This chapter addresses the goal, or goals, of yoga, particularly the tantric turn to harmony, integration, and transformation as yogic goal. The tantric ideal contrasts with but also is supposed to include spiritual transcendence. My aim is to connect Yogic ideas about this and other results of yoga practice—especially psychic powers, siddhis—with contemporary ideas about health and well-being. Yoga need not be one-sided, should not be one-sided, I shall argue while exploring first siddhi teachings in connection with the idea of enlightenment (samadhi), then views about emotional well-being through bhakti and the yoga of art, and finally the holistic ideal of psychic transformation.
This last idea is tantric. It is symbolized in Buddhism by the bodhisattva, the perfect individual. In the Upanishads as well as tantric psychology, it is the ideal of living in the the soul, a translife consciousness “thumb size, forever dwelling in the heart of creatures” (Katha 6.17). A divine flame is depicted at the core of the individual, “behind” or otherwise related to the heart chakra (see figure 4C). The ideal of psychic transformation includes ethical and social well-being as well as mental, emotional, and physical well-being. And it connects with the siddhi theme of the Yoga Sutra (YS).
The YS’s fourth and final chapter is devoted to metaphysical conceptions. There is little instruction about practice. Despite the dualistic metaphysics that has already been drawn, there are arguments for a peculiar nature of chitta—thought and emotion or mind—distinguishing it from all other forms taken by prakriti, nature. The YS’s metaphysics may for this reason be described as a triple-ism, not a dualism. But be that as it may, the chitta’s being won over to the side of consciousness, away from the side of mechanical nature, is in general the way siddhis, the powers of consciousness, are acquired.
Traditionally taken to be results of yoga, if not invariably a laudable goal, siddhis are integrated into the larger theory in YS chapter 4 differently than is usually thought. The standard interpretation focuses on YS 3.37, which says that siddhis are obstacles to the ultimate goal of samadhi, enlightenment or yogic trance (“These powers or wonders according to the ordinary human consciousness are obstacles to samadhi”). Against that single sutra we have in chapter 4, however, the claim that siddhis follow upon thought and emotion coming under the control of the conscious being, the purusha. This is voluntarism par excellence. The admonishment of YS 3.37 is the sore thumb. In chapter 4, acquisition of powers turns out to be something that cannot be renounced. Let me explain.
The entire third chapter of the YS—except 3.37 and a few sutras at the beginning—lists siddhis along with practices that bring them about. Then at the beginning of the fourth chapter is a wonderful overview of that whole long stretch of text, along with explanation of the possibility of siddhis. This puts them—strangely, given the YS’s dualism as well as 3.37—as native capacities of consciousness.
Sutra 4.1 summarizes the practice themes introduced in chapter 3: “Powers (siddhi) come by birth, from herbs, mantras, asceticism, and samadhi.” Note that even this last item, samadhi, is given a voluntarist spin: samadhi is here not just goal but also instrument. In my reading, “yogic trance” or “enstacy” is itself a power of consciousness.1 It is a part of samyama, we learn at YS 3.3–4, the pair of sutras that introduces the long list of powers. Most of these are said to come about through samyama, a conscious identification and control, and thus samadhi would be part of the means to powers, not blocked by them.2 It would also not be the final goal, since it leads to something else. Let us dig a little deeper into the samadhi concept.
At YS 1.17–18, samadhi is said to have two forms, the second of which “is preceded by effort to hold steady ideas intent on contentment.” As remarked in chapter 2, these create or reinforce samadhi-prone dispositions such that some people, on the basis of effort in previous lifetimes, are compelled into the yogic experience without much effort on their part in the current life. Sutra 4.1 repeats the idea with respect to siddhis, among which it seems we should count the ability to enter samadhi.
Powers come from accomplishments in previous lifetimes, “by birth.” People born with metanormal abilities presumably have practiced yoga in a former life and vasana (translife samskara) are continuous from death to birth. They come “from herbs,” as is taught in Ayurveda, traditional medical science. They come from “mantras,” the practice of japa, which is the repetition of sacred syllables such as om. And they come from yogic austerities such as fasting (asceticism, tapas), and from samadhi. Note that, as I argued above (in the second section of chapter 2), if powers flow from samadhi, then samadhi cannot involve an entire separation of consciousness from its embodiments. And, as pointed out, samadhi is said to form part of samyama, the general power of conscious identification and control.
Sutra 4.2: “Transformation into a different type of being (or, into another birth) comes about from a superabundance of natural potentiality.” The classical commentators emphasize that especially at death one has the opportunity to change into another type of being, not only through the loss of a particular persona but also by a core individuality becoming manifest in ways that were hitherto hidden. Vyasa insinuates that humans sometimes become gods.
More abstractly, the sutra itself suggests that practicing yoga does not change one’s core nature but rather triggers wonders latent and intrinsic to consciousness. This reading is borne out by sutra 2.43 as well as the next sutra, 4.3. Sutra 2.43: “Powers of the organs of action (speech, hands, feet, evacuation, and sex) result from asceticism (tapas), which destroys imperfections.” And sutra 4.3: “Practicing yoga does not impel transformations of nature. Rather, like a farmer (irrigating, weeding, etc., to help plants grow), yogic practices break up coverings or obstacles (so that one’s true nature can become manifest).”
One’s nature is not transformed from the outside, like a potter shaping a vessel of clay, but rather from the inside, like a caterpillar into a butterfly. Yoga practice removes obstacles to a self-manifestation that, once set off, unfolds on its own. That is, once obstacles are destroyed, the wonders of samadhi, etc., occur naturally.3 The tantric ideal of perfect balance of body, life, mind, and self—psychic transformation—is thus precursed, and the Upanishadic idea of yoga as self-purification, which is reaffirmed in the Gita (e.g., in 6.12), is echoed. Self-perfection may have to be protected and tweaked, but in its essentials it is not created; it is rather the natural state or the natural state in expansion as the soul integrates its instruments into itself. (Compare, in appendix A, Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2.14: “With a knife smear a mirror with clay and just as when cleansed it shines again brilliantly, / So the embodied who knows the reality of the self (atman) becomes integrated, purposes fulfilled, parted from grief.”) However, without prerequisites passed—including, most importantly, the YS’s “mental stillness” (chitta-vritti-nirodha), the cleansing of the mirror in the image of the Upanishad—the goal would remain elusive. This seems to be the idea. (Compare, in appendix D, Kularnava Tantra 2.33ff.)
