THE YOGA SUTRA IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
CHAPTER 11
The decades that followed Vivekananda’s triumphal mission to the West were the stage for what has been termed India’s “Yoga Renaissance.” For the most part, this new flowering of yoga took place on Indian soil, with only two of its leading figures actually following Vivekananda to the West. The most illustrious of these was Paramahansa Yogananada, who settled in the United States in 1920, teaching and lecturing there for decades before his highly inspirational Autobiography of a Yogi was published in 1946, six years prior to his death. While he called his particular synthesis Kriya Yoga, the term used for “practical yoga” in Yoga Sutra 2.1–27, Patanjali’s work is conspicuously absent from his writings. Rather, the Autobiography emphasizes the scientific foundations of yoga practice, the links between Indian and Christian spirituality, and the miraculous supernatural powers of India’s yogis. Another yoga master who briefly traveled to the United States in the same period was Shri Yogendra, who sought to debunk the teachings of such fraudulent self-proclaimed practitioners of Tantric Yoga as Alistair Crowley and Pierre Bernard. However, the Yoga Institutes he founded during the years he remained in the New York area were, for all intensive purposes, medical clinics.
Why other members of that first generation of post-Vivekanandan yoga specialists did not follow in the Swami’s footsteps had much to do with American xenophobia. A series of restrictive immigration acts passed between 1917 and 1929 barred nearly all Asians from so much as entering the country. It was not until 1965, when that act was amended and Asian immigration quotas lifted, that Indian gurus were allowed to return to the United States—just in time for the cultural revolution that was sweeping the country. During the intervening half-century, most Americans seeking instruction in yoga and the Yoga Sutra from Indian gurus and scholars had to travel to India to do so. Of course, the Vedanta and Theosophical Society’s western beachheads continued to retail Indian wisdom in major urban centers, and Yoga scholars in India and the West could communicate through publications and correspondence. In addition, some Indian yoga gurus, as imperial subjects, did journey to Great Britain. For the most part, however, modern Indian and Western interpretations and appropriations of the Yoga Sutra followed separate tracks, with India lagging behind the West for several decades.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, the Yoga Sutra was widely ignored in India; the founding fathers of the Yoga Renaissance barely mention the work. One of these was the Bengali freedom fighter Aurobindo Ghosh, better known as Shri Aurobindo, who was imprisoned by the British for his revolutionary activities in 1908. After his release in 1909, he fled British India for the French enclave of Pondicherry on India’s southeastern coast, where he gave up his political activities for the inner, spiritual life. Aurobindo had had a number of transformative mystical experiences during his year of incarceration, which led to the development of his own system of Yoga. That system, detailed in his 1914–21 Synthesis of Yoga relied heavily on the Bhagavad Gita while ignoring the Yoga Sutra. Already in 1912, Aurobindo was certain of the distinctiveness of his own path, noting that his was “not the conventional method of Patanjali,” but “the natural method” he had “stumbled upon in his meditations.”1 Looking back on those breakthroughs, he would attribute his inspiration to Vivekananda: “I began my Yoga in 1904. My Sadhana [practice] was not founded upon books but upon personal experience that crowded on me from within…. It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the Jail.”2 As Peter Heehs has observed, Aurobindo’s synthesis was closer to that of Tantric Yoga, whose goal was the transformation of the world and life (shakti) as opposed to the isolation of Spirit from Nature. A crucial element of Aurobindo’s Yoga, concerning the passage from mind to “supermind,” was influenced by Nietzsche’s theory of the “super-man,” but was also redolent of the evolutionist theories of Vivekananda and the Theosophists. Although he does not refer to it directly in his Synthesis of Yoga, Aurobindo does appear to have taken the Yoga Sutra’s aphorisms on the supernatural powers (siddhis) as his inspiration for the final chapters of his unfinished work.
