1. Sanskrit words are transliterated without diacritical marks except within sentences of Sanskrit text (which occur mainly in the appendices) and terms in the glossary. The first page of the glossary spells out the conventions utilized in this book (changing, for example, indological ś to sh), and gives all Sanskrit words used here both in the standard way with diacritics and in our anglicized fashion.
2. The Yoga Sutra, which belongs to the fourth or fifth century C.E., says that om designates the ishvara, the “Lord” (YS 1.27: “The Lord is indicated by the syllable om”). In this way it joins much earlier Upanishads, theistic Upanishads—the fourth or fifth century B.C.E.—and the very early Mandukya, sixth century B.C.E. or earlier, which is not theistic (see appendix A). The ishvara in the YS is at a minimum the archetypal yogin, self-rapt, self-illuminating, if not also, as understood by some, the creator of the universe (YS 1.23–29). Some view the YS’s ishvara as the impersonal self, atman, which would be, then, the sense of om. But Buddhists chant om while rejecting all notions of atman and ishvara. Suffice it to say that om means traditionally whatever the chanter takes to be the highest and best in herself or the universe.
3. Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (1896), “The Story of Sumedha,” 5–31.
4. At Yoga Sutra (YS) 1.20 (see appendix C), we get inclusivism about ways to samadhi, the mystic trance or mental silence considered the goal of yoga (see section 5.1): “Others attain it (samadhi) through faith, energy, remembering (i.e., meditation), and wisdom deriving from (previous) samadhi.” That there is more than one way to attain the goal is also stated at YS 1.24 with the use of the word “or” (va): the sutra specifies devotional yoga. The little word va appears again at YS 1.34 and again in each of the following five sutras. It of course functions as a sentence connective, but it carries the sense of a certain methodological pluralism. At YS 1.33, the method is pranayama, which apparently by itself can carry one to mental silence. Yogic sleep is another method mentioned. Analogously, different philosophies support yoga practices. The explanation why distinct methods of yoga work to achieve mental silence is that different people face different difficulties while each of us has a core consciousness that is silent and thought-transcendent. Once the obstacles are removed (YS 4.2 and 4.3), our true nature stands revealed. The analogy to pluralism in Yoga philosophy is that philosophy removes intellectual blocks that are different for different people and in general provides intellectual support for the practices in distinct ways.
5. Warren, Buddhism in Translations (1896), “Questions Which Tend Not to Edification,” 117–28.
1. Swami Satyananda of the Bihar School of Yoga in a manual: “Try to feel the different parts of your body in contact with the floor. This is important for it starts to develop your awareness of the different parts of the body.” Swami Satyananda Saraswati, A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya (1989), 27.
2. Charles MacInerney, Shavasana, the Art of Relaxation (1995). Shavasana is traditionally a very important posture. It is expressly mentioned, for instance, in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, verse 1.32.
3. H. David Coulter, Anatomy of Hatha Yoga (2001), 62.
4. B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga (1979), 423–24.
5. Some of Iyengar’s usages appear a lot more abstract and theoretical than others. Traditional theory of “breaths” and vital energies is itself quite complex. See the range of usages in particular in Iyengar’s presentation in Light on Pranayama (1987), 12–14.
6. Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha (1989), 27.
7. The term chitta (Yoga Sutra 1.2 and throughout the text) is used to frame the goal of yoga: stilling of the fluctuations of chitta. The word is a nominalized past passive participle of chit, to be aware. The “mind”—chitta—connects the world and consciousness. “Mind” is also okay to translate the Sanskrit word, although chitta includes emotion as well as thought and perceptual experience. With respect to consciousness, chitta is object, like the things of the world. But with respect to the world, it is subject, having an object directedness, or intentionality, among other features. In relation to consciousness, the “mind” can be controlled, in meditation. But objects determine its intentionality, in veridical perception, for example, the objects perceived, which the perceptions in turn indicate, according to YS 1.8 and the classical commentaries. Similarly, a person can check remembering (remembering is a form that chitta takes), but any remembering would be about something or other experienced previously.
In the YS, chitta comprises thought, emotion, and perception, including internal perception, as well as dreaming. Perhaps the conscious being has a native perception, but all conceptualized perception, savikalpaka-pratyaksha, would be a formation of chitta. Emotion is thought to color chitta in common classical conception, but there are few explicit statements about emotion in the YS. Patanjali himself lists five types of fluctuation of chitta (YS 1.6). From YS 1.15, we might expand the idea to include desire. (See also YS 4.10.) Controlling desire is in any case considered necessary to still the mind, since desire is given voice by the mind.
For more on chitta, see in particular notes 48, 51, 55, and 56 to appendix C. For a modern account, see, e.g., J. Krishnamurti, Talks and Dialogues (1970).
8. For more on ajna chakra and references, see: Sir John Woodroffe, The Serpent Power (1928), and Hiroshi Motoyama, Theories of the Chakras (1981). Books from the Bihar School of Yoga generally include talk of chakras, as does Iyengar (e.g., in his YS translation: Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 1993).
9. Swami Satyananda, Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha (1989), 407–08.
10. Iyengar, Light on Yoga (1979), 437.
11. Coulter, Anatomy of Hatha Yoga (2001), 184.
12. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika (HYP) is not the earliest text we know of where chakras are mentioned explicitly. Several are earlier, e.g., the Goraksha Paditi of the eleventh century, from which the HYP borrows, and there are bits of much earlier texts that can be interpreted as mentioning, or presupposing, the tantric system, e.g., YS 3.29–34. See also note 30 to chapter 4.
13. The contemporary philosophic literature on testimony has begun to criticize an inferentialist account (we have to know that the testifier is trustworthy and infer that what she says is true on that basis). And it has begun to understand testimony similarly to Nyaya (to wit, that acceptance and understanding are normally fused, and that in practice we give the benefit of the doubt). H. H. Price, in Belief (1969), long ago moved in this direction (112–29). A paper by Arindam Chakrabarti, “Telling as Letting Know,” in Knowing from Words, ed. A. Chakrabarti and B. K. Matilal (1994), presents a cogent case in favor of a noninferentialist theory (99–124). We could not understand one another were acceptance not the epistemic default. Then in a summary judgment about the whole area of contemporary philosophy, Peter Graham says: “The testimony debate is largely over whether testimony-based beliefs are epistemically inferential or, like perception, memory, and introspection-based beliefs, epistemically direct” (“Liberal Fundamentalism and Its Rivals,” in The Epistemology of Testimony, ed. J. Lackey and E. Sosa, 2006, 93). Graham lists eleven leading philosophers who argue the “direct” thesis in a couple of dozen books and papers, and cites the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–96) as the classical (Western) source of the thesis.
14. Nyaya’s epistemology of testimony begins with the Nyaya Sutra (c. 200 C.E.), which suggests (in sutras 1.1.7 and 2.1.49–56) that the speech act of the expert who knows and wants to communicate without deceit is the proximate cause of acquisition of knowledge through testimony. Later Nyaya philosophers say that it is the statement under the interpretation of the hearer that is the proximate cause, the trigger of the knowledge acquisition, given that other conditions are in place.
15. Pattabhi Jois and his Power Yoga teachers famously use a form of pranayama (called ujjayi, Victorious Breath: see below, note 20) in their hatha flow series, but they too would say proper pranayama is done sitting or lying down. Among other yoga teachers tying this type of breathing to a series of asanas is Gary Kraftsow, who also follows the convention of distinguishing right breathing in asana flow from genuine pranayama; see Yoga for Wellness (1999) and Yoga for Transformation (2002).
16. The ones mentioned in the fifteenth-century manual HYP are nicely presented in English by B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Pranayama (1987), as well as in various publications of the Bihar School of Yoga.
17. Among Web sites giving instructions for Moon Salutations, chandra namaskara, is http://odin.himinbi.org/moon_salutation. The following comes from Austin yoga teacher Cary Choate (to whom apologies for the modifications).
The origins of Sun Salutations, surya namaskara, are said to lie with Hanuman, the Monkey King of Ramayana legend, specifically in Hanuman’s gratitude to his guru, the Sun (surya), for teaching him asanas—which he learned, so goes the story, backpedaling across the sky to face his guru and his chariot on their daily journey. The Moon Salutations series is said to have been developed in the Kripalu Yoga Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but I could find no information on the center’s Web site to verify this. There is traditionally no story comparable to Hanuman’s and Sun Salutations. (Someone should invent one.)
The sequence: 1. Mountain Pose (tadasana) with hands at the heart in anjali mudra (see note 18 following). 2. Inhale to Raised-Hands Pose, urdhva hastasana. 3. Exhale and bend to the left. 4. Inhale to center. 5. Exhale and bend to the right. 6. Inhale to center. 7. Exhale to a small backbend. 8. Inhale to center. 9. Exhale to (1) Mountain Pose, etc., called samasthiti, the Original Position, hands in prayer position. 10. Inhale and jump to legs spread wide, arms shoulder height, palms above ankles. 11. Exhale to Widespread Forward Fold, prasarita padottanasana, hands on shins. 12. Inhale and look up. 13. Exhale and fold. 14. Inhale to vertical, hands joined in prayer above the head, elbows by ears. 15. Exhale and turn to the left for a version of Side Stretch, parshvottanasana, hands in prayer in front of the left foot or on the shin, head over the knee, which is bent at first and then slowly straightened. 16. Inhale to vertical, hands above head. 17. Exhale and turn to the right for Side Stretch on the right side. 18. Inhale to vertical. 19. Exhale to face forward and inhale, bringing in the feet to Raised-Hands Pose. 20. Exhale in a swan dive to Forward Fold, uttanasana. 21. Inhale, place the fingertips on the floor or on the shins. 22. Exhale, turn left, and step a large step back with the right leg into preparation for Crescent Moon Pose, anjaneyasana—a matronymic for Hanuman—getting ready to lift the heart or sternum (in imitation of Hanuman’s devotion to the Divine Mother, Sita, who is also the Moon). 23. Inhale to Crescent Moon, slight backbend, remaining on toes, right knee to the floor, hands above head, elbows by ears, hands folded, finger-tips touching. 24. Exhale and crouch, bringing the right leg up even with the left, on tiptoes with both feet, fingertips on the floor, hands under the shoulders and shoulder-width apart, weight on the toes, thighs parallel to the floor. 25. Inhale to Crescent Moon on the other side, stepping the left foot back. 26. Exhale and hold. 27. Inhale and exhale to Downward Dog, adhomukha shvanasana. 28. Inhale, raising the left leg as high as possible, pushing back through the heel. (Variation: Tilt back right, opening the torso.) 29. Exhale to Downward Dog. 30. Inhale, raising the right leg in the same fashion as the left. 31. Exhale to Downward Dog. 32. Inhale, moving through Four-Limbs Pose, chaturangasana, to urdhva-mukha shvanasana, “Up-Dog.” 33. Exhale and hold, look up. 34. Inhale and jump, step, or walk to squat on tiptoes, torso upright, crown of the head in line with the tailbone, chest up, thighs parallel to the floor. 35. Exhale and inhale to raise the arms to the ears, fingertips touching above the head, Upward Salute. 36. Exhale and inhale to stand up slowly back to the Original Position, sama sthiti, which is Mountain Pose with hands folded in anjali mudra.