This reading of the YS would show that the idea of the purpose of yoga as the particular power of samadhi is not all that the text holds forth. By putting aside only a few of the more metaphysical statements, we can see throughout the text the larger goal of powers taken more broadly and integrally, including balance and harmony among all the parts of our being. Let us look at one more sutra from chapter 4, in fact the very next, to seal this interpretation.
YS 4.4: “Thought and emotion (chitta) are shaped solely from egoity.” By “egoity,” asmita, the Samkhya principle of individuation might be meant, one of the twenty-four primary divisions or tattva of nature. According to the Samkhya-karika, the principle is responsible, in the unrolling of primordial stuff, for differentiations of individuals within a type, that is, on the side of nature, prakriti.4 The purusha, the yogin himself, the one capable of shaping chitta, is intrinsically an individual.
However, assimilation to Samkhya is not even the route taken by the classical commentators here. The accomplished yogin capable of mental silence has the ability to individuate, i.e., create, new mind, chitta, new mental patterns, for himself by himself, or herself, as opposed to having one created for her by universal nature (to include karma from previous lives). In other words, normally a self or person is not very responsible, it is implied, for the cast of his or her mind. The current persona, the self in its current embodiment, would have chitta, mental and emotional patterns, determined by a combination of karma and the body and the environment. But the yogin has the ability to create new patterns.5
The interpretation of the classical commentators supports the power theme of Yoga philosophy: the yogin has metanormal capabilities, whereas ordinarily the mind is determined mainly by impersonal forces. Self-determination is at the core of all Yoga teaching, philosophic or practical, Patanjali’s or another’s, ancient or modern, defined by a commitment to yoga practices. A practice-oriented reading is put forth here by Vyasa and company: given that our minds are shaped to a large degree by our culture and social relationships, this sutra asks us to view the yogin as the artist and critic, the innovator capable of new chitta. At a minimum, he or she would not be as bound to convention as the nonyogin. In this way, the sutra seals the siddhi theme of chapter 3. Insofar as yoga is focused on transformation or creation of chitta, there need be no world denial. Aloneness, kaivalya, is not the only goal.
We have already dismissed the reading that would cram the meaning of all the sutras into the box of a dualistic metaphysics. But let me beat the dead horse (an exception to the rule of ahimsa). How could a disconnected individual shape chitta? Would the shaping of a mind be from the outside or from within? We are supposed to believe that in reality there is no relation between purusha and prakriti, but let us imagine, in line with the immediately preceding sutra, YS 4.3, that the the shaping is to be from within. Then we would have a nugget soul or purusha enveloped by nature, prakriti, somehow shaping and controlling her. The purusha would have no way out, though prakriti would be, thankfully, malleable and responsive. However, she would also be not conscious. The untenability of this picture is an argument for holism, for the deep unity, at some level, of matter and consciousness, as discussed at the end of chapter 2. It is not hard to discern holistic principles implicit in the sutras.
The YS in fact assumes about as much intrinsic power for consciousness as Vedantic theism assumes for God in its maximal version of self-determination. Sutra 4.23 asserts a kind of maximal capacity for knowledge: “The mind (chitta) that is conditioned both by awareness of the seer [i.e., the purusha] and that to be seen [i.e., prakriti] can cognize anything.” Other kinds of mastery include the ethical (others’ friendliness is said to flow from perfection of ahimsa at YS 2.35), as well as occult abilities and metanormal bodily capacities that have been better popularized (YS 3.46: “Perfection of the body means beauty, grace, strength, and adamantine hardness”—echoing an idea found in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad [2.11; see appendix A] of a body “made of the fire of yoga”).
To be sure, the YS contains themes of world negation, joining with other early Indic mystical movements. In early Buddhist metaphysics and cosmology as well as in the early Jaina and several Upanishads, the reigning assumption seems to be that all embodiment is by nature suffering: sarvam duhkham, “All is suffering,” is Buddhism’s First Noble Truth. Pain and suffering arrive in practically infinite forms and degrees. The best one can do is to be calm and inactive, not creating disturbances in the cosmic web. This is the view prior to—or, less controversially, simply opposed to—tantrism and the tantric turn.
In a different interpretation of the truth of suffering, our experience is viewed as unfortunate in comparison with the Buddha’s. “All is suffering” is matched by the third of the Four Noble Truths, the Truth of Nirvana. This is something positive, a void or emptiness (shunyata) vibrant with compassion and bliss that are the true self, or nonself, anatman, of everyone—much like the atman of the Upanishads. Thus regard for one’s own self and consciousness, or future self, requires one to try to see life’s pleasures as well as its pains as all in fact suffering, that is, in the light of the bliss that would be ours were we to awaken. In this Mahayana and tantric version of Buddhism, the void spills over into life in the perfection of the individual, the bodhisattva.6
Patanjali seems to side with the quietists at YS 2.15: “And because of conflicting fluctuations of qualities, there is suffering in change, in anxious, feverish states of mind, and in mental dispositions (samskara). Thus the person of discriminating judgment sees all as suffering” (my emphasis). This of course echoes Buddhism’s First Noble Truth. But given the surrounding text (see appendix C), the judgment expressed seems based not on everyday experience alone—where of course we take ourselves to experience pleasure sometimes—but on a comparison with true self-experience. Furthermore, the tantric could agree with the sutra that there is suffering in conflicting fluctuations (virodha), while holding that there is the possibility of harmony and divine life. Abhinava Gupta holds that self-realization manifests in life as a spiritual tranquility (shanti) compatible with artistic expression, life as Shiva’s dance.
