The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla: the Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition. Critically Edited and Translated by James Mallinson and Péter-Dániel Szántó. Introduction. (original) (raw)
Yogabῑja: a Critical Transcription of a Text on a Haṭhayoga
Nova Tellus, 2016
Este trabajo brinda una transcripción crítica de un texto temprano e importante en materia de haṭhayoga. La transcripción se basa en tres recensiones procedentes tanto del norte como del sur de India. Uno de los propósitos es tratar de solventar algunos problemas de interpretación causados por las discrepancias existentes entre diferentes ediciones del texto. Además, busca fomentar la labor académica, exegética y filológica, entre los estudiosos tanto en torno de este texto, como de la tradición textual del haṭhayoga.
In most general terms, hathayoga involves the internalisation and embodied literalisation of the Vedic fire sacrifice. Reflecting on the place of sacrifice in anthropological theory, and on the way in which sacrifice structures the relationship between humans and gods in terms of gift obligations, this paper explores the theoretical implications of hathayoga's embodied literalisation of a profoundly symbolic act. Although similar to various forms of ascetic renunciation, hathayoga is unique, it will be argued, in being structured as the physiological antithesis of religious ritual. Self-realisation based on the internalised yajna sacrifice undermines the binary structure of the sacred and the profane and makes god irrelevant. This raises theoretical questions concerning the social significance of a ritual that is anti-social on a number of different levels.
Hathayogapradipika - A Compact Treatise on Hathayoga -An overview
Indica Yoga , 2021
Among the various treatises Hathayoga - Hathayogapradipika by Svatmarama is respected, accepted and studied widely for its compact and the same time comprehensive approach to all aspects of Hathayoga.There are four chapters in the text - Hathayogapradipika. There are about 389 verses in the entire treatise. The chapters are - 1) Asana and other prerequisites for Yoga 2) Pranayama 3) Mudras 4) Samadhi- Nadanusandhana An overview of Hathayogapradipika which is an integral part of Yoga teaching and learning in contemporary times is presented in this write up.
Parasher Sen's Review of A Genealogy of Devotion (H Asia, H Net Reviews)
H-Net Reviews , 2020
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin) If one was to simplify, the book under review could be said to fall under what is popularly called comparative religion, except that it emphatically does not fall under this genre as the scholarship that it contains forcefully argues against the essen-tialist definition of religion. The crux of this book is about delineating what was new in the bhakti that emerged in North India during the medieval and early modern periods and how devotional communities that evolved around it aligned or disagreed with each other. Bhakti, tantra, yoga, and Sufism as important elements in the subtitle of A Genealogy of Devotion allude to these religious communities and give an impression that each of these religiosities will emerge as a distinct subject of discussion in the book. On the contrary, what Patton Burchett has ably done is to weave the in-terlinkages between them, suggesting that the boundaries around each were not rigid. In narrating the historical relationships between them, this book nonetheless shows that each of these strands also had distinct features that kept its individual identity intact. Thus, fluidity on the one hand as the harbinger of possible exchanges co-existed with concerted efforts of the practitioners of these religiosities to define oneself as distinct from the "other." These multiple sensibilities are complex to explain, and it is this heterogeneity and complexity that Burchett has carefully brought to the fore, thus establishing that neither binaries of opposition , nor distinct personalities of uniqueness remain historical subjects of enquiry for long. The most central issue in the book that is consciously highlighted is that each of these religiosities evolved against the complex politico-historical circumstances from the early medieval to the early modern period. This period concomitantly saw the emergence of Persianate traditions that then fruitfully fertilized with the Indic ones. It is this particu-larity of the historical context against which religious ideas evolved that is the essence of the book. The various chapters then unravel how this happened , what were the challenges and institutional impetus and most importantly, the ideological influences that transformed the religious landscape of North India during this period. Burchett does a microlevel regional case study of the Rāmānandīs to illustrate his arguments.
Kālavañcana in the Konkan: How a Vajrayāna Haṭhayoga Tradition Cheated Buddhism's Death in India
Religions, 2019
In recent decades the relationship between tantric traditions of Buddhism and Śaivism has been the subject of sustained scholarly enquiry. This article looks at a specific aspect of this relationship, that between Buddhist and Śaiva traditions of practitioners of physical yoga, which came to be categorised in Sanskrit texts as haṭhayoga. Taking as its starting point the recent identification as Buddhist of the c.11th-century Amṛtasiddhi, which is the earliest text to teach any of the methods of haṭhayoga and whose teachings are found in many subsequent non-Buddhist works, the article draws on a range of textual and material sources to identify the Konkan site of Kadri as a key location for the transition from Buddhist to Nāth Śaiva haṭhayoga traditions, and proposes that this transition may provide a model for how Buddhist teachings survived elsewhere in India after Buddhism's demise there as a formal religion.