18. “Hands Cupped in Offering” renders anjali mudra. The word mudra means (sacred) gesture expressing a particular attitude (here devotion), also seal, both tokening the meaning of the gesture and firmly securing it, “sealing it off,” in the consciousness.
19. The reference is to Gita 2.48, samatvam yoga ucyate, “Yoga is defined as equanimity [balance, samatva].”
20. Almost all yoga manuals include instructions for ujjayi pranayama, Victorious Breath, which is mentioned in the HYP (2.51–53). Notably, it is practiced in Power Yoga, the Ashtanga Yoga of K. Pattabhi Jois (see: http://www.ayri.org). (Jois, Iyengar, and two other great modern hatha yoga gurus, T.K.V. Desikachar and Srivatsa Ramaswami, were all students of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya [1888–1989] in Bangalore and Mysore in South India.) Particularly clear on this form of breath control is Iyengar, Light on Yoga (1979), 441–43, whom I follow. The technique involves full inhalations and exhalations but no retentions. The distinctive trick is to sound like Darth Vader, slightly contracting the larynx as air runs through the throat.
21. The word kumbhaka is a technical term of pranayama or breath-control practice: “retention,” i.e., a moment of stillness, of not breathing in or out. The word connotes the base of a pillar, and breath retention is commonly said to be a foundation of pranayama.
22. For chin mudra, the consciousness seal (or gesture), which involves, in one variation, the tip of the forefinger touching the tip of the thumb, forming a circle, with the other fingers extended straight, palms up, and the hands on the thighs or knees, see Swami Satyananda, Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha (1989), 427–29.
23. The HYP lays out the practice in four verses, 2.7–10. Iyengar, Light on Pranayama (1987), has a long section on nadi shodhana (209–20), and my rendition of course ignores many fine points covered by him and in other standard manuals. Indeed, Iyengar discourages this practice until, as he says (210), “your nasal membranes develop sensitivity and your fingers dexterity by practicing the Pranayamas described earlier [i.e., in the preceding 200 pages of the book!].” H. Maheshwari of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry taught me the technique in 1972 or 1973.
24. That yoga teachers use the term “sit-bones”—which does not occur in the professional medical lexicon—proves again my point of the first section that yoga teaching is from a first-person point of view. Sit-bones are easily identified in asana practice (they are phenomenological), but anatomical charts are drawn from an externalist point of view, as though the bones were not ours.
25. A kriya is an action combining a series of asana, breath-control practices, and/or locks. The particular kriya here is described at HYP 2.46 (see appendix E): “The throat contraction in place [jalamdhara bandha, Throat Lock], then through quick contraction from below [mula bandha, Root Lock], [and at the same time] by stretching the belly back [and engaging uddiyana bandha, Stomach Lock], the prana is forced into the channel of Brahman [sushumna, the central channel].”
26. The pragmatic meaning of namas te—literally, salutations to thee (or you)—is salutations to the (divine) child (in your heart). In proper Sanskrit usage, no one says te or any form of tvam to an adult, tvam being the familiar “you” reserved for children mostly, and te being the dative form of tvam. When such a pragmatic rule is broken, we understand a secondary or metaphorical sense, as we do in a yoga class with namas te.
27. Louis Renou in “Études Védiques: Yoga” (1953) delineates the meaning in the Rig Veda, which is the oldest Sanskrit text. The dictionary by Hermann Grassmann, Worterbuch zum Rig-Veda (1873), lists all occurrences of root yunj and its derivatives for the Rig Veda. K. S. Joshi, “On the Meaning of Yoga” (1965), surveys a dozen classical usages as well as usages within the early literature.
28. For instance, Taittiriya Samhita 4.1.1–5, verses that are repeated at the beginning of the second chapter of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad: (4.1.1) yunjanah prathamam manas, “Disciplining the mind first.” The word yunjanah is a form of the verbal root, yunj, from which the noun, yoga, is also derived.
29. See note 2 to appendix A for comments by the great scholar and philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on the controversy about importance and originality.
30. An excellent introduction to the history and multiple developments of classical Vedanta remains Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (1922–1955), in five volumes. Volumes II through V are dominated by expositions of varieties of classical Vedanta; volume I includes a discussion of the thought of early Upanishads as well as Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta. I shall say a few words in overview later in the main text.
Then there is neo-Vedanta, whose relationship to yoga practices and teachings is so rich and complex that it would take at least another book to do it justice. See, for example, works by K. C. Bhattacharyya, who takes an Advaita perspective—Studies in Philosophy (1956, 1958) and Search for the Absolute in Neo-Vedanta (1976). There is also most notably T.M.P. Mahadevan, The Philosophy of Beauty (1969), who at once endorses the classical Advaita understanding of Brahman and a criterion of beauty as reflection of Brahman in terms of temporality and finitude. Neo-Vedantins include the scholar and philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who in An Idealist View of Life (1937), among many books and papers, blends Vedanta with Western idealism. Further, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, among other yoga masters, are called neo-Vedantins. I shall have several occasions to refer to Vivekananda’s and Aurobindo’s teachings.
31. I explore Nagarjuna’s influence on philosophy in my Classical Indian Metaphysics (1995).
32. Teun Goudrian and Sanjukta Gupta, Hindu Tantric and Shakta Literature (1981), 224–31.
1. See (in appendix C) Yoga Sutra 1.4 in particular.
2. YS 2.5. Bliss in Vedanta, including Advaita, is supposed to be intrinsic to our truest self or Brahman. This is a old Upanishadic theme, or megatheme, that is made dramatic in several passages, e.g., Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.33:
If among humans one is accomplished and prosperous, in charge of others, best provided with all human enjoyments—that is, to consider human beings, (said to be) the highest bliss. Now a hundred times that bliss, a hundred of the blisses of humans, equals one bliss of… the Pitris’ world and a hundred times that bliss equals one bliss of… the Gandharvas’ world and a hundred times that bliss equals one bliss of… the gods-by-works’ world and a hundred times that bliss equals one bliss of… the gods-by-births’ world and a hundred times that bliss equals one bliss of… Prajapati’s world and a hundred times that bliss equals one bliss in the world of the Absolute Brahman—and of one who has heard the sacred teaching, is not devious, and not afflicted by desire. Now this is truly the highest bliss.
3. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.9.
4. Shankara, Brahma-sutra-bhashya, introduction to 1.1.1 (tr. G. Thibaut, The Brahma Sutra of Badarayana, 1890), gives us a definition of sublatable consciousness, which has a dualistic structure permitting what the translator renders “superimposition” (the appearance of one thing as another):
But what have we to understand by the term “superimposition?” The apparent presentation, in the form of remembrance, to consciousness of something previously observed, in some other thing. Some indeed define the term “superimposition” as the superimposition of the attributes of one thing on another thing. Others, again, define superimposition as the error founded on the non-apprehension of the difference of that which is superimposed from that on which it is superimposed. Others, again, define it as the fictitious assumption of attributes contrary to the nature of that thing on which something else is superimposed. But all these definitions agree in so far as they represent super-imposition as the apparent presentation of the attributes of one thing in another thing. And therewith agrees also the popular view which is exemplified by expressions such as the following: “Mother-of-pearl appears like silver,” “The moon although one only appears as if she were double.”
5. Shankara and his most able interpreters grasp what Western philosophers call the Kantian notion of the transcendental unity of apperception, and they distinguish the pure witness, sakshin, as a presupposition of all experience, from the self, atman. (Kant, by the way, conflates the two.) When it comes to the self, there is really neither the witnessed nor witnessing, since self-illuminating consciousness is nondual. So we have to keep mind, Advaitins would warn, that the “witness” is a concept of everyday life and experience, and that what we are after is the self. Bina Gupta has made these points especially clear in two books, The Disinterested Witness (1998) and Perceiving in Advaita Vedanta (1991).
6. It is a commonplace among Advaita authors that yoga removes obstacles (a dominant theme of, e.g., Shankara’s Upadeshasahasri [Mayeda 1979]), as do Vedic sacrifices with respect to bad karma. No action, Shankara stresses, directly brings about the supreme good, since the self is something already accomplished. See, e.g., Brahma-sutra-bhashya 1.1.4. The Yoga Sutra takes a similar position, discussed here at the beginning of chapter 5.
7. Kena Upanishad 1.3 (tr. R. Hume, 1921, 335):
There the eye goes not; / Speech goes not, nor the mind. / We know not, we understand not / How one would teach It.
Here is a quotation from the eleventh-century Advaitin Shriharsha that I discuss in my Classical Indian Metaphysics (1995), 82 and 347, note 35.
Indeed this (awareness as self-illumining) is made known by scripture, which is a source of knowledge (pramana) for it. (Scripture does not make it known directly, since—as I have already argued—it cannot, by its very nature, be known directly through words, but scripture) indirectly indicates it through its general purport (i.e., in considering the general purport of Upanishadic texts). Thus, although as it is it cannot be directly denoted, from the perspective of spiritual ignorance, in contrast, scripture in its general purport is to be taken as the knowledge source (pramana) after the manner of our opponents. In reality, however, it is self-certified in the form of consciousness.