But however we read the YS, a turn to world affirmation occurs in the philosophy and practices of tantra. North, south, east, and west in yogic traditions in India, in Vedanta, Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Buddhism, Jainism, and in new traditions too, there is the tantric turn. The old concern with discovery of a hidden or deeper self or consciousness remains, but is incorporated into a wider vision upholding enjoyment (bhoga) of all the flavors (rasa) of divine manifestation.7 Celebration of the divine in life comes to be integrated into a world-oriented view of the person and self and the goals of life. Some early tantric texts (such as the Kularnava Tantra; see sppendix D) do keep to the idea that the highest good entails liberation from rebirth. But the ideal is shifting, coming to encompass development (through rebirth, partly) of a spiritual individual—the accomplished (siddha) yogin or in Buddhism, the bodhisattva. Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), famous for bringing Vedanta to the West, proclaims that he no longer wishes to be free from rebirth, to renounce the world for the self, atman, but rather to be reborn again and again to worship God indwelling diversely in the material universe.8 Self is not conceived as only the impersonal and cosmic atman but as the individual jiva, the living being, who is destined to become perfect in the terms of this mystically material universe.
The origins of tantra are obscure, but there are precursors in the Upanishads and especially in the Gita’s notion of karma yoga. Ethnographers have also pointed to “autochthonous” practices of people speaking Dravidian and other non-Indo-European languages. The worship of female “Earth” divinities seems especially important, permitting “homologies” and acculturation, to use the terms of academic specialists. Of course, much could be said about the material dimensions of tantric culture, but here we shall keep our eyes on the Yoga in tantra, i.e., Yoga philosophy.
The guiding idea of tantric outlooks is spiritual transformation. Everything may be one, or interdependent, but the processes of self-and world-development are real and meaningful. Yoga is the secret of self and nature, as the lower self and the body are transformed. On analogy to the transformation of desire into the higher emotions or aesthetic delight, spiritual transformation is said to occur in the purified “vessel” by the action of spiritual energy, or shakti. The flows of breath, prana, the vital energies of the body, are transmuted. The yogin or yogini is the remade person, a mage, with occult powers, siddhis.
More broadly, pleasure and sexual fulfillment are viewed as intrinsically valuable throughout the highbrow literature of later classical Indian culture. The Kama Sutra, a textbook on lovemaking and sexual fulfillment that may be as early as the fourth century C.E., presupposes a theory of erotic dispositions as inherently good. Sexual desire is worthy of fulfillment so long as other values and duties are not neglected. “Let life be prosperous and full” is the attitude, not “Let us away from these things that are transitory.”9 A literature of philosophic aesthetics comes to accompany an increasingly refined poetry and drama, and the idea of the connoisseur, literally the “like-hearted” (sahridaya), who is capable of both universal empathy and uniquely aesthetic emotions prompted by art, is championed. The tantric philosopher Abhinava Gupta (see appendix D) draws on aesthetics to articulate a yoga of beauty and art—the topic of the next section.
To close this one, let us look at the unificational themes of tantra, the idea of unity in the notion of harmony, asanas requiring right alignment, and the holism of holistic health. Those who practice asanas know that some of the most difficult poses challenge balance. One cannot simply will balance, although one-pointed concentration helps. One has to be particularly responsive to feedback, as one limb or another normally in play is taken out of play. Balance poses reveal dependencies that are not absolute—they are really imbalance poses, teaching balance by imbalances that require compensation in effort or, more profoundly, alignment with other limbs.
All this is a metaphor or model for what yoga has to contribute to holistic health, as we get a better sense for the parts of our psychological makeup. If there is a teleology implicit in the practices of yoga prominent today, it is holistic health. This is wellness that is dynamic and expansive, including strength and flexibility for the body but also delight in the emotions, insight in the mind, and spiritual growth. There is movement toward integration of all the parts of the being (compare Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2.14, appendix A).
Better to grasp the concept of holistic health and tantric perfectionism, let us look back at the Platonic theory of a tripartite self.10 Tantra would add a spiritual element to Plato’s mix of, one, the appetitive, two, the enthusiastic or emotional, and, three, the rational. Thus, counting the body, four, we would have with the spiritual, five, a conception of the main parts of personality that is not too far from the kosha theory of the Upanishads (see figure 4A). However, there is unfortunately in the Western theory nothing spiritual. In Plato’s view, the rational is to control and harmonize the activities of the appetitive and emotional parts. The vision of a society governed by a philosopher-king who alone comprehends the idea or form of the good corresponds with the psychological picture. The inadequacy of the political ideal thus helps to show the inadequacy of the tripartite view of the self. In Plato’s closed society, poetry is banned as obscuring the rational message, and harmony is secured only at the expense of sensual gratification. Plato’s would be a totalitarian state, where police keep us from unruliness. The problem lies in what does the harmonizing, the rational mind, which is clearly not up to the task—both socially and psychologically. Yoga proposes a role for the mind limited to its proper province, along with life-encouraging alliances and mergers with our other parts, all under the management of a psychic or spiritual element.
In the Symposium, which is perhaps Plato’s greatest literary creation as opposed to work of philosophy, a view of harmony is presented that is much closer to the tantric conception. Here the form of the good is identical with ideal beauty. Through contemplation of the worthiness of the object of desire, a philosopher climbs the ladder of love, reaching the supreme (beauty = truth = goodness). In the process, feeling is transformed from desire into something very lofty, in what is more a mystical than a rational contemplation. And the result is not in the Symposium a set of rules for society but something rather more subtle, a bringing of beauty into life, something like Abhinava’s yoga of art. The philosopher who has beheld the form of the beautiful turns back to the world to create works of delight—as does God in the harmony manifest in the great moments and rhythms of the natural universe. According to Plato, the philosopher also brings about harmony in the social universe, but here psychologically the integration does not, as in the Republic, have the rational part as the ruler, it seems to me. Clearly, it is not in tantra, although like other instruments the mind is a valuable tool and, indeed, according to Abhinava, its best and correct use the most important limb (anga) of yoga.
Holistic health in tantric yoga implies not just absence of illness and injury—which is a negative concept of wellness with perhaps too much play in contemporary medicine—but fulfillment of our capacities. Even disease and injury are afforded instrumental value in helping us achieve a complex balance and integration of all the parts of our being, including the highest but not restricted to it. As the Kularnava Tantra says (2.25; see appendix D), “Enjoyment becomes yoga practice; misbehavior becomes art (and the good deed); transmigratory existence (samsara) becomes liberation (spiritual transcendence).” This idea reverberates throughout tantra and yoga literature. Even the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which is quite ascetic overall, advocates sexual practices bringing enjoyment (bhoga) as well as spiritual enlightenment (HYP 3.103), though its ideas of yogic perfection are much narrower than in more mainstream tantra. The broad ideal may be articulated best in Mahayana Buddhism’s notion of the bodhisattva, which we shall continue to explore in the next section, along with Aurobindo’s notion of psychic transformation, the topic with which we close.
