Yoga is the restraint of the fluctuations of consciousness. Then the seer [i.e. the Self] abides in its own nature.4 – Patañjali Reaching the unification of mind as pure I-am-ness, the mind becomes serene and infinite like a vast ocean.5 - Vyāsa Those for whom the wavering mind does not waver, not even at the thought of the void, have crossed the awful ocean of existence that is agitated by the monsters of the kleśas [afflictions].6 - Nāgārjuna The present thesis has in many ways been a painful experience. Having started out with the objective of examining the relationship between religion and identity in Hindu nationalism, having then read at least a shelf of books on that subject, as well as a large quantity of other material more or less irrelevant to the initial purpose, I realized my passions lay firmly within the fascinating world of Yoga. Indeed, at times the process that ultimately culminated in realizing my ordained task resembled more a labyrinth than scholarly edification, finding myself stuck at various points with an infinite number of side-tracks and lost in an indefinite theoretical regression (or digression?). So what saved me from disappearing altogether in a cloud-of- confusion, quite the opposite of that lucid yogic trance (samādhi) I had previously been studying? To be sure, it was my own willful choice, at last, to bring it all together, motivated primarily by an interest in Yoga; a resolution which nonetheless would not have been possible without all those surrounding me—tutors, family, co- students, close and distant friends alike. Neither would this work have been com- 1 From p. 293 in “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” (appendix 2 in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics), translated in Morson & Emerson (1990), p. 59-60. 2 On Judaism, ed. N. Glatzer, 1968, p. 216. 3 Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, ed. and tr. M. Friedman, 1990, p. 135. 4 From the Yogasūtra, I.2-3, my translation. (Sanskrit text from Śāstrī, 1998.) 5 Freely translated from VB I.36: tathāsmitāyāṃ samāpannaṃ cittaṃ nistaraṅga-mahodadhi-kalpam śāntam anantam asmitāmātram bhavati. 6 Verse 59 from Yuktiṣaṣṭikā, (‘Sixty Verses of Arguments’). Translation by C. Lindtner in Master of Wisdom (1997, Dharma Publishing), p. 93. 4 pleted without the support from and creative dialogues with those very same people. Thank you! Why, then, the fascination? The increasing popularity of modern Yoga—one is tempted to call it a craze—is as yet not thoroughly understood. Why, all of a sudden, are people all over the world practicing yoga postures (āsana) and breath-control (prāṇāyāma)? Are they longing for divine union with Brahman, as Vedāntins would have it, or complete isolation (kaivalya) of awareness, most of them apparently without even knowing it, without ever having read the Yogasūtra and much less heard of supracognitive enstasy (asaṃprajñāta samādhi)? Behind these questions lurks another, perhaps more pressing issue: Are the “ancient” and “authentic” Yoga traditions now being transformed, adapted to a globalized world and diluted of their philosophical and historical complexity, slimmed down to fit the overstrained individual’s “practice light” (laghu-abhyāsa), or are they kept essentially intact? Indeed, has there ever existed an “ahistorical” Yoga tradition, the divine gift from India to the rest of the world? Thinking hard and long about this, I felt the increasing urge to scrutinize the history and philosophy of one of the most popular branches of 20th century Yoga, thus hoping to shed some light on the problem, from one perspec- tive of many possible. This was also the branch that I myself had practiced for some time, having met in Chennai (in southern India) with one of its most influential gurus T.K.V. Desikachar, eldest son of “grand guru” Krishnamacharya. It soon came to mind that my recent interest in the Russian polymath Mikhail Bakhtin would come in handy. His explorations into the intricacies of dialogue are certainly useful for investigating also Yoga. After all, is not the human world of meaning an incessant and creative play (līla) of dialogue? Are we not always part of an interaction that can never be fully reduced or finally explained, simply because there is always yet another perspective to consider, yet another viewpoint (dṛṣti) to take? And is this never-ending conversation not more of a chaos than a structured system, displaying incompleteness rather than teleology—a relentless quotidian straggling with various “artists” fighting for the final statement they can never boast but all too often aspire to? Then there are the claims of the Madhyamaka-Buddhist Nāgārjuna, and the somewhat later Patañjali (and