Indirect indication is discussed by the great New Nyaya philosopher Gangesha (c. 1300) in an entire section of his Tattva-cinta-mani, translated by myself and N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya, Epistemology of Perception (2004), 641–57. The point is that expressions can fix a referent without having the remotest relevance to what the thing is by nature, its structure and necessary properties. “Devadatta’s house is the one where the crows are hovering” tells someone where to find the house through an indicator, the hovering crows, that have nothing to do with a house—this is one of several stock examples.
8. Like Yoga philosophy, Yoga psychology is not monolithic. There are several overlapping schema, all of which are at odds with materialist assumptions. The “sheath” conception according to which consciousness has five types of embodiment—physical, vital (or “breath-made,” pranic), lower mental, higher mental, and blissful koshas—first appears in the Taittiriya Upanishad, c. sixth century B.C.E. (Brahmanandavalli 2ff.); see figure 4A. The idea has been picked up by centuries of commentators, including Buddhists in the idea of skandha; see figure 4B. While famously antimetaphysical, Buddhist philosophy, like almost all forms of Yoga, assumes a subtle body that survives death.
9. Here are the major theories. Property dualists say that, contra Descartes, consciousness is not itself stuff. It is a property, like an object’s color or shape. Consciousness is a property of the living body. There is only one kind of stuff, but there are two kinds of property, physical and mental. (Compare classical Indian Charvaka: “From the material elements, earth, etc., consciousness is produced, like the intoxicating power of grain fermented.”) Others, called functionalists, claim that consciousness is an event. It is something that happens, a bodily process or function, like digestion or sleep. (Certain Buddhists might be called functionalists by this mark, but Western functionalists, unlike the philosophers of the Eastern religion, see mental events as physically caused.)
Hard materialists, called reductionists, hold that all description, including description of the mental and consciousness, is reducible to scientific language. The reason—according to “type-type-identity” theorists—is that types of brain event correlate with types of mental event. Others argue that mind-body correlations connect nonrepeating particulars that stand as either the mental or physical terms. All mind-body generalizations are, to this group, suspicious: these are “token-identity” materialists. Another faction holds that our ordinary ways of speaking are misguided. What we say about consciousness and its objects phenomenologically is false, and, according to some, can be eliminated. Eventually everyone will learn to speak in technical terms. Words like “consciousness,” “desire,” and “intention” belong to a “folk psychology” that will be replaced by proper science, the terms disappearing, like “phlogiston.” Other nonreductive materialists are “mysterians”: consciousness is a natural phenomenon but human concepts are, for various reasons, inadequate to the explanatory task.
Functionalism and other nonidentity materialist views developed out of an epiphenomenalism in vogue a hundred years ago. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon that while distinct from things physical is caused by them. Consciousness has no causal power itself. The physical universe is causally closed. Consciousness is, then, in the current jargon, supervenient, like the faces in a photograph whose appearance depends on the colors and patterns of pixels on the paper, or the computer screen, on which they are seen. Any self or person, on this view, would have an all-determining material substratum, riding piggyback on its material cause. Functionalists say that supervenience occurs not on static physical entities but rather on processes. The correlates of consciousness are functions that physical things assume. An analogy to computer programs has become familiar: steps in programs do not reduce to states of electrons, since they might be realized in different ways on different machines. Computers made by one company of silver and by another of lead can all run UNIX. Programs are nevertheless entitywise simply physical.
10. Explanations have a structure: propositions that explain—the explanans—and propositions that are explained—the explananda. According to materialism, brain science would do the explaining; descriptions of consciousness and mental events would be explained. To state the point a little differently: materialists debate among themselves about the ontology of things mentioned in the sentences that comprise the explananda of brain science without abandoning the supposition that consciousness is physically caused.
11. Among the more dramatic and reputable of documented cases where there is little or no measurable brain activity is: L. K. Kothari, A. Bordia, and O. P. Gupta (all at the time professors in Indian medical schools), “Studies on a Yogi During an Eight-Day Confinement in a Sealed Underground Pit” (1973).
12. Actually, this view of later Nyaya was pioneered in its sister Vaisheshika school, in particular by Prashastapada (c. 550), Padarthadharmasangraha (tr. Jha, 1916, 1985), 570–74. Compare C. J. Ducasse, Nature, Mind, and Death (1951), 402–04.
13. Technically, only “indeterminate perception,” nirvikalpaka pratyaksha, is the end result of the triggering of a person’s physico-psychological dispositions, since “determinate cognition,” savikalpaka pratyaksha, is fed its “predication content” (prakara, the way something appears) by an immediately prior indeterminate perception. At least this is the view of the New Nyaya school. The earliest commentators on the Nyaya Sutra (until Vachaspati, c. 950) do not distinguish the two types of perception.
14. Some of these reverse dependences are dramatic. Learning language, for example, fashions the brain in a very deep way, not just the face. The “wild child” called Genie did not learn language because of abuse, and her brain did not develop in the normal way: Susan Curtiss, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day “Wild Child” (1977). Note also how a group of language speakers, e.g., the French, have facial resemblances in virtue of the facial movements required to speak the particular language.
15. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996), 94–99 and 120–21.
16. For other arguments, see Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996). Chalmers is rhetorically efficient in showing what is wrong with a materialist view of the mind, arranging the difficulties to mount a convincing case.
There are several further refutations and motivating considerations identified in the papers of The Case for Dualism, ed. John Smythies and John Beloff (1989), among which is an asymmetry that many point out: our world is imaginable on (let us say) idealist premises that accede no reality to “matter,” whereas it is not imaginable on materialist premises that accede no reality to “consciousness.”
There are several who claim that one or another materialist theory of the mind resolves these difficulties, and there are now hundreds of books and papers by professionals in now perhaps the hottest subject area in academic philosophy. The reason for the excitement would seem to be, from the Yoga vantage point, that materialism is wrong and the fact of consciousness shows it.
17. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1951).
18. Of course, we should not concede that literal meaning is in all contexts restricted to physical referents. Linguistic requirements targeting mystics’ communicating with nonmystics are discussed in my “Mystic Analogizing and the ‘Peculiarly Mystical,’” in Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven Katz (1992). The upshot is that mystics successfully communicate, although later experience may bring deepened understanding in an intellectual sense as well as experientially. In the classic discussion of Nyaya and other schools, being told that a water buffalo (gavaya) is like a cow in certain respects and unlike it in others, one learns, even without water-buffalo experience, what a water buffalo is. But after encountering a real water buffalo, even one’s intellectual understanding is firmed up, while of course the experience is itself something richer. Yogic experience is, like an immediate perception of a water buffalo, a rather different mode of knowledge in the first place.
19. A famous chariot metaphor in the Katha Upanishad (3.3–9) has the body as the carriage, the sense organs as the horses, the thought-mind (manas) as the reins, the rational intelligence (buddhi) as the driver, and the self (atman) as passenger. But the point of the passage is that if the passenger would reach “the highest place of Vishnu,” he has to give the orders and take the reins. The chief has to take better control of her subordinates, integrating the instruments into a spiritual journey.
20. Many Upanishads present dualist Samkhya conceptions. This is doubtless the reason the Brahma Sutra (c. 200 B.C.E.)—the founding document of classical Vedanta as a philosophic school—is at such pains to dispute the claim that Samkhya captures the teaching of the Upanishads. The Bhagavad Gita also uses some Samkhya terminology, and is generally counted as an important precursor for classical Samkhya. For the history of the major Samkhya texts, see Gerald Larson, Classical Samkhya (1969).
21. Gerald Larson, voicing scholarly consensus, puts Patanjali’s YS as contemporaneous with Ishvarakrishna’s Samkhya-karika, that is, around 400 C.E.: Samkhya, Vol. IV of The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies (1987), 165–67.
22. Among scholars, I hardly stand alone in viewing Patanjali as opposed here to the practicing mainstream. See, e.g., David White, “Yoga in Early Hindu Tantra,” in Yoga: The Indian Tradition (2003), ed. Ian Whicher and David Carpenter, for example, 143, as well as, in the same book, David Lorenzen, “Kapalikas and Kalamukhas: Two Lost Shaivite Sects,” 93–94.
23. There is also an internal inconsistency, since the YS conceives of samadhi, mystic trance (or the ability to enter trance), to be included in the nature of what it calls samyama (conscious identification), YS 3.4. How can samadhi be part of what samyama is and also be transcendent to all “powers?” That powers flow from samyama is the central theme of YS chapter 3, occupying thus almost a fourth of the sutras of the entire text.
24. Surendranath Dasgupta long ago in his classic A History of Indian Philosophy (1922) argued that Patanjali was a compiler and editor. He claims that the classical commentators Vachaspati and Vijnana Bhikshu also looked at Patanjali this way, without, however, citing textual evidence. My own sense is that this is right, though it is not said in so many words. The internal evidence, however, does make the case for Dasgupta’s reading, which seems to me warranted on the whole. From Dasgupta (1922), I:229:
Patanjali was probably the most notable person [of a certain school of Samkhya] for he not only collected the different forms of yoga practice, and gleaned the diverse ideas which were or could be associated with the yoga, but grafted them all on the Samkhya metaphysics, and gave them the form in which they have been handed down to us. Vachaspati and Vijnana Bhikshu… agree with us in holding that Patanjali was not the founder of the Yoga, but an editor.
25. Probably, however, a convergence of evidence (pramana samplava) should be viewed as Patanjali’s official position, though this does seem the argument of YS 2.22 and 4.16. Accepted “knowledge sources,” pramana, are listed at YS 1.7.
26. Classical Indian philosophers writing in Sanskrit were aware of the problems of the YS’s dualism, and, indeed, the view is not nearly as prominent as others in late classical times, so far as we can judge from philosophic texts. The Nyaya Sutra (NyS) itself contains a refutation of the Samkhya approach to consciousness (3.2.1–9), and Nyaya philosophers think of the philosophy of the YS as a brand of Samkhya without saying it in so many words.