The discipline of devotional yoga, bhakti yoga, the “yoga of love” has been most famously articulated in the Bhagavad Gita, but also permeates tantra and almost all late Hindu religion. (The bhakti teaching of the Gita is expressed in its later chapters in particular; see appendix B.) To be sure, there are late-classical handbooks of yoga, such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (see appendix E), where bhakti is not in focus. But even there the “grace of the guru” figures prominently. Clearly, bhakti is predominant in, for example, the Kashmiri Shaivism of Abhinava Gupta (appendix D) as well as movements all over the subcontinent. It’s not at all a stretch to say that in Vedanta and Vaishnavism more generally as well, bhakti reigns as the most important form of yoga in contemporary India. A more qualified statement would be needed to take in tantric Buddhism, but there too bhakti is conspicuous.
In the idea of God or the Divine or the Buddha that is crucial, there is both a general and a personal element. The general element connects with Western philosophy’s “teleological argument,” that is to say, with the kinds of consideration that Western philosophers have taken up—the beauty and order of the workings of nature and the miracle of our own being and faculties—to prove the existence of God on the basis of analogy to human arts and crafts (design requiring a designer). The practitioner of bhakti goes beyond the inference to perceive the beautiful body of the Beloved everywhere, in the great sights and sounds of Earth, the Mother, but also in every contact, in every sensation, both externally and internally in thought and emotion. The things and events of nature demand not only belief—the bhakti yogini would insist, implicitly granting the argument (of which there is an Eastern version much debated in Nyaya11)—but principally delight in the whomever or whatever is their origin.12
The particular element in bhakti is a matter of personal relationship that extends, however indirectly or in however long a line, to this origin. That is, to use the first-person language of yoga, that whoever or whatever is the stuff of the stars and the Earth and the waters of life is somehow responsible for them too, through self-transformation. The idea that that divine X could be aware of and indeed somehow care for, if not me, at least something that does relate directly to me is the crucial propositional content of bhakti, in my opinion. There is my personal divinity, the spark soul in my heart, my higher self, my guru, who is intimate and responsive and moves my feelings by my sense of his or her connectedness, which makes me connected too. Bhakti yoga is all about training the emotions, and the emotions relate to the concrete, the divine or the divine representative in the here and now. The feeling is extended, as best one can, to transform all our everyday attitudes. In this way, bhakti would come to infuse all that we become and do. Our lives would be different.
Thus the sense of connectedness goes all the way back, grounded in the origin, the ishvara or devi or equivalent—about which it is necessary, then, to have some conception. I repeat, the particular element is more important in practicing bhakti, the devotional feeling rhapsodized in songs and literature. At the far end of the bhakti attitude is simply something or someone who need be conceived only vaguely. Nevertheless, the idea of total connection has to be there. Intimacy at the near end is divinely grounded. Thus the general is definitely intended.
Note that with the general and the particular put together, the whole universe stands as intermediary. For the Creator (mother, sustainer, etc., even emptiness) is the Creator (mother, sustainer, emptiness) of everything, the same with respect to the entire universe. Our existences conform to universal laws, exceptionless processes. The Creator has the whole to worry about, the workings of everything, and cannot be faulted for not weighting my preferences the way I do. Indeed, yogic preliminaries, such as nonharmfulness (ahimsa) and the other yamas and niyamas of the YS, are rules to which I have to conform to enter into the right relations that are the very essence of yoga. Thus a Yoga philosophy of bhakti turns to the intermediaries, the connectives joining the high and the low, which become manifest in practice.
Yoga is a matter of right relation, right alignment and connection among all the parts of ourselves. For whatever higher or deeper part there is—by definition, something of which I am currently unaware or aware only imperfectly—I need most of all a teacher, someone who knows the principles of yoga. I need a spiritual intermediary, a divine or human guru, who can show me right alignment. However found, the teacher naturally provokes a form of bhakti, gratitude mixed with devotion and happiness entailing confidence about our own destiny.13 The universe, i.e., the sequence of events in a lifetime and its collective lessons or its sheer beauty, along with the conspiracies necessary to make us see it, can play the guru’s role. So too can a tradition. The position is not filled only by a human representative or a god or goddess anthropomorphically conceived. But a book from a guru of the past as well as personal divinities and avataras can serve, as can a living guru. Some teachers are charismatic, some not so charismatic. The essential prerequisite is having at least better connection with the divine than we have, and knowing how to bring us to know or realize it.
Classical Yoga philosophy in the Gita and elsewhere provides rich resources for theory of the teacher. At the high end is the notion of the avatara, the special divine “descent,” put forth in the Gita’s fourth chapter. There is a special “divine descent” into finite form to uphold a moral order and direct the world in the right ways. Gita 4.6–8, Krishna speaking:
Although I exist as the unborn, the imperishable self and am the Lord of beings, by resorting to and controlling my own nature I come into phenomenal being through my own magical power of delimitation (maya).14 / Whenever there is a crisis concerning the right way (dharma), Arjuna, and a rising up of evil, then I loose myself forth (taking birth). For protection of good people and for destruction of evildoers, for establishment of the right way, I take birth age after age.15
Krishna as avatara is a person who is aware of himself as a manifestation of God, a person who shares somehow in God’s awareness, power, and native delight.16 In the Mahabharata as a whole, I admit, Krishna does more than teach yoga (see the introduction to appendix B). The “establishment of the right way” mentioned in verse 4.8, quoted here, is not to be understood as only a matter of yogic guidance. But in accordance with the openness and inclusivism of our Yoga, let us explore further the concept of divine descent and the guru. The Gita as a yoga manual is in rather surprising agreement here with the Yoga Sutra, as I intend to show.17
The Yoga Sutra has a conception of the Lord, ishvara, and a version of devotional yoga. In chapter 1, a handful of distinct methods to reach mental silence are laid out (mental silence being the goal of yoga according to YS 1.2, chitta-vritti-nirodha, stilling of fluctuations of thought and emotion, also called calming illumination of the mind at YS 1.33). One of these methods is bhakti.18 YS 1.23 sums it up: Mental silence can result “from opening to (pranidhana, meditation on, surrender to) the Lord (ishvara).” Vyasa, the first commentator, glosses pranidhana as bhakti, which he says is an intense desire to be like the Lord in certain yogic characteristics and abilities.
