The Committee to Nuke Elysium

For over a thousand years before the appearance of the Yoga Sūtras (YS) and Bhagavad Gītā (BhG), yoga was a practice of yoking the physical body. Yet today, even when scholars, teachers, and commentators say they are talking about the “ancient tradition” of yoga they are (often knowingly) suppressing its actual history.

The result of denying the roots and realities of yoga, says White, is that “nearly every history of “yoga” written to date has in fact been the history of meditation.”

Erasing a meaningful understanding of yogic yokingin order to give a hyperbolic importance to the practices of contemplation turns out to be a switch not unlike that accomplished by yogis who stole the bodies of kings and went on to live as royal impostors.

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White argues against academic colleagues who play down villainous yogis. Given the ubiquitous occurrence of “yoking of another” animal or human body “with one’s own self (ātman)” as the chief mode of operation of yogis in more than a thousand years of Indian texts, White maintains sinister yogis are not mere “literary fixtures.” Through copious (quite captivating) examples, White demonstrates in the entire period of literature, no other representation of yogis even exists.

Why is it that not a single yogi in these narratives is ever seen assuming a yogic posture (āsana); controlling his breath, senses, and mind; engaging in meditation (dhyāna); or realizing transcendent states of consciousness (samādhi) – all of the practices of what has been deemed “classical yoga”?

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White, like other scholars, is keen to dismantle the hagiography of contemporary yoga. The idea that yoga is an ahistorical, unbroken transmission is a perfection White holds as pure fabrication, a recent and fantastical construction based on singling out specific passages of just two texts.

The reef upon which many of these modernist constructions have stranded themselves is the notion that the BhG and YS were capstone works, literary culmination of an unbroken and unchanging tradition of yogic theory and practice extending back to, if not beyond, the Vedas of the second millennium BCE.

In fact, these are works that were compiled toward the end of a five-hundred-year period in which a new synthesis of theory and practice, sometimes referred to as “yoga,” was very much in vogue throughout South Asia.

It’s easy to appreciate this by checking out the commentary of almost any copy of the Yoga Sūtraswhich often obviate the significance of the vibhūti, in spite of the fact this pada on attainment of extraordinary powers comprises over a quarter of the YS.