Embracing Vivekananda’s Neo-Vedanta teachings on Yoga as an ancient Indian science, two of Aurobindo’s contemporaries established yoga research centers in western India: these were Shri Yogendra and Swami Kuvalayananda, the two yoga gurus most responsible for the early “medicalization” of yoga in India. Their innovations lay the foundation for the principal tenet of modern postural yoga practice, that is, that yoga is primarily a set of techniques for realizing and maintaining good health. Both of these figures claimed Madhavdas, a former civil servant who had renounced the world to practice yoga in the Himalayas in the late nineteenth century, as their teacher. In spite of Madhavdas’s allegiance to Vivekananda’s teachings, however, neither of his disciples saw fit to showcase the Yoga Sutra in their respective syntheses.
Shri Yogendra founded his Yoga Institute in Mumbai in 1918, to which he returned and remained following four years of clinical practice in New York between 1919 and 1923. In 1924 Kuvalayananda established his Kaivalyadhama Yoga Ashram about thirty miles to the southeast, at Lonavla in the state of Maharashtra. The yoga that both promulgated was entirely devoted to placing yoga physiology in the service of general health and physical fitness, which for Kuvalayananda meant going back to the sources—in his case the “Little Lamp” and other Hatha Yoga works—to recover the yogic science of the ancients. Kuvalayananda did, however, write a series of studies of Patanjali’s sutras on breath control and meditation, which appeared in the 1956 and 1957 issues of Yoga Mimamsa, the Kaivalyadhama Yoga Ashram’s scientific yoga journal.
Another giant of the Indian Yoga Renaissance was Swami Sivananda. The scion of an illustrious south Indian priestly lineage turned Western medical doctor, he had given up his practice in Malaysia to settle in Rishikesh, in the Himalayan foothills, in 1920. There he established a yoga ashram that would become the headquarters for his Divine Life Society, which he founded in 1936. In 1935, he wrote The Science of Pranayama, one of the first of his hundreds of publications that followed Vivekananda’s lead by bringing together the language of science, physiology, and health to explain “liberation” in terms of prana. Sivananda’s teachings and writings differed from those of Vivekananda on two major points. One of these was his emphasis on celibacy and semen retention as essential to Indian masculinity; the other was a formulation of Raja Yoga that, fusing Hatha Yoga and Vedanta, entirely bypassed the teachings of the Yoga Sutra.
That none of these giants of India’s early twentieth-century Yoga Renaissance chose to include the Yoga Sutra in their innovative adaptations (or reinventions) of yoga is yet another indication of the fact that India generally remained a “Yoga desert” well beyond the nineteenth-century publication of Sanskrit and English editions of the Yoga Sutra. Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga was, in many respects, a foreign work, written in the West by a western-educated Indian for a Western readership. It would not be until the publication of works in regional languages by Hariharananda Aranya and Tirumalai Krishnamacharya that Indian masters would integrate the Yoga Sutra into works targeting an Indian readership. As we will see, however, in the case of Krishnamacharya, the Yoga Sutra was far less important to the master himself than it has been for two of his most illustrious disciples, who, in their respective struggles to claim the mantle of their teacher’s legacy, have since the 1990s made him out to be the greatest Yoga Sutra connoisseur of the modern era.
One of the most illustrious foreign guests in the early days of Sivananda’s Rishikesh ashram was Mircea Eliade, the Romanian scholar who would become the mid-twentieth century’s premier specialist of both yoga and Yoga philosophy. On the rebound from a disastrous romance with the daughter of his Bengali mentor, the philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta, Eliade had, in the fall of 1930, fled what he called “historical India” for the “eternal India” of Sivananda’s Himalayan ashram. During his six months there, he lived the life of a renouncer, wearing the ocher robes of a yogi, begging his food with a brass bowl, bathing in the churning snow-fed waters of the holy river, and most importantly for his research, conversing with the Swami and his fellow hermits on the subjects of philosophy and Sanskrit. At the time of Eliade’s departure, Sivananda predicted that he would become the “next Vivekananda,” spreading the message of yoga and Vedanta throughout the West. Eliade demurred, remarking that he found Vivekananda’s writings to be superficial.