The idea of such pranidhana is not as controversial in the Sanskrit commentaries as one might expect, knowing the diversity of renderings among modern translators. Still, on the idea of the Lord (ishvara) there is plenty of controversy among the classical authors.19 The two-word expression recurs at YS 2.45, which connects the practice with samadhi. Interestingly, the immediately preceding sutra, YS 2.44, says that the practice of self-study (with respect to a yogic text), sva-adhyaya, brings the power, siddhi, of achieving contact with one’s preferred divinity, ishta devata.20 A person worships the form of the One that it is easiest to worship, the form to which she or he is personally drawn, who is their teacher or the teacher of their teacher, the founder of the lineage that extends to you. (See in appendix D, in the Kularnava Tantra, verse 1.2: Devi tells her guru Shiva that he is “easy to love” as she requests yoga teachings from him.) Others worship the forms and divinities they are drawn to. Behind them all stands the One.21 In the tantric understanding of all this, the form of worship is puja, the ceremony of celebration of the divinity. The connection is occult but nonetheless real, a particular puja connecting with a particular divinity, the ceremony making, so to say, the right psychic space for that particlar divinity to manifest—this seems to be the tantric idea.
Skipping a couple of sutras that are systematic in character (in that they relate, or try to relate, the ishvara idea to the Samkhya system), we have at YS 1.26 what seems the essential conception: “The Lord is the guru even of the ancient teachers in not being limited by time.” One of the arguments for the existence of God in classical Indian philosophy is what we may call the Criteriological Argument, which goes like this. Each craft, including speech, is by definition learned from a teacher who has learned from a previous teacher, e.g., grammar that, since the world has a beginning (a crucial premise that atheists such as Mimamsakas and Buddhists reject), has to have an originator, a first guru, traditionally, Shiva, the great god (maha deva), the founder of yoga. Shiva sets conventions, endowing words with meaning and patterns as grammatical rules, and fixing standards for excellence in all occupations. We learn these standards from our immediate teachers, who also learned them. Learning processes have to begin somewhere. Therefore, we must suppose an Original Teacher who knows the principles intrinsically without having been taught or who originally set them. Humans are rather obviously ruled out as incapable of these tasks (setting the conventions of language, etc.), so we must conceive of a Diving Being performing them, thus a “guru even of the ancient teachers in not being limited by time.”22
That God is the original teacher of yoga converges with the Gita’s notion of Brahman as the foundation of dharma as well as the tantric idea of an individual’s enlightenment as working for the benefit of everyone. It locks up with the Buddhist notion of the bodhisattva (as expressly pointed out by Abhinava—see appendix D: “Bodhisattvas, who are persons who know reality, appear again even after (their enlightenment) in a body that is perfectly appropriate for them in their intention, which is dharmic (righteous) and born out of concern for others’ welfare, whose only consequence would be others actually being helped”). God is impartial. Similarly, the yogin “delights in the welfare of everyone,” in the phrase of the Gita (sarva-hite ratah). Yoga brings us into right alignment, making us better sensitive to the general welfare. The principles of yoga have social ramifications.
It is not hard to see how the positive Buddhist tantric conception of the void’s spilling over into life is connected to the idea of the perfect individual, the bodhisattva. Remarkably, there is a similar nexus of ideas in the “yoga of art” teaching of Abhinava Gupta (Abhinava’s overall philosophy and oeuvre are introduced in appendix D). In brief, Abhinava uses the rasa theory of classical criticism, the alamkara shastra, to fill out the Gita’s teaching of karma yoga.23 This genre of Sanskrit literature is rich and diverse, but throughout there is an amazingly durable theory of human nature. In the oldest version, the Natya Shastra, “The Science of Spectacle,” by Bharata (c. 200 B.C.E.), eight dominant natural emotional states are matched to eight aesthetic flavors (rasas) that a poet or dramatist should create his work to provoke in a (cultured) audience. Bharata lists eight types of rasa, which correspond to eight abiding natural emotions:
BHAVA (natural emotion) |
RASA (relishing) |
rati (sexual feeling) |
sringara (the erotic) |
hasa (laughter) |
hasya (the comic) |
shoka (grief) |
karuna (the compassionate) |
krodha (anger) |
raudra (the furious) |
utsaha (energy, vitality) |
vira (the heroic) |
bhaya (fear) |
bhayanika (the frightening) |
jugupsa (repulsion) |
bibatsa (the disgusting) |
vismaya (wonder) |
adbhuta (the astonishing) |
According to Bharata, rasas arise out of “abiding emotional states,” sthayi bhava, listed in the left column. Everyone is subject to these basic feelings, and the dramatist capturing an audience’s interest and writing a good play evokes them in aesthetic versions, listed in the right column. This means that, unlike with ordinary fear, for instance, the spectator need not herself be afraid while savoring the bhayanika, the “frightening” (the “delightfully frightening,” as is implied by its falling into the aesthetic category). She knows what it is like to be afraid (she has the appropriate mental dispositions, samskaras), and enjoys the representation, knowing it is only a play. The rasa is universal, however, and her individuality merges (ideally) with that of every member of the audience (all of whom meet the prerequisites for this type of experience) in relishing the presentation.24 Thus the poet and dramatist work from knowledge of human nature, and the feelings are evoked by crafting situations in which the “abiding emotional states” occur.
Appendix D contains a bit of Abhinava’s commentary on Bharata’s Natya Shastra, where the theory of the eight flavors is in the immediate background (the argument is that there is a ninth rasa of spiritual peace, shanta rasa). More broadly, this tenth-century tantric critic and philosopher turns the older theory of rasa on its head by taking a more essentialist view of aesthetic response, a more internalist perspective. According to him, the rasas are grounded not only in the corresponding bhavas but also in the atman, the impersonal and universal self. The delight intrinsic to all relishing derives from the atman, who is universal. The specialness of the ninth rasa (the reason, Abhinava says, Bharata did not himself mention it) is that it is doubly grounded in the self.