And then there is an argument by Uddyotakara (c. 600), elucidating Vatsyayana’s commentary on NyS 1.1.2. If the yogins responsible for the shastra (science) on the topic of meditation and other practices leading to the supreme personal good were lost to the world and incapable of communication, that shastra would be bogus—an outrageous possibility that Uddyotakara dismisses without further argument. In other words, if there were an entire disconnection of consciousness and matter in the liberation experience, then there could be no yogin “liberated in life” who could tell us about it. However, we are told.
27. Yoga Sutra 1.50: “The dispositions (samskara) created by this state (yogic trance) block the firings of other dispositions.”
In case some may think that Nyaya is not a Yoga philosophy since it is motivated mainly by epistemological questions concerning knowledge of everyday facts, let me point out that to accept yogic perception, yaugika pratyaksha, as a genuine knowledge source, pramana, is the mainstream Nyaya position. And the YS is often quoted by Nyaya philosophers as a psychological authority.
28. I mentioned the Buddha’s parable of the arrow in the introduction. Nagarjuna taught what is famed as the “Four-Cornered Negation.” From his Mulamadhyamaka-karika, 18:8 (tr. Jay Garfield, 1995, 102): “Everything is real and not real. Both real and not real. Neither real nor not real. That is Lord Buddha’s teaching.”
Within the secondary literature on Nagarjuna and his school, I recommend the overview of David Ruegg, The Literature of the Madhyamaka School of Philosophy in India (1981), and Christian Lindtner, Nagarjuniana (1986). For the logic of Nagarjuna’s method, please see Graham Priest and Jay Garfield’s “Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought” in Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (2002), 249–70. Lindtner, however, seems to my mind to better capture the spirit of Nagarjuna’s Buddhism since Priest and Garfield provide a decidedly intellectual as opposed to a mystic reading: Nagarjuna discovered true contradictions (a position they call dialethism).
We should note further that the mainstream Mahayana view seems to be that those who have direct (yogic) perception of emptiness do know something about the connections between the realms, albeit they cannot be expressed in ways easily understood by us. Nagarjuna, moreover, in addition to his more famous treatises, wrote letters of advice on yoga practice and indeed devotional poetry.
29. Advaita, despite its laudable silence about nature, is not so silent about the self. Like the metaphysics of the YS, the view strips will and action away from consciousness. The only value, and indeed the only true reality (to take these words in an imaginative sense), is self-absorption, the self’s self-illumining consciousness. This leaves out our abilities; the self neither acts nor refrains from action. Extraordinary powers, siddhis, are a trap, Advaita avers (at least does one faction of Advaita, that following Padmapada, c. 800 C.E.), just as Patanjali asserted. Indeed, most of the same reasons that were given why Patanjali’s dualism is unsatisfactory show that Advaita is not the Yoga philosophy for us. At least, it cannot be for those who are “experience seekers” or “siddhi seekers” (terms of derision that I have heard from contemporary Advaitins in conversation). Note, finally, that for Advaita the “mind” does not include the self. Indeed, it is open to Advaita to take a materialist position on mentality. The self transcends all science, as we learned in the first section, and cannot be correlated with anything.
30. Recognition of psychosomatic phenemona is no longer controversial within mainstream medicine. Imagery is a special instance, about which skeptics might consult the Handbook of Therapeutic Imagery Techniques, ed. Anees Sheik (2002), especially the introductory essay, 1–26, on the history of the technique in medicine by Carol McMahon and the editor, the latter a professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a past president of the American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery as well as the founder of The Journal of Medical Imagery.
Michael Murphy in The Future of the Body (1992) presents a veritable encyclopedia of “metanormal” capabilities, hundreds of pages of cataloging of dramatic determinations of consciousness. Murphy cites more than a dozen studies published in mainstream medical journals in a note to the following claim (372): “Many clinical and experimental studies have shown that imagery practice can facilitate relief from various afflictions, among them depression, anxiety, insomnia, obesity, sexual problems, chronic pain, phobias, psychosomatic illnesses, cancer, and other diseases.” But some of the most notable examples of the power of imagery are in the Christian tradition of religious imagining, with well-documented cases of stigmata. See, in particular, 497–502.
31. The most dramatic yogic feat I know of through a modern scientific source, the yogic death of Haridas as recounted by the British Chief Medical Officer for Lahore and the Punjab, 1837, is highlighted by Murphy, The Future of the Body (1992), 472–74. This is a fantastic story, too long, unfortunately, to quote. The upshot is that CMO was convinced. Elaborate care had to be taken in reviving the entranced yogin, whose state may be compared to hibernation.
32. Ian Whicher is the first, so far as I am aware, to use the word “sattvafication.” He also deserves credit for showing that this is the central transformational thesis of the YS; see The Integrity of the Yoga Darshana (1998).
33. An excellent survey is Michael Levine, Pantheism (1994).
34. The Indian theistic conception is developed in many of same texts that are the classic expositions of yoga; see appendix A. Of particular interest, however, is the “Inner Controller” passage from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (3.7.3– 23), the first couple of lines of which are (R. Hume translation, 1921):
3.7.3. He who, dwelling in the earth, yet is other than the earth, whom the earth does not know, whose body the earth is, who controls the earth from within—He is your Soul [atman], the Inner Controller, the Immortal.
3.7.4. He who, dwelling in the waters, yet is other than the waters, whom the waters do not know, whose body the waters are, who controls the waters from within—He is your Soul [atman], the Inner Controller, the Immortal.
…[and so through about twenty items: fire, wind, sun, moon, the visual organ, the rational intelligence, et cetera.]
For an overview and history of Indian theism, see E. W. Hopkins, The Religions of India (1970).
35. Chandogya Upanisad 3.14.1. Among many other Upanishadic passages that express the monistic idea is Taittiriya 2.1–9 (the Anandavalli), where the “sheath” theory is introduced (see figure 4A). Each of our bodies is discovered to be the Brahman.
That there is a single self that is everything is of course a centralmost Upanishadic theme. In the midst of punning and false etymologizing, the Brihadaranyaka brings out the logic with a light touch. From 1.4.1–2: “In the beginning the world was self (atman) alone… He was afraid.… Then this one thought to himself, ‘Since there is nothing else than myself, of what I am afraid?’ Thereupon, verily, his fear departed, for of what should he have been afraid?” In chapter 3, we shall explore the connection of this idea with the yogic practice of ahimsa, nonharmfulness.
36. Shankara, the Advaitin (c. 700 C.E.), says that although through yoga comes acquisition of extraordinary powers (siddhis), “the highest beatitude is not to be attained… by the road of yoga” (yoga marga): in his Brahma Sutra commentary on sutra 2.1.3 (tr. Thibaut, 1890, 1962), 1:298 (translation slightly altered), and 223 on siddhis (“that yoga does lead to extraordinary powers, such as subtlety of body and so on, cannot be set aside by a mere arbitrary denial”). Possibly Shankara means that the supreme good cannot be obtained by the road of the philosophy of Yoga, i.e., of the Yoga Sutra, for not only is this sutra, 2.1.3, and all the sutras in this stretch of text, focused on systems (darshana), often Shankara states that yogins know Brahman in their meditations, e.g., in his commentary on Brahma Sutra 3.2.22 (tr. Thibaut, 1890, 1962, 2:166). But more probably he is thinking about self-illumining consciousness, which indeed requires no instrumentation and thus no yoga practice (Thibaut translates yoga marga as “road of Yoga-practice”). But we should also note that, as Shankara says in his Upadesha-sahasri (Mayeda 1979), that to be “self-disciplined in peace, self-control, compassion, and the like (i.e., other yogic characteristics, shamadama-dayadi-yukta),” is preparation for self-realization, the “highest beatitude,” as discussed in the first section of this chapter.
Ramanuja (c. 1100) and theistic Vedantins in general take a positive view of yoga that is less qualified. Nevertheless, asana and other traditional yoga practices have to give way to bhakti and then “surrender” (prapatti) to God. In the course of this, the person is transformed, not so much in terms of siddhis, personal powers that a yogini might exercise on her own, but bhavas and rasa, emotions and (spiritual) relishing, that do sometimes—it is commonly thought—have extraordinary bodily manifestations. Ramanuja’s commentary on Brahma Sutra 1.2.23 is a particularly clear statement of his attitude about yoga and bhakti (tr. Thibaut, 1904, 284–85). The notion of surrender, prapatti, became central in the later tradition of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta that developed from Ramanuja and Yamuna (c. 1050).
37. Plato’s theory of the self is discussed in chapter 4.
38. William James, “Does Consciousness Exist,” Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912.
39. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996).
40. Here we may mention that this is the Nyaya position, namely, that philosophy is a form of yoga; see Nyaya-sutra 4.2.42–48. Philosophic debate as yoga practice is striking in certain traditions even today, most notably Tibetan Buddhism.
41. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902, 1982).
42. From James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902, 1982) in the chapter entitled “Conclusions,” 398–99:
Although the religious question is primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual until certain particular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come home to him, are touched. These ideas will thus be essential to that individual’s religion—which is as much as to say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves.…
Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes. If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief—though I know it will appear a sorry under-belief to some of you—for which I can only bespeak the same indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours.
In Hinduism, the idiosyncratic character of overbelief matches the arbitrariness of one’s preference for a particular divinity, one’s ishta devata, preferred divinity; see, in this book, p. 151.
43. Saint Teresa, “Prayer of Quiet,” chapter 15, The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila (tr. E. Peers, 1960), 159 in particular: “In these periods of Quiet, then, let the soul repose in its rest; let them put their learning aside;… for, if the state of Quiet is intense, it becomes difficult to speak except with great distress.”
44. Whether or not the person who wrote the famous commentary on the Brahma Sutra is really the author of the bhakti poetry is beside the point. That many have taken the Brahma Sutra positions to be compatible with bhakti is clear just because the poems are attributed to Shankara.
We may also note that the ishta-devata idea is prominent in Tibetan Buddhism, where it is stressed that the deity (yidam) is to be understood differently at different levels of practice.