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Eliade’s most important work on Yoga—and, arguably the most significant of his hundreds of publications on the history of world religions—first appeared in French in 1954. Some twenty years in the making, it slowly evolved out of the doctoral dissertation he had submitted to the University of Bucharest in 1933 under the title “The Psychology of Indian Meditation.” As Eliade noted in his 1954 foreword, Patanjali’s system was not his major concern. Rather, his was an effort to distinguish Yoga philosophy from what it was not (Tantra, devotional Hinduism, Hatha Yoga) and to situate it in its broader South Asian contexts. However, we also see him elaborating one of the pervasive themes of his broader oeuvre: that archaic systems of thought—in this case India’s Yoga traditions—could, if recovered by modern man, free humanity from its existential condition, what Eliade called the “terror of history.”
For Eliade, classical Yoga was a “living fossil, a modality of archaic spirituality that has survived nowhere else.”3 Integral to that spirituality was an ancient form of psychoanalysis and a thoroughgoing investigation into the role of the subconscious. This theme, which we see in the title of Eliade’s 1933 dissertation, is one that he returned to repeatedly in his writing on Yoga. Yoga was a path of self-analysis, but one whose goals transcended those of psychoanalysis inasmuch as it led not only to an understanding of the contents of the unconscious mind but also to mastery over them, and ultimately to their destruction.
This was samadhi. Eliade was not alone in this reading of Patanjali, a fact he acknowledged in his earliest French-language publication on Yoga. On the first page of this 1936 work, he cited two scholars: his Indian mentor Dasgupta and the German Yoga scholar Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. In 1932, Hauer had published a book titled Der Yoga als Heilweg (“Yoga as a Path to Salvation”) in which he argued for the psychoanalytic value of Patanjali’s system, a theme he would greatly expand upon in a revised version of the book, written in 1958. In the latter work, Hauer also shows his clear indebtedness to the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung, with whom he frequently met and collaborated in the 1930s. Eliade also interacted with Jung, collaborating with him in 1951 on the seminal Eranos Jahrbuch titled Mensch und Zeit (“Man and Time”). For much of the 1920s and 1930s, Jung himself had been strongly influenced by Patanjali’s “Yoga psychology,” but had abandoned it for reasons nearly identical to those marshaled by Hegel about a century earlier. In the end, Jung had rejected Patanjali’s system, maintaining that it collapsed psychology into philosophy and was grounded in broad metaphysical concepts that had little relation to empirical facts or psychological experience. Furthermore, because the East had not yet reached the level of self-awareness achieved in Western scientific thought, it was not possessed of a psychology in the Western sense of the word: it was, rather, “prepsychological.” Furthermore, Jung could not reconcile his view of the role of the ego in mystical experience with Patanjali’s description of samadhi, which required the complete negation of the ego.
Unlike the Swiss Jung, the German Hauer and the Romanian Eliade perceived another dimension to Yoga, which resonated with their adherence to the causes of National Socialism and Fascism. For Eliade, his scholarship on Yoga in particular had a political significance, which he closely linked to the rise of the Iron Guard, the nationalist and anti-Semitic movement he had joined in 1937. For Hauer, who was inducted into the SS by Heinrich Himmler in 1933, yoga was a quintessentially Aryan phenomenon, an ancient Indo-Germanic tradition that glorified the heroic death of both the warrior and the yogi. His linking of the two worlds is made explicit in the final paragraph of his 1932 work (which he also reprinted in full in his 1958 revised edition). Here, after praising Vijnanabhikshu for his engaging presentation of the entire Yoga system, he concluded his work by offering a sort of millenarian vision of the reforging, through Vivekananda’s transmission of the Yoga Sutra to the West, of the ancient bond between two the great strands of the Indo-Germanic Geist.
Eliade was the first leading Western scholar of Yoga to combine some personal experience of yoga with formal academic training. As we have noted, since the time of Madame Blavatsky, a clear line has generally separated persons seeking practical knowledge of yoga from others seeking historical and theoretical knowledge of the Yoga Sutra and Yoga philosophy. A classic example of the gulf separating the two camps are the reviews received by James Haughton Woods’s 1914 translation of the Yoga Sutra with the commentaries of Vyasa and Vachaspati Mishra. A highly peripatetic scholar, Woods had spent two decades preparing his translation, studying with the greatest luminaries of the time at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Bonn, Berlin, Varanasi, Srinagar, and Pune. Now a full century after its original publication, Woods’s translation continues to receive praise from critical scholars as a model of technical precision and rigor. But poetry it is not. By way of example, his translation of Yoga Sutra 4.9 reads as follows: “There is an uninterrupted [causal] relation [of subconscious impressions], although remote in species and point-of-space and movement-of-time, by reason of the correspondence between memory and subliminal-impressions.”
