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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 eldwork 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 srya namaskr
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. t
. nga yoga gets its name not from
Patajalis eight-fold yoga but from the as.t
n
ga
da
n
davat
pranm,
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. Marks 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 yogas physical practices.
Until about a thousand years ago, in the context of yoga the Sanskrit word sana 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 nd the rst instances of sana
referring to non-seated poses (and not long afterwards sana is likewise used to refer to
non-seated postures in the contexts of sex, wrestling and armed combat, as well as of
ghting elephants - this is evinced by the early th-century Mnasollsa, the th- to
th-century Mallapurna
e rst
. and the early th-century Maithil Varnaratnkara).
.
descriptions of non-seated sanas called as such in the context of yoga are found in Pcartrika Samhits.
e earliest, that in the c. tenth-century Vimnrcankalpa, describes
.
irrespective of conceptions of the ultimate reality. Prior to the medieval adoption of Yoga
as one of the six daranas - an orthodox attempt to co-opt yogas 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 rst 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 reect upon. I would
like to nish by once again congratulating Mark on his landmark work.
ank you.