45. Here, as mentioned, they join Nyaya.
46. Bhagavata Purana 10.29.47–48, tr. G. V. Tagare (1978), IV:1442:
Recipients of such a high honor from the noble-souled Lord Krishna, the Gopis got puffed up with pride and… Lord Krishna disappeared then and there, for curing them of that pride and showering Grace on them.
A similar parable is told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass (tr. Robert Graves, 1951). The beautiful Psyche has an occult lover, Cupid, who flies away when she, prompted by her curious sisters (two older sisters in whom she shouldn’t have confided in the first place), tries to know too much, holding a lamp to see the sleeping Psyche.
1. Karl Potter distinguishes sharply between philosophical and transactional views of karma in “The Karma Theory and Its Interpretation in Some Indian Philosophical Systems,” included in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, ed. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (1980), 241–67, showing the difference between a philosophical theory and popular mythology.
2. Buddhists sometimes explain universals or natural kinds, such as being water, as collective karma. A weaker view is that collective karma produces an “environmental effect”: we are reborn in worlds that we experience as having certain types of properties, and these properties extend to the types of entity we believe exist in these worlds, not just to particulars. Also, worlds are not necessarily spatiotemporally distinct. Apparently, collective karmically induced generation of certain object types correlates with types of subjectivity. For example, a deva (god), a preta (ghost), and a human can all see an object as liquid. But the deva sees ambrosia, the preta poison, and the human water. Here we have the seed of the idea of cultural relativity.
3. Tibetan Buddhists, for example, tend to view the “fully ripened” effect type of single action as determining type of rebirth in certain cases. Thus no matter how much good karma you have and how little bad karma, matricide, unpurified, leads to rebirth as a hell-being.
4. On the YS’s concept of chitta, see note 7 of chapter 1. In brief, the notion encompasses emotion as well as thought. A common Upanishadic theme is that the mind rests on pranic airs.
5. The Nyaya school takes over much of the ontology of a sister school, Vaisheshika. The great Vaisheshika author, Prashastapada (c. 575) lists samskara as one of twenty-four qualities, finding three subtypes, vega (impetus or speed), bhavana (the experiential, the mental), and sthiti-sthapaka (elasticity): Padartha-dharma-samgraha (tr. Ganganatha Jha, 1916, 1982), 570–74. Although there is debate about whether the overall category captures a true universal, a natural kind, as opposed to a mentally projected generality (see Gopinath Bhattacharya, Tarka-samgraha by Annambhatta, 1976, 361), it is not too difficult to see the commonality, the dispositional nature of all three as a kind of self-perpetuation.
6. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1888), 84–86.
7. When Yogachara idealists such as Asanga (c. 300 C.E.) and Vasubandhu (c. 350) talk of a “storehouse consciousness” (alaya-vijnana), they are thinking about things as webs of samskaras, more commonly called bija, seeds, and vasana, dispositions in the broadest sense—including, in this idealist perspective, not only internal objects but also material things as, to use J. S. Mill’s phrase, “permanent possibilities of experience.” Stefan Anacker writes in the introduction to his translation of Vasubandhu’s Vimshatika (Set of Twenty Verses), Seven Works of Vasubandhu (1984), 159:
What is observed directly are always only preceptions, colored by particular consciousness-“seeds.” The very fact that these “seeds” are spoken of at all indicates a double influence. On the one hand, every consciousness-moment deposits a “seed”; on the other, each “seed” influences every subsequent consciousness-moment, until a “revolution at the basis of consciousness” is achieved.
See also, e.g., Vasubandhu, Trimshika (Set of Thirty Verses) 19: karmano vasana, the force of karma that provides continuity (K. N. Chatterjee, Vijnapti-matrata-siddhi, which contains translations of both the Vimshatika and the Trimshika along with a Sanskrit commentary, also translated, and the Sanskrit text, 1980, 107ff.). The commentator Sthiramati, c. 550, is quite explicit about all this: “[the vasana] is the seed (or force) deposited in the Alaya by the object and subject (subject-object aspect of a self-conscious idea) that had risen earlier and is capable of giving rise to the yet-to-be similar subject-object aspect (of a self-conscious idea)” (Chatterjee’s translation, 108). Conceived of earlier as dharma, property quanta, they fall into bundles or aggregates, skandha, corresponding to, roughly, the sheaths of the Upanishads and Vedanta. See figures 4A and 4B in chapter 4.
8. Yoga epistemology of knowledge sources is carried out by commentators on the YS, and in particular by Vachaspati Mishra (c. 900), relying on Nyaya views. Sutra 1.7: “The knowledge sources (along with the veridical awarenesses to which they give rise) are perception, inference, and testimony.” The testimony referred to is probably meant to include scriptural testimony, the Upanishads, for example, as well as what we learn from teachers and friends. However, if a chain of testimony does not orginate in veridical perception (or inference based on perception), it would be unreliable, the philosophers argue. Perception is the premier knowledge source, and presupposed in the working of inference and other knowledge sources.
As is elaborated in this book in chapter 4, yogic perception is one variety of perception, defended—but not normally appealed to—by Nyaya philosophers in support of their theses. Nyaya philosophers for the most part did not presume to be yogins, and have left us no mystic psychology. But philosophers sympathetic to yoga practices and psychology do not themselves have to be yogins, at least not master yogins or yoginis, and of course yogic perception (along with testimony) is all-important for Yoga’s occult teachings.
Vachaspati, we might add, is a treasury of wisdom and sophistication: a tenth-century philosopher who wrote an important commentary on the YS but who was also a luminary in Nyaya as well as, strange to tell (given the disputes with Nyaya), Advaita Vedanta.
9. These ideas are elaborated by me in several publications, including the introduction to Epistemology of Perception (2004), 7–20.
10. Vachaspati and others call this the anyatha-khyati position, “perceptual presentation of something as other than it is.” Though it is not universally accepted among Yoga contributors, there is equally a role for samskara on alternative views.
11. The olfactory organ is normally stimulated when tiny bits of odiferous substances are breathed in, coming into contact with it. This conception is common to both the early Nyaya and Vaisheshika literature. The Navya–Nyaya philosopher Gangesha repeatedly uses the sandalwood example; see my Epistemology of Perception (2004).
12. The idealist and grammarian philosopher Bhartrihari (c. 450), the Indian Plato, appears to have been an important influence on tantric views of creation, as pointed out by Howard Coward, Bhartrihari (1976), 111. Bhartrihari has a theory of perfectly ordered universals, a hierarchy in which the higher determines the lower all the way down to the particulars of our world.
13. YS 1.50–51 and 3.9–10. Instead of “firing,” the term normally used is “awakening,” and triggers are “awakeners,” udbodhaka.
14. See Abhinava’s stotra, translated in appendix D. See also Paul Mueller-Ortega’s discussion, “On Subtle Knowledge and the Refinement of Thought in Abhinavagupta’s Liberative Tantric Method,” in Knut Jabobson, ed., Theory and Practice of Yoga (2005), 181–212. Abhinava’s thesis of the bhava of the self matching the ninth rasa of shanti is discussed in chapter 5, the second section.
15. Translated by R. Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (1921), 110.
16. Compare Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (1981), 409–11. Hitler couldn’t just change his mind all of a sudden or change his character, as though just waking up one morning and deciding to be a good person.
17. The Sanskrit word ahimsa is a derivative of the verbal root han, kill, harm, in an irregular form of the desiderative—normally, “He/she/you/I desire to X.” Thus the word ahimsa carries a desiderative sense: himsa is desire to harm and ahimsa desire not to harm. The desiderative form is also used for will and intention, thus “will to X,” and ahimsa intention not to harm, i.e., nonharmfulness. The popular translations “noninjury” and “nonviolence” are satisfactory, but the etymological lesson is that the word connotes an attitude or personal policy. Nonharmfulness is an attitude one adopts, or tries to adopt. The idea suggests a rule, or set of rules, governing effort and action.
18. In Buddhism, the focus is instead on karuna, compassion, and maitri, friendliness or loving-kindness. But these are said to entail ahimsa.
19. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. I take the Sanskrit text from the edition by J. L. Shastri, Upanishads (1970).
20. Perhaps the earliest occurrence of the idea is in the Brihadaranyaka; see note 35 of chapter 2.
21. I follow the Sanskrit of the edition by Gokhale (1950).
22. In Tibetan Buddhism, the doctrine is dramatically exemplified in a meditation (toglen, “taking and giving”) that involves accepting the suffering of others. Those accomplished in it are said to be able to transfer disease from others to themselves where it can be purified. This is made possible by a fundamental interconnectedness.
23. There is a term for the “bad yogin,” ku-yogin, and there are examples strewn throughout the epics and Puranas, perhaps most notably, Ravana in the Ramayana. That such a character is used as a villian for plot development does not undermine the standard meaning, which implies a kind of saintliness for the accomplished yogin and a striving for saintliness in the beginner. The concept of the deviant is common in classical philosophy; consider, e.g., the difference between the veritable knowledge-generating inferential indicator or mark, hetu, and the fallacious sign that resembles it, which is not a hetu but rather a “pseudo-reason,” hetvabhasa, the common term for fallacy.
24. Translation by M. Kumar (1981).
25. From chapter 8 of The Bodhicaryavatara, which is full of arguments that hinge on likenesses among subjects (verses 90, 94, and 95): At first one should meditate intently on the equality of oneself and others as follows: “All equally experience suffering and happiness. I should look after them as I do myself.… I should dispel the suffering of others because it is suffering like my own suffering. I should help others too because of their nature as beings, which is like my own being. When happiness is liked by me and others equally, what is so special about me that I strive after happiness only for myself?” Shantideva endorses the Buddhist “no-self” theory: there is neither one’s own self nor others’ selves as enduring realities. Nevertheless, one should try to end all suffering (verses 101 and 102): “The continuum of consciousness, like a queue, and the combination of constituents, like an army, are not real. The person who experiences suffering does not exist. To whom will that suffering belong? Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering.” Metaphysically, there is nothing special about oneself or others. The nonharm attitude we apply to ourselves for whatever reason (“just because suffering is what it is”) we should apply to others equally (verse 103): “If it [suffering] must be prevented, then all of it must be. If not, then this goes for oneself as for everyone.” Translations by K. Cosby and A. Skilton (1996).