While for many scholars Woods’s translation is a gold standard to be emulated—as many have done in subsequent translations—mere mortals, as one of his early scholarly reviewers noted, may find his English to be as impenetrable as the original Sanskrit. This appears to have been the case for one of Woods’s most critical readers, a celebrated poet who collaborated with a traditional Indian guru on a quite different translation of Patanjali’s text. This was William Butler Yeats, who toward the end of his life was a disciple of an Indian holy man named Shri Purohit Swami. The two collaborated on translations of several works of Indian spirituality, including the Yoga Sutra, and Shri Purohit Swami’s readings of Patanjali’s work come through in several of Yeats’s essays.
Like nearly all of his contemporaries, Shri Purohit Swami read the Yoga Sutra through the lens of Vedanta, identifying Yoga as union with God. Two decades later, Swami Prabhavananda, founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, would, together with his illustrious understudy Christopher Isherwood, define Yoga in the same way, further asserting that “yoga, prior to Patanjali, was originally grounded in Vedanta philosophy.”4 So too, Krishnamacharya and his principal disciples have equated Yoga with the union of the individual self with the cosmic or transcendent Self. These and the majority of twentieth- and twenty-first-century yoga gurus who have written “commentaries” on the Yoga Sutra combine these common elements of pandit lore with folksy stories about holy men they have known, which are intended to communicate the subtleties of Yoga philosophy in ways that their “children” can understand.
It is Yeats’s own voice, however, that one clearly hears in his 1937 introduction to Shri Purohit Swami’s translation of the Yoga Sutra. His essay opens with a reference to “a famous poet and student of Samskrit [sic], who used it as a dictionary.”5 Here, he was referring to none other than T. S. Eliot, who had studied Sanskrit under Woods at Harvard during the 1911/12 academic year, at a time when Patanjali’s work was his guide to life as well as the foundation for his theoretical approach to the psychology of reading and writing. It may also have inspired him to write his most acclaimed work of poetry. As his biographer Cleo Kearns has suggested, the metaphor of root and rebirth in the opening verses of Eliot’s The Waste Land is best comprehended when read through the lens of Patanjali’s analysis of subliminal impressions and the seeds of karma from past lives:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
While Woods’s translation and interpretation of the Yoga Sutra played a formative role in Eliot’s development as a poet, for Yeats his prose style left much to be desired.
Some years ago I bought The Yoga-System of Patanjali, translated and edited by James Horton [sic] Woods and published by the Harvard Press. It is the standard edition, final, impeccable in scholastic eyes…. Certainly before the Ajanta Caves were painted … naked ascetics had put what they believed an ancient wisdom into short aphorisms for their pupils to get by heart and put into practice. I come in my turn, no grammarian, but a man engaged in that endless research into life, death, God, that is every man’s revery. I want to hear the talk of those naked men, and I am certain they never said “The subliminal impression produced this (super reflective balanced state)” nor talked of “predicate relations.”6
While both Yeats and Eliot were members of the Theosophical Society, Eliade and Jung were openly critical of the group. Their view was shared by another member of the European literati, the Hungarian Arthur Koestler, who in 1942 inveighed against “the hacks of Yogi-journalese” and “crank philosophers who dispense a minimum of information about breathing-technique wrapped in a maximum of obscurantist bombast.”7 In 1959, Koestler was able to combine a lecture tour to India and Japan with his own ethnographic and literary study of India’s Yoga traditions. The result was his 1960 book, The Lotus and the Robot, in which he addressed the Yoga Sutra’s discussion of the supernatural powers. Here, he rightly argued, contra the bowdlerized readings of the Theosophists Wood and Judge, that Patanjali had identified the power to enter into another body, omnipotence, and levitation as legitimate rewards for persons who had mastered the higher forms of contemplation. He also noted that this was the general consensus among the Indian practitioners of yoga he had interviewed.