Bharata has what we might call a foundationalist view, that there are natural emotions that serve as material to be aesthetically transformed. Abhinava, in contrast, sees aesthetic experience as native to an interior realm closer to the self’s own experience of bliss (ananda) than any natural feeling we are born with. Aesthetic experience draws on the ananda (delight) that is intrinsic to self-awareness. Relishing is not only impersonal and independent of petty circumstances of life experience but also preexistent. It is an inner sense or feeling that is not caused by the body or by mental dispositions (samskaras) created by experience storing memories. The circumstances portrayed by art may be physical, but the rasas, like the universal self, are not physically caused. They are drawn out. In themselves, they belong to a separate domain of self-experience.
In line with this internalist, noncausal position, rasas are viewed as self-authenticating, sva-prakasha, like the self. In this way, the perspective of the connoisseur is insider and privileged, the trained sensibility of the sahridaya, in Abhinava’s view, the person of “like heart and mind,” who is fit for aesthetic experience. Similarly, the self-disciplined yogin is fit to experience Shiva, the supreme self and reality. The analogy is explicit and total. The training that makes possible (but does not cause) our relishings undercuts their intersubjectivity no less than the training necessary to taste the supreme delight undercuts the reality of the One. Indeed, aesthetic training is a kind of yoga. Each world (bhuvana) or domain of the self’s manifestation has objects that are proper to it and to a corresponding consciousness. The same is true of the aesthetic experience (rasa) of the sahridaya.
At risk of digression, it seems to me interesting that there is only one aesthetic state for which a radically different word and concept is used than that for the corresponding natural state: suffering or grief, shoka, which as a naturally occurring feeling is said to be matched in the audience not with a form of shoka but with something radically different, namely, karuna, compassion. The thesis that links the two is that when we contemplate suffering in the aesthetically interested but personally disinterested fashion of a connoisseur (sahridaya, “like-hearted” member of the audience), we taste the rasa of compassion—which, we may add, in the spirit of Abhinava’s aesthetic Yoga, is right and proper because that’s the true response of the atman, our deep self or, as in Buddhism, “nonself” essential consciousness.
Perhaps one side of the First Noble Truth—interpreting the “All” to refer to things that concern others as well as ourselves—is to acknowledge the selfness of others and to practice ahimsa. Abhinava would say that in a yoga of art, by empathizing with even an imaginary suffering we grow in our dispositions to compassion. Indeed, in all aesthetic experience we begin to enjoy the bliss of the true self, ananda, since rasas as hedonic states are apparently closer to the self than are natural states, our everyday pleasures and pains. Thus aesthetic experience secures for us progress yogically toward the supreme good, now conceived as a kind of individual perfection. The supreme good includes developing an aesthetic and moral self. It is not just self-realization in the narrow sense in operation before or apart from the tantric turn.
In Buddhism, the change begins with the story of the bodhisattva’s turning back from the personal annihilation of a solitary nirvana to help the world out of suffering. No end of embodiment for the buddha of unbounded compassion, not until every sentient being is enlightened. The bodhisattva is in every way beautiful and worthy of worship, worthy of bhakti, which is incorporated into the Mahayana path.
The history of the idea goes way back. Sermons and stories of the Pali canon, which are much earlier than the Mahayana literature to which the bodhisattva idea is proper, extol a triad of character traits as conducive to the sumum bonum: uprightness (shila in Sanskrit, sila in Pali), yogic trance or concentration (samadhi, sammadhi), and wisdom (prajna, panna). Practices consonant with their development are laid out in the early literature. In the hands of Mahayanins, the three are split to become the six marks, the six perfections, paramita, of a bodhisattva, and practice teachings are reorganized around the sextad of charity, uprightness, energy, patience, concentration (samadhi), and wisdom.25 These qualities, whether as perfected through yoga practice over lifetimes or as natural traits of the awakened (unobstructed now for the master yogin or yogini), make a person efficient in helping others achieve enlightenment.26 Thus like the supreme guru, Shiva, in Kashmiri Shaivism and the Lord of the Yoga Sutra’s conception, the bodhisattva is the ultimate teacher who inspires bhakti. The beautiful body of the bodhisattva also inspires love and delight.
In Buddhist tantra, yoga is auxiliary to the way of the bodhisattva. But assimilation is a two-way street. The Buddhist ideal converges strikingly with the karma yogin idea of the Gita we reviewed in chapter 3, although the intellectual foundations are different.27 The Kaula goal and path as depicted in the Kularnava Tantra and elsewhere are also similar. In Vaishnavism we find just about everything we find elsewhere, and perhaps the best examples. Krishna, whom we are to make every effort to imitate and remake ourselves to be like, has certain qualities or characteristics. Rupa Gosvamin’s sixteenth-century list of sixty-four qualities of Krishna includes: “Strong,” “Truthful,” “Eloquent,” “Learned,” “Witty,” “Artistic,” “Adroit,” “Self-Controlled,” “Generous,” “Compassionate,” “Happy,” “Captivated by Love,” “Beneficent to Everyone,” “Partial to the Good,” “Ever Fresh and New,” and “Endowed with Spiritual Powers,” among many more traits that are both yogic and world-directed.28 One might add to this growing collection of paths the practice (the “yoke”) of the imitation of Christ, in Christianity, which whether historically connected or not surely seems to have a bhakti element. Sufi-ism is drenched in bhakti. These may appear remote disciplines, the trails of spiritual mountain-climbers. But bhakti is available in the yoga studio and anywhere else, to anyone, according to those who teach it. Music is also a particularly efficacious conduit, it is no hazard to say.
Finally, the concept of shri, divine beauty. This word, shri, is used in the Vaishnavism of South India in roughly the same ways as shakti in the Shaivism of Abhinava and company. The world is a manifestion of Shree (to use the phonetic spelling), of beauty, the Great Goddess. She is evident in nature. She gives meaning to life, both externally and internally. We are all her vehicles, but yoga is particularly efficacious in attuning us to her expressive energies.