26. In Vaishnavism, for example, this accords with ahimsa heading lists of virtues in the Gita—5.7, 6.29, and so on (see appendix B)—despite the martial context of the Kurukshetra war. The ethics of nonharmfulness is most probably Yoga’s greatest contribution to moral philosophy as a whole. And it is, through Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., a major contribution to a global political ethic.
27. Here are several subtle points in danger of getting mixed up. Self-sacrifice is surely both possible and commendable in the right circumstances. But it would be the circumstances that justify assuming harm, and the presupposition stands that one would and should not harm oneself—without benefiting others.
In Buddhist ethics—to take up another apparently opposed position—the emphasis is on others. Though it is said that to achieve acceptance of the suffering of others one may start by accepting one’s own future suffering, the ethical ideal targets others, not by any means oneself. All self-interest seems banished. Nevertheless, current suffering is seen as motivational, spurring one on or to take up the Buddhist path. Then again, meditation that causes a person physical suffering (within limits) is encouraged in some traditions (e.g., Zen). Moreover, surely mastering asanas is not easy, not accomplished without pain. But there is good pain and bad pain, and one must learn to tell the difference. Also, pain changes, as does thought and emotion, under the influence of self-monitoring consciousness.
28. This is emphasized by Arvind Sharma in his work on Jaina philosophy, A Jaina Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion (2001), 43: “while himsa has ordinarily been understood as harm to others; for Jainas, however, it refers primarily to injuring oneself—to behavior which inhibits the soul’s ability to attain moksha.”
29. An eloquent and complex defense of the proposition can be found in a chapter in Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga (1973), “Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom,” 170–88.
30. Within the context of bhakti yoga, there is the recurrent theme of slipping away from one’s daily duties to dally with God, like Radha to meet her divine lover, Krishna.
31. Personally I am persuaded by the arguments landing W. D. Ross in an ethical pluralism of a handful of basic duties (but only a handful), more or less the ones he identifies. Professor Ross recognizes a total of six basic duties, including self-development but also including “duties of fidelity (promise-keeping),” reparation, justice, benevolence, and noninjury. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (1930, 2002), chapter II, “What Makes Right Acts Right,” 16–47. To appreciate Ross’s view should mollify (by its breadth) the queasiness of those who sense in the notion of a duty of self-development a guise for “self-cherishing,” rationalization of action done merely for the sake of self-interest. But self-development can be motivated by the interests of others (the yogini as heroine).
32. Of course, the point that one’s first spiritual responsibility is oneself is not to be used as an excuse not to provide help to others (seva, service), protection, comfort, spiritual advice, and so on, as gurus are wont to point out.
33. This observation is made by J. N. Mohanty, Classical Indian Philosophy (2000), 108. On the pluralism of yogic methods according to the Yoga Sutra, see above, note 4 to the introduction.
34. Not only is this move made in the Jaina argument outlined above, it is implicit in Christianity’s “Golden Rule,” it seems to me, as well as in Confucius. See in particular Analects 15.23, where “likeness to self” is said to be the “single thread of morality.”
Among Western ethicists, Kant perhaps makes the most convincing case in discussing applications of the categorical imperative where all hinges on our ability “to stand in the other’s shoes,” to see ourselves and others as alike as “ends in themselves” (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [tr. Paton, 1964]).
35. For example, Mohanty, Classical Indian Philosophy (2000), 91.
36. B. K. Matilal, “The Jaina Contribution to Indian Logic,” in The Character of Logic in India, ed. Jonardon Ganeri (1998), 130.
37. Compare Kant’s identification of antinomies of reason with respect to certain questions such as the eternity of the universe (Critique of Pure Reason [1965]).
38. Mohanty, Classical Indian Philosophy (2000), 91.
39. Translation by R. Hume (1921).
40. The Buddhist view is that harmonies arise naturally from beings with virtuous minds. Samkhya and Advaita Vedanta tend to take a negative view of nature.
41. Laurie Patton, “Nature Romanticism and Sacrifice in Rgvedic Interpretations,” in Hinduism and Ecology, ed. Christopher Chappel and Mary Tucker (2002). This passage is quoted in Sridhar and Bilimoria (2007), 301.
42. That degree of value in general maps degree of organic unity is argued by Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (1981), 415–22.
43. That karma yoga is not exclusively a Hindu teaching is shown by James R. Egge, Religious Giving and the Invention of Karma in Theravada Buddhism (2002).
44. The Brihadaranyaka opens by cosmicizing the sacrificial horse (tr. R. Hume, 1921):
Om! Verily, the dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse; the sun, his eye; the wind, his breath; universal fire (Agni Vaisvanara), his open mouth. The year is the body of the sacrificial horse; the sky, his back; the atmosphere, his belly; the earth, the under part of his belly; the quarters, his flanks; the intermediate quarters, his ribs; the seasons, his limbs; the months and half-months, his joints; days and nights, his feet; the stars, his bones; the clouds, his flesh. Sand is the food in his stomach; rivers are his entrails. His liver and lungs are the mountains; plants and trees, his hair. The orient is his fore part; the occident, his hind part. When he yawns, then it lightens. When he shakes himself, then it thunders. When he urinates, then it rains. Voice, indeed, is his voice.
However, we might also label the theme “interiorization of the sacrifice,” anticipating the Gita. See appendix A. The interiorization/cosmicization-of-the-sacrifice motif is brought out by scholar Mircea Eliade in connection with the Upanishads in History of Religious Ideas, Vol. I (1978), 238–41, and then with the karma yoga teaching of the Gita in History of Religious Ideas, Vol. II (1982), 241 (a few lines are worth quoting):
It can be said that the Bhagavad Gita attempts to “save” all human acts, to “justify” every profane action; for, by the mere fact that he no longer enjoys their “fruits,” man transforms his acts into sacrifices, that is, into transpersonal dynamisms that contribute to the maintenance of the cosmic order. Now, as Krisna declares, only acts whose object is sacrifice do not bind (3.9). Prajapati created sacrifice so that the cosmos could manifest itself and human beings could live and propagate (3.10ff.). But Krisna reveals that man, too, can collaborate in the perfection of the divine work not only by sacrifices properly speaking… but by all his acts, whatever their nature. When the various ascetics and yogins “sacrifice” their psychophysiological activities, they detach themselves from these activities, they give them a transpersonal value (4.25ff.), and, in so doing, they “all have the true idea of sacrifice and, by sacrifice, wipe out their impurities” (4.30). This transmutation of profane activites into rituals is made possible by Yoga. [Italics in the original.]
Eliade is in error here only with the “all” part of the idea of karma yoga embracing profane acts: not every activity is suitable for offering since not every activity can be offered in the spirit of bhakti, as I shall argue.
45. Aurobindo, The Life Divine (1973). The view is perhaps at odds with certain traditional ideas. For example, both Hindus and Buddhists have tended to see time in cycles, with temporal succession usually aligned with regression and tendency to evil, not progress. Thus the stories of the “Golden Age” (satya yuga). In contrast, enlightenment is usually viewed as a one-way transformation, so that—to take Mahayana for example—eventually the universe is full of bodhisattvas. Historicity is usually taken to be intrinsic to a Western perspective and foreign to the classical Indian, and Aurobindo, a “modern” thinker, received a Western education in the late nineteenth century (see below, note 42 to chapter 4). But I think the question of different cultures’ views of time and history is not so simple as this, and the developmental strand of Aurobindo’s conception is not just due to his “Westernness” but has at least something to do with his reading of the Gita.
46. Karmic confidence is dramatically exampled in Tibetan Buddhist stories of lamas planning their reincarnations and how they will be recognized.
47. Many views about adrishta are common across classical schools, but they are perhaps best developed in Mimamsa, Exegesis. Wilhelm Halbfass explains both the concept and its history with reference to Mimamsa and other systems in “Karma, Apurva, and ‘Natural’ Causes,” in O’Flaherty (1980), 268–302.
In the Madhyamika Buddhist view, not only does karmic causation work without a temporal intermediary, it takes place without essentially existent entities. Moreover, almost all Buddhist philosophy eschews the idea of a substrate for karma to rest in. But in Hindu as well as Buddhist theories, karmic causation is something like action at a distance.
48. Warren (1896, 1973) collects many of the “life lessons” in Jataka tales. See also Speyer, Gataka-Mala (1895), which is a translation of a collection of stories by the Mayayana Buddhist Aryasura (c. 400, at best guess). There are similar collections outside Buddhism, such as the Hitopadesha (Wilkins 1886, 1968).
Note that generally in Buddhist theory one is not “punished” for being “bad,” but rather has self-evaluating negative feeling tones accompanying experience as a psychic consequence of having engaged previously in actions of a certain type.
49. A classical source for the view that species continuity is usual is Krishna’s assurance to Arjuna in the Gita (6.40–45) that as a yogin he is guaranteed a birth that will allow his practice to continue from the point achieved in the previous life. Admittedly, Krishna’s statement does not itself entail that every human being is at death guaranteed a human future unless every human being is a yogin. But isn’t everyone potentially a yogin or yogini?
In support of the possibility of cross-species continuity are such stories as Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as a cockroach lying on its back, as well as a famous passage from Chuang Tzu about dreaming being a butterfly (“Now I do not know whether I am Chuang Tzu who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Tzu”). My sense is that there is no mainstream position among the classical Yoga philosophies. Cross-species reincarnation is a common idea in the Puranas as well as, strikingly, in the Buddhist Jataka tales.
50. This notion, which goes way back to the Vedas (that Vedic clans reincarnate together is an idea that underlies the practice of certain sacrifices), was popularized by the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle (1963).
51. Murphy, The Future of the Body (1992) lists more than fifty studies in support of the general thesis of reincarnation, but none, as far as I can tell, supports much more than the general thesis; see his appendix E, “Studies of Near-Death, Out-of-Body, Reincarnation-Type, and Otherword Experiences,” 618–21.