Koestler was the last member of the Western literati to pay serious heed to the Yoga Sutra. After 1965—the year in which relaxed immigration policies opened the way for Indian gurus to flow into the United States just as the counterculture movement was gaining momentum in the West—that torch would be taken up again by members of the emergent yoga subculture. The first seeds of that subculture had already been planted in 1952, when the New York–born violinist Yehudi Menuhin first began practicing yoga under the tutelage of B.K.S. Iyengar.
It was in 1967 however, that yoga truly burst into the collective Western consciousness, when the Beatles met and subsequently introduced Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his program of Transcendental Meditation (TM) to the world. The Maharishi made the cover of Time magazine in 1975, but in the same year, the movement stalled, with monthly teacher training enrollments dropping by 90 percent in the two years that followed. It was then, in 1977, that a new TM product called the TM-Sidhi program was introduced. Ostensibly based on the third chapter of the Yoga Sutra, this was nothing less than training in supernatural powers, with an emphasis on levitation, or “yogic flying.” This program, which the Maharishi University of Management website indicates “was brought to light by Maharishi from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,” involves mentally repeating the “flying sutra” or one of the other sutras on the supernatural powers (siddhis).8 In the case of yogic flying, practitioners begin by hopping on firm foam mattresses in the cross-legged posture. Eventually, they hover, and finally they fly. Neither this power, nor the many other benefits claimed by the program (increases in “brain wave coherence,” reduced rates of crime, sickness and accidents, world peace) have ever been substantiated.
what has been termed India’s “Yoga Renaissance”: Alter 2004, 26, 103, 175.
Alistair Crowley and Pierre Bernard: Alter 2011, 132; Koestler 1960, 106–7.
It was not until 1965: Narayan 1993, 494–95.
“not the conventional method of Patanjali: Heehs 2008, 239.
I began my Yoga in 1904: Kane 1977, 1465.
As Peter Heehs has observed: Heehs 2008, 239, 278, 280, 283, 285–87.
In spite of Madhavdas’s allegiance: De Michelis 2003, 183.
he wrote The Science of Pranayama: Alter 2004, 63.
entirely bypassed the teachings of the Yoga Sutra: Alter 2011, 68–75, 132–33.
One of the most illustrious foreign guests: White 2009a, xvii–xviii.
Eliade demurred: Strauss 2005, 40.
As Eliade noted in his 1954 foreword: Eliade 1973, xvi–xxi.
a “living fossil: Eliade 1973, 361.
On the first page: Ciurtin 2008, 351.
Hauer had published: Hauer 1932, xv–xvi; Hauer 1958, 407–50.
Jung himself had been strongly influenced: Coward 2002, 61–62, 82.
For Eliade: Ciurtin 2009, 324.
For Hauer: Benavides 2001, 225–38; Alles 2002, 178.
a sort of millenarian vision: Hauer 1932, 142; 1958, 272–73.
his translation of Yoga Sutra 4.9: Woods 1914, 307.
as one of his early scholarly reviewers noted: Masson-Oursel 1921, 60–61.
Swami Prabhavananda: Prabhavananda and Isherwood 1971, 9, 15.
So too, Krishnamacharya: Ranganathan and Ranganathan 2007, 31; Iyengar 1993, 47; Desikachar 1999, 5.
none other than T. S. Eliot: O’Donnell 1994, 390n2; Kearns 1987, 58n10.
when Patanjali’s work was his guide: Kearns 1987, 57–59.
Some years ago I bought The Yoga-System of Patanjali: O’Donnell 1994, 175.
While both Yeats and Eliot were members: Goldberg 2010, 52; Eliade 1973, xix; Tacey 2001, 24.
“the hacks of Yogi-journalese”: Koestler 1945, 246.
the Yoga Sutra’s discussion: Koestler 1960, 110–11.
The Maharishi made the cover of Time magazine: “Seer of Flying” 1977, 105.
This program: found at http://www.mum.edu/RelId/606573/ISvars/default/TM-Sidhi_Program.htm. See also http://www.minet.org/mantras.html and http://www.permanentpeace.org/technology/yogic_flying.html.