At the very end of the Katha or Story Upanishad (see appendix A, Katha 6.17), is an image that recurs throughout subsequent literature as a symbol of the individual soul: “thumb-size,” seated in a “secret cave” (another Upanishadic symbol) located in or behind the heart (chakra), there is a conscious being (purusha) who survives death. “The inner self (atman) is a conscious being (purusha), thumb-size, forever dwelling in the heart of creatures. / It is to be extracted from the body patiently, with diligence, like the cane shaft from the munja reed. / The bright, the immortal, it should be known. The bright, the immortal, it should be known.”29
From the spiritual autobiography of the Siddha yogin, Swami Muktananda (1908–82): “I would have a new movement in the heart, in which an egg-shaped ball of radiance would come into view. This is the vision of the radiant, thumb-sized being, who is described as follows in the Shvetasvatara Upanishad… ‘The inner soul always dwells in the heart of all men as a thumb-sized being.’” 30
There are other images, most notably the Hamsa (e.g., Katha 2.2.2), the symbol of the Sri Ramakrishna Math, the Bihar School of Yoga, and other modern institutions, which, despite being sometimes depicted as a swan, is the Siberian crane—I hazard, following Kalidasa and other classical authors—a bird that flies over the Himalayas each spring from India, where it winters, to summer in Siberia.31 There is also the image of the spark soul, the same in divine substance as the spark in everyone else, transmigrating from death to birth.
All this has become part of the mainstream Tantric psychological picture, in accordance with the Shat-chakra-nirupana (Description of the Six Chakras) of Purananda (sixteenth century).32 In Kundalini Yoga, Swami Satyananda writes about the heart chakra (anahata), “In the center of the pericarp of the lotus is an inverted triangle, within which burns the akhanda jyotir, unflickering eternal flame, representing the jivatman or individual soul.”33 As we saw in chapter 4, there is wide diversity of opinion about the jivatman, the individual consciousness, especially in its relationship to Brahman or God. But there is interesting commonality too. All Yoga traditions teach that the intention to practice yoga is a wedge of light coming up from our truest self or consciousness, turning us toward other right attitudes in life as well as to our longer-term self-interest, that is to say, our self-interest considering survival and reincarnation.
Thus amid great diversity of opinion about an individual soul, I wish to strike the common theme of yoga as tool of—let us say, following the coinage of Aurobindo—psychic transformation.34 Our minimalist commitment is only to the value of yoga for this life and an indefinite future. But just to consider asanas, there are some it would take, for most of us, at least another lifetime to master! There is also the ability to turn one’s thought and emotion to the sattvic, that is, to the healthy and good and beautiful. One way to think about all this is that we are being influenced by the purusha or soul, the psychic spark in the heart that survives death, the jivatman, a part of ourselves deeper than thought that has leverage over it, capable of changing it and all our instruments for the better. In the terms of the kosha system (figure 4A), it’s as though the innermost sheath of bliss (the anandamaya kosha) expands to suffuse the other sheaths, the mental, pranic, and physical, so that—to use the aesthetic terminology of Abhinava—everywhere there is rasa. To paraphrase the line from the Kularnava Tantra, all life becomes yoga and even our flaws and failures the stuff of art.
Aurobindo weaves a theory of psychic transformation into an overall Vedantic philosophy, and has much to say about an occult individual in the heart, which he calls the psychic entity.35 The psychic entity develops psychic personality, which he calls the psychic being and the true person, over the course of lifetimes of embodiment, incorporating transformed mental and pranic energies and dispositions into an enduring individual complex that survives the death of the body.
The true secret soul in us—subliminal, we have said, but this word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil—this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our physical nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and… the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay, or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.36
In a poem by Abhinava translated in appendix E, the divinities of the directions offer all our efforts to the divine core represented by Bhairava/Bhairavi and the central channel descending from the thousand-petaled lotus above the head down into the heart chakra. Here Aurobindo’s conception is a little different. The soul in a secret temple behind (but immediately connected to) the heart center—our spark soul—is constantly doing puja, offering everything to the divine in joy and adoration, all the while luring, not coercing, our parts—body, life, and mind—to the side of its quiet spirituality. This is the interpretation Aurobindo gives to the “Nachiketas fire” of the Katha Upanishad (see appendix A, the introduction to the Katha), “the immortal in the world of mortals.”
Our minimalist attitude responds, like the Jaina logic, with a syat, “maybe,” maybe this is true. There surely are other views about a jivatman. Personally, my response is that it would be wonderful if such a theory were even roughly right. Here is not only survival but also meaning and purpose to an individual life; life has meaning as, we might say, psychic expansion, involving increased psychic incorporation of mind, life, and body. The tantric turn is from an idea of withdrawal from the outer to the inner and a turn to an idea of transformation of the outer by the inner. Such a reversal is expressly championed by Aurobindo. It’s the kosha theory inside out, or the flowering of the inner in the outer, to change metaphors. Translife continuity is crucial, partly because our lives are short. It takes more than a single lifetime for a soul to perfect its instruments.
Like other tantric endeavors, Aurobindo’s is a rather maximalist spiritual philosophy that departs from the traditional Vedantic emphasis on transcendence to include affirmation of spirit in life. It is a world-affirming theism in which psychic transformation is key. The soul or psychic entity emerges from behind its veil into what Aurobindo calls the surface consciousness, urging us to practice yoga with all our instruments, body, life, and mind, and inspiring works—of wisdom or saintliness or beauty or at least comparatively greater wisdom, et cetera. The soul oversees and, in this view, progressively becomes the perfection of the body, life, and mind. Thus, as in the tantric turn more generally, the supreme good is not simply discovery of Brahman, as classical Vedantins claim, but just as importantly a kind of occult self-making, the making of a spiritual but also world-oriented individual.37
This is a process for which the divine and the embodied psychic being are said to share responsibility. As we saw in connection with Aurobindo’s reincarnation argument, psychic development—alternatively, manifestation—through a series of lives is the linchpin of his, and in general the tantric, view of self and indeed the world and God. In particular, Aurobindo’s stress on individuality echoes Abhinava’s concept of svatantrya, the freedom of self-determination that belongs to Shiva, who is ourselves. Actually, here Aurobindo’s theory diverges a little from the Kaula philosophy of Abhinava, since Aurobindo puts much more emphasis on the theory of soul development (deriving from the Gita) than does Abhinava, who views the individual as manifesting from the top down (an idea inherited from Samkhya), although of course he accepts karmic continuities. But both tantric theists have a common denominator with modern existentialism, since God is not external to us but rather the source of our spontaneous acts. With both Aurobindo and Abhinava, reality is enriched by our personal delimitations of the universal creativity. The point of life is not just to recover or recognize the self as source but also, according to our own appropriations, individual natures, and styles, to manifest the divine energy and to relish beauty.