52. Ian Stevenson, Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987), speculates that adults are less capable of previous-life memories since they are much more occupied in the affairs of this one than children (54).
53. From the Introduction to the Jataka, tr. Henry Clark Warren (1896, 1973), 74–75.
54. The first section of the first chapter of Gangesha’s massive Tattva-chintamani (Jewel of Reflection on the Truth of Epistemomology) is about the causal efficacy of mangala, doing something auspicious, such as chanting om, making a flower offering, etc. Some of his reasoning there seems playful, not serious. But in the last section of the inference chapter, on mukti, he argues that such actions can negate the payback effect of karma; see Ramanuja Tatacharya (1999), the mukti vada, 396–442.
55. The phrase “attraction of the future” is Aurobindo’s: The Future Poetry (1973), 255: “the spirit is the master of the future,… in a profound sense it is the call and attraction of the future that makes the past and present.”
56. The stock example of a samagri is the sprouting of a seed joined with water, sunlight, etc., a seed that by itself would stand as a necessary though not a sufficient condition for a seedling. The bundle of causal factors sufficient for the sprout include the seed but also water and warmth and earthen nutriment.
Buddhists reject the notion of a bundle, but substitute similar complexity. The topic is discussed at length by me along with Joel Feldman in our forthcoming translation and explanation of the Kshana-bhanga-siddhi, “Proof of Momentariness,” by the twelfth-century Buddhist philosopher Ratnakirti. Please check my Web site for publication particulars: http://asnic.utexas.edu/asnic/phillips.
57. Karl Potter, “The Naturalistic Principle of Karma” (1964).
58. Shankara’s “Commentary” or Bhashya (c. 750) on the Brahma Sutra (c. 200 B.C.E.) 2.1.34, tr. G. Thibaut, The Vedanta Sutras of Badarayana (1890, 1962), part 1, 357–59.
59. Shankara, Brahma-sutra-bhashya 2.1.35–36 (tr. Thibaut, 1890, 1962, 359–61).
60. Johannes Bronkhorst, Karma and Teleology (2000), argues that the need to explain rebirth and the workings of adrishta moved the Nyaya school progressively toward theism. This may be true of Udayana and of others too, but late Nyaya is not as theistic as some think, being misled by Udayana’s prominence in matters of natural theology.
61. Rebirth theodicy is in this way similar to the theory of Augustine (e.g., Of True Religion) that natural evil is payback for sin. The Indian theory has the advantage, however, of the punishment better fitting the crime than in the Western version, because there are lines of individual continuity as opposed to our paying for the sins of remote ancestors. However, then there must be continuity in the consciousness making choices and after-death awareness of the connection between payback and choice (compare C. J. Ducasse’s reasoning, discussed at the beginning of chapter 4). Otherwise, there could be no moral lessons and the retributive nature of karma would make no sense.
1. C. J. Ducasse, Nature, Mind, and Death (1951), 491–502.
2. Twins born with a common hip that are separated by operation would both possess the memory of a pain that occurred in the shared body part before the separation. Other fission cases also show that identity does not track a particular psychological process or ability; see note 11 below.
3. The quote from Leibniz occurs in Nature, Mind, and Death (1951), 497, where Ducasse cites Leibniz’s Philosophische Scriften, ed. Gerhardt, IV:300.
4. Ducasse, Nature, Mind, and Death (1951), 502. In a later book, the professor develops this plank of his thesis further, within an even more sympathetic treatment that combs through empirical evidence: A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life After Death (1961).
5. See note 40 below for Udayana’s version of the argument.
6. Abhinava, echoing a theme from the Gita (“one shouldn’t disturb the minds of ordinary people”), says that Nyaya is the philosophy for the masses, according to K. C. Pandey, Abhinavagupta (1963), 382. We, however, are interested in the secret findings of yogic experience.
7. Stephen Braude, First-Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind (1991).
8. YS 3.38 describes the siddhi of what some have termed “possession.” Supposedly, a yogin or yogini can direct more than one body at once. David White treats the power—questionably in my opinion—as a distinguishing mark of a yogin in “Ceci n’est pas un yogi” (2006).
9. Buddhaghosha, Visuddhimagga, “The Path of Purification,” tr. Bhikku Nyanamol (1976), 2:521–22. The eighty-nine items all lie within the consciousness “band” or “aggregate,” skandha; see figure 4B. Mahayana has a slightly different list of fifty-one mental factors.
10. Bernard Williams in a famous paper, “The Self and the Future” (1973), shows that what matters most is mind, not the body, by the following thought experiment. A future group of scientists, heartless but with the full authority of the State, have designed an experiment involving you and another person whom you know nothing about. In an operation during which you—we’ll call you person A—will lose consciousness, your brain will be “wiped clean” and reprogrammed, so to say, with the exact content of the mind of person B. Body B pre-operation will have your mind A postoperation, so that all your current memories, intentions, skills, dispositions to emotion, preferences, daydreams, etc., will be housed by current body B. You have to decide now (you are convinced that what you say will be decisive to the outcome) whether postoperation you would like the combination of body A and mind B (Y) or the combination of body B and mind A (Z) to receive $100,000. Which would you choose and why? (Let us stipulate no altruism.) Almost everyone chooses to be mind A and body B. We give mental factors greater weight.
Of course, the term “mind” hides many of the interesting questions. Too much is lumped together. Not everything mental is equal. My question: What about cross-life continuities? If there are some, as all Yoga supposes, wouldn’t that change our opinion of what matters?
11. The Buddhist Shantideva denies that there is any such privileged relationship: see chapter 3, note 25, for some of his arguments that we should care about the suffering of others just as much as our own. But even if these are persuasive morally, they are still prudentially insufficient, it seems to me, concerning the rebirth possibility.
A fission thought experiment is supposed to show that personal identity is not what matters. Imagine that your only chance of survival is that your brain be bisected and each half transplanted to a body that has every one of your memories and abilities. Arguably, your personal identity does not transfer to both Lefty and Righty, since the concept of identity entails something single. But you surely would be happy that there are to be these continuers of you. Better that than no survival. Indeed, how much more work could I get done if I could double! (Lefty and Righty could amicably divide up chores.) Personal identity is, then, not what matters most, concludes Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), 262, in particular, drawing a similar conclusion to Shantideva’s. But this and other arguments against the rationality of self-interest are weak. (Parfit, by the way, who has a reductionist view of personal identity, himself claims that his is the Buddhist position: 273 and 502–3.) Personal identity may not be what matters most in the Lefty/Righty scenario, but this does not show that what separates persons—or, in the Buddhist view, consciousness streams—is not something to care about. Indeed, as argued in chapter 2, we have special responsibilities to our future selves, whether at any given time that be just a single future self (as presumably would be normal) or more, because our actions are special causal factors.
Note again that it is part of yogic lore that one self or soul or consciousness stream can divide or somehow live in more than one (physical) body at a time. Reincarnation presupposes that a consciousness factor is continuous through a series of physical lives, and multiple embodiments is a consonant notion.
12. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984). Despite the general excellence of this work, Parfit is wrong to claim that his is the Buddhist position. Buddhists on the person and continuity share quite little with him in broad overview, since I cannot imagine Parfit subscribing to any version of reincarnation theory and all classical Buddhist views embrace rebirth, with the possible exception of some varieties of (anti-intellectualist) Zen. Nevertheless, Parfit not only rejects, like the Buddhist, the sufficiency of physical criteria of identity, he proffers a reductionism, which can be read as opposition to any Nyaya-like view of an essential self, the possessor of properties. This is an idea that the Buddhist too attacks. And the real target of Parfit is self-interest, which, as we have noted, the Buddhist Shanti-deva also attacks.
The key idea in Parfit’s analysis is overlapping continuity. I cannot remember the five-year-old birthday party but I can remember events in the life of the seven-year-old who could remember events at five. Personal identity is comprised of multiple psychological and physical processes. These, again, do seem to be like the skandhas of Buddhist theory; see figure 4B.
13. Nyaya Sutra 1.1.10 as interpreted by Vatsyayana, who begins his commentary by discussing recognition (pratisandhana). The sutra itself says only that cognition is one of several psychological properties that show the existence of a self by inference.
In the Yoga context, the importance of recognition, we should note, is not only argumentational in that the tantric Abhinava Gupta uses this type of cognition as a model of enlightenment, of the awakening of the individual to its identity with Shiva or Brahman. Similarly, some of the best evidence for reincarnation are translife memories and/or training (such as knowing a language not learned in the current lifetime, called xenoglossy). The possibility of these phenomena require, if not a self, translife lines of continuity of consciousness.
14. Nyaya Sutra 3.1.1 and commentaries. See also Jonardon Ganeri, “Cross-Modality and the Self” (2000).
15. Udayana’s reasoning is in his famous treatise defending the view of an enduring self, the Atma-tattva-viveka (Discrimination of Truth [from Falsehood] Concerning the Self), where this is one of a barrage of arguments put against the Buddhist stream theory, though also one of the most important.
16. This is at least what Udayana thinks, voicing what he takes to be the standard position in late Yogachara philosophy. We may note that another explanation open to Buddhists would be a rather common yogic thesis about sleep: consciousness of objects or properties very alien to our ordinary, waking awareness cannot be remembered without special training.
17. Udayana, Atma-tattva-viveka, ed. V. Dvivedhin and L. S. Dravida (1986), 808–9.
18. The position that every moment of consciousness is self-conscious is termed in Sanskrit sva-samvedana, and is prominent in particular in the Yogachara school of Vasubandhu (c. 350), Dignaga (c. 500), Dharmakirti (c. 625), and followers. However, it is work by Ratnakirti (Kshana-bhanga-siddhi), who seems to have been Udayana’s contemporary, that appears targeted by the Nyaya philosopher. Ratnakirti combines Yogachara with strong strains of Madhyamika.
19. There does seem to be one sense in which the person might survive. In Vedantic theism, as also in the process theism of A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, God’s memory is so vivid that the person’s life would be as though eternally reenacted, like a halo in a river with rapids. See, e.g., Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984), 32–34.