Rupa Gosvami (c. 1525), in a shocking use of a worldly metaphor, says that the prerequisite (adhikara) for the most advanced type of bhakti is simply longing (lobha), intense longing, veritable greed for amorous contact with Krishna. This contrasts with scriptural injunctions that he specifies must be followed as a prerequisite for less perfect forms of bhakti. But here, in what seems like Aurobindo’s “soul emergence,” both logic and scripture are swept aside as the desire for the divine takes over, assuredly bringing the rasa and delight of divine contact and love play in all the events of life.38 The seeker’s prana and thought are transformed as a spiritual identity is forged in erotic rendezvous of the divine with the individual soul.39 This is the tantric turn with a vengeance, spirit coming into life and psychic transformation.
To round off this book, I want to bring out a virtue of Yoga in the context of political philosophy, that is, to draw out the most important political ramifications of rebirth and the yogic goals we have surveyed. What sorts of institutions would we want, were we confident of rebirth along the lines of individual and karmic continuity and justice, unseen force (adrishta; see the final section of chapter 3; alternatively, God’s grace), affirmed throughout Yoga philosophies? The question presupposes continuity of some mental dispositions (samskara) as well as individual translife identity. It also presupposes some sense of the workings of unseen force.
The answer to the question is, fortunately, pretty clear, at least in broad outline. We would want the world into which we will be born to be one where our talents can flourish.40 The political philosopher John Rawls famously imagines an “original position” where all parties to a fundamental social contract—namely everyone—would choose the first principles of government without knowledge of their particular place in society, parents, sexual identity, likes and dislikes, and so forth.41 All one would know is that one is a human being in a society governed by law, along with, to be sure, science, including principles of bureaucracy and administration. Such a perspective is strikingly similar to that which we take when we contemplate our next birth according to Yoga, albeit one may be aware of a certain karmic carryover in translife consciousness.
According to the most prominent rebirth theory, which we are calling soul making, each of us will be reborn as a human being, in all likelihood. Otherwise, there could be little karmic continuity. Musical talent and a person’s developing it, or not, throughout a lifetime seems a good example. Surely Paul McCartney, who cannot read music, has been a musician previously. And, like a musical ear, so on through a range of inherited and acquired characteristics that help to secure continuity from one life to the next. According to this Yoga theory, each of us is or is making a translife personality through making karma and individualized realizations of human capacities.
Thus as beings with multiple human futures, we have tremendous interest in worldly institutions. When we die we are not going away; for us there is no final heaven or hell beyond the planet, and we are not just “food for worms.”42 Thinking, then, with Rawls, about the institutions that we would like to be in place for our future births, we have, I should like first to point out, tremendous incentive for those institutions to be fair.
Contemplating future births according to the principles of samskara continuity and karmic justice, we have added reason to want what Rawls calls the Liberty Principle (“maximal liberty compatible with a like liberty for another”). We would also accept something like his Equality Principle, which has two parts, Equal Opportunity and the Difference Principle. Yoga, as I will explain, might want to quarrel with the Difference Principle. Rawls thinks that the two principles would be unanimously adopted in the original position. Yoga’s theory of rebirth and karmic justice would mainly reinforce his conclusions. Yet there is one departure that stands out.
Distribution of wealth looks a little different to Yoga than it does to Rawls. The philosopher abstracts from positions of people in society, considering a unit to be a single life. If a person knows, however, that her current birth is only the most immediate of a long series, then it seems she would be a little more willing to gamble with unequal distributions than is Rawls, who argues that institutionalized inequalities should work out to the advantage of the least well-off. Karmically, a super-rich birth is not necessarily desirable, since with great wealth comes great responsibility for beneficence. The danger of forming negative unseen force is particularly great, and a modest patrimony may be a godsend.
Furthermore, what we really want are institutions that allow us to develop our talents, no matter to what class or caste we are born.43 So long as we have schools aplenty for everyone and yoga studios, we would not mind that a few have especially great wealth. We ourselves may have such a birth in the future, or had one in the past, and we have a healthy respect for the addictive qualities of the pleasures that wealth makes possible. In any case, we should like to be secure in having yoga instruction available, and if this requires wealthy patronage other than the State’s, then we might differ from Rawls. In contrast, a case can be made for yoga instruction in State-sponsored schools, an easy case, since yogic skills are transferable to all occupations, mental and physical. Furthermore, yogic instruction need not be sectarian, although it cannot help but make a person more self-conscious in the good sense. The poor should not have to depend on charity to get yoga instruction. Furthermore, as parties to an original contract, à la Rawls (and earlier social contract theorists), we might be especially mindful of the least fortunate out of a sense, like Rawls’s, of longer-term self-interest.44 May everyone be prosperous and find the opportunity to practice.
Finally, let me share some mantras and further ideas about setting an intention (samkalpa; see the introduction), especially as such a practice is relevant to a yoga class. First, a Vedic mantra (taught to me by Shri Jagan natha Vedalankara, whose interpretation I follow) that seems appropriate for the beginning of a yoga class. In English it goes as follows: “I call the fire, ancient priest of the sacrifice, the divine who summons (the divinities), bringing here jewels.”45 The mantra is particularly significant because it is the first verse of the Veda, of the Rig Veda, to be precise, verse 1.1.1, part of a short hymn to fire (agni). I interpret this fire (following Jagannatha) not as earthly or heavenly but rather as psychic fire, the Hamsa, the spark soul.46 In the verse, such fire bridges the worlds—it is able to bring here the sacred and its enrichment. The fire is the ancient priest of the inner or yogic sacrifice, and appropriately invoked at the beginning of a class of asanas. The idea is that we enliven the soul’s intention when we call the psychic flame. In other words, we call the fire, the Hamsa, the “thumb-size” consciousness in or behind the heart, dwelling in a cave or inner sanctum of the body as temple.47