20. Here is another of the many thought-experiments explored by Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984). Faced with mandatory travel to Mars, by a teletransporter (as in Star Trek) that destroys your current body, then replicates it down to subatomic configurations at the speed of light on Mars seconds later or the conventional way by spacecraft (requiring, let us say, two years), which would you choose? I have gotten mixed results when I have questioned students on this, and Parfit reports the same, explaining that people’s prior metaphysical conceptions seem to determine their intuitions: 200ff. Personally, I would go the long way. The living body is not the only factor in personal identity, but surely it gets some weight.
21. Here we shall follow primarily the classical Vedantic and tantric inheritance, though there is a Samkhya notion of a subtle body that influences tantra in particular. According to Ishvarakrishna’s Samkhya-karika (c. 400), the linga sharira, the “subtle body” that is the vehicle for transmigration, is made of five subtle elements (tan-matra) matching the five gross elements, earth, water, fire, air, and ether (akasha, the medium of sound): tr. G. Larson (1979), 268–69. In everyday life, we are acquainted with these subtle elements as the sense data delivered by the five distinct sense organs, odors of subtle earth, tastes of subtle water, visions of subtle fire (tejas), tactile sense data of subtle air, and sounds of subtle ether. This theory moves some Yoga philosophers (in our broad sense) to think about the koshas, and later the chakras, as composed of different subtle elements. But no one seems very sure about the connections, and the Samkhya view becomes absorbed in tantric principles of manifestation.
We should also note that there is now a rather large contemporary literature on near-death and out-of-body experiences that constitute evidence for survival. Such reports are not usually tied to a yogic or occult psychology, making them all the more probative for the fact of survival but not very useful for tracing the psychological lines that matter.
22. Mention of five koshas or bodies first occurs in the Taittiriya Upanishad, c. sixth century B.C.E. (Brahmanandavalli 2ff.): see appendix A. The word kosha does not appear in this passage, but it does appear earlier in the Upanishad (Taittiriya 1.4.1), and the commentators, rightly to my mind, carry over the conception to the list of five.
The skandha concept appears in the Pali canon (of which, scholars surmise, there was a Sanskrit version), and is used as an organizational category by the great commentator Buddhaghosha (c. 400) and others in the southern tradition. Among early Sanskrit texts where the notion is similaly organizational is the Abhidharma-kosha of Vasubandhu (c. 350).
Surendranath Dasgupta brings out the importance of the notion for Buddhist psychology at the beginning of an excellent survey of the central concepts of early Buddhism, A History of Indian Philosophy (1922), 1:93: “We have seen that the Buddha said that there was no atman (soul). He said that when people held that they found the much spoken of soul, they really only found the five khandhas [skandhas] together or any one of them.”
23. The idea of such canals (nadi, also hita) connecting occultly the parts of our larger self is as old as the Brihadaranyaka (2.1.19 and 4.2.3) and Chandogya (8.6.1–3 and 8.6.6) Upanishads.
24. A famous passage in the Brihadaranyaka uses the word loka twice in the sense of field of vision, not parallel universe, since the passage is talking about a living person. Verse 4.3.32 (translated in my Classical Indian Metaphysics, 1995, 11): “An ocean, a single seer without duality becomes he whose world (loka) is brahman, O King,” Yajnavalkya instructed. “This is his supreme way. This is his supreme achievement. This is his supreme world (loka). This is his supreme bliss. Other beings live on just a small portion of this bliss.”
The other world or worlds or vision fields are said to be accessible by means of the pranic body through which we survive death. Sleep and dreams are supposed to provide evidence supplementing the testimony of those who are “travelers” by means of yogic trance. The accessibility is underpinned by the omnipresence of Brahman, according to Vedanta, although even Advaita Vedantins also hold that a subliminal being connects with nonphysical forces and beings inhabiting the various worlds, i.e., “levels” of Brahman.
25. The Upanishads mention hells, as do Buddhist texts. In my own view, this world can be hell enough! We might also note that it is commonly proclaimed in Puranas and tantras that ours is the only world where spiritual progress (through yoga) is possible. Ours is the only world of soul making. Other worlds are typal in the sense that their denizens do not develop through life, death, and rebirth.
26. I know no Tibetan, though since many technical terms in Tibetan Buddhist texts are taken from Sanskrit I can see a level of interlock beyond concepts expressed in English. The two translations I have relied on are: W. E. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), and Francesca Freemantle and Chögyam Trungpa, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Boulder: Shambala, 1975).
Although I cannot claim to have consulted the translation by Robert Thurman, I may say that his The Jewel Tree of Tibet (2005) is the best introduction to Tibetan Buddhism I know of, capturing the tradition’s spirit as an “enlightenment engine.” At the end, Thurman comments on his own reading and translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, making sure we see the big picture that there are no dead persons. Our consciousnesses are ever moving on to new experiences and opportunites. We are right now as much dead as anyone.
27. Probably this is not the expression in Tibetan, but it used in the Freemantle and Trungpa translation (1975), 33ff.
28. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, tr. Freemantle and Trungpa (1975), 72ff.
29. Some Tantric Buddhists utilize a chakric schema that is practically identical with the Shaivite pictured in figure 4C, although a system of three chakras and other variations occur, as also within Shaivism. Here is a sample usage from an old Tibetan synoptic textbook, Fundamentals of the Buddhist Tantras, by Mkhas Grub Rje (c. 1500), tr. F. D. Lessing and A. Wayman (1968), which links up with the Shaivite Hatha Yoga Pradipika in its mention of a central channel or “middle vein,” avadhuti, as well as “four Voids,” 321: “through the “gate” of being a fit vessel for that [completion of the discipline], he contemplates in piercing the “centers” (i.e., lotus or chakra centers of the body). Thus… he makes the wind [prana] enter, dwell, and dissolve in the middle vein” (avadhuti); from that the four Voids are produced.”
The diversity in the numbers, etc., can be accounted for by the complexity of our occult natures and connections to pranic, mental, and spiritual worlds or continua, in my opinion. To have a yogic experience of an opening or piercing in any single chakra from any direction can be, according to contemporary accounts as well as classical texts, an overwhelming experience. It would be easy to miss further occult complexity through being absorbed in something special, it would seem.
Another way to appreciate this last point using Tibetan Buddhist conceptions and our Jaina methodology is to consider that if the “three realms,” the Formless Realm, the Form Realm (with its eighteen heavens), and the Desire Realm (with its six heavens and five migrations)—see, e.g., Robert Thurman, Essential Tibetan Buddhism (1995)—are in any way real (i.e., if there is to be a truth here, syat, as would say our positive perspectivalists), and if, the way all this occult complexity relates to us is through a subtle body of centers of consciousness or chakras, then surely we should expect diversity in chakric accounts from our variously limited points of view.
30. Sir John Woodroffe (a.k.a. Arthur Avalon) translated and commented upon the Shat-chakra-nirupana of Purnananda Giri of the sixteenth century in The Serpent Power (1928), which has had enormous influence, indeed probably too much influence, through another enormously popular treatment, Mircea Eliade’s Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1954, 1969). Eliade erroneously and achronistically projects Purnananda’s version as the paradigmatically tantric theory—as pointed out by Paul Mueller-Ortega, “On Subtle Knowledge and the Refinement of Thought” (2005), 182.
Nevertheless, there is much overlap and a mainstream conception, as articulated, e.g., by Sanjukta Gupta, whom I follow: “Tantric Sadhana: Yoga,” which is a chapter in Hindu Tantrism, by Sanjukta Gupta, Dirk Jan Hoens, and Teun Goudriaan (1979). Gupta presents the mainstream picture, filling in details from a wide range of texts (170–79). I rely also to some extent on Hiroshi Motoyama, Theory of the Chakras (1981), who himself relies, in part, on Woodroffe and (to be sure) the Shat-chakra-nirupana.
31. Such imagery occurs throughout the literature on the “living liberated,” jivan mukta. The Shaiva Siddhanta authors of South India seem especially “fond,” as Chacko Valiaveetil puts it, “of expressing this union in love in terms of a mystical marriage” (Liberated Life [1980], 132). See also the papers in Living Liberation in Hindu Thought, ed. A. Fort and P. Mumme (1996).
32. I have informal evidence for “chakric experience is not uncommon”: informal surveys among students (eyes closed) about this, also with yoga teachers whom I have, through weeks of attending their classes, felt emboldened enough to ask. Now a standard take on this kind of avowal is that it is bad karma to talk about such experience. So my guess is that no formal survey would reveal anything of interest, and that the incidence of such occurrence is actually higher than my informal surveys would indicate.
33. The notion of yogic perception is discussed in Nyaya under Nyaya Sutra 4.2.38, where samadhi is conceived as a kind of yaugika pratyaksha. The notion is elaborated in the later, noncommentarial literature such as the Nyaya-manjari by Jayanta Bhatta (c. 850). It is universally supposed among Nyaya philosophers, although Raghunatha (c. 1500) famously quips against the Vaisheshika argument for atoms that if they are seen yogically, that we should find some yogins and ask. The thesis that there is yogic perception as a knowledge source is clearly expressed also in Prashastapada (c. 500), the great Vaisheshika philosopher, Padartha-dharma-samgraha (tr. Jha [1982], 392ff.). For the Buddhist theory), the Yogachara Buddhist theory, that is, see Charlene McDermott, “Yogic Direct Awareness as Means of Valid Cognition in Dharmakirti and Rgyal-tshab” (1991). The Madhyamika Buddhist who rejects the projects of epistemology may be counted an exception. But he too—like the Vishishtadvaita Vedantin who holds that testimony (viz., the Upanishadic revelation) trumps yogic perception—views the summum bonum as achieved through a kind of meditation, which counts as yogic perception for our purposes here. The Kularnava Tantra (c. 1100) makes a particularly clear statement about the authority of yogic perception; see, in appendix D, Kularnava 2.87–89. And so on.
34. Descartes thought that propositions restricted in content to appearances (experiences themselves), e.g., “It looks as though I am seeing a hand”—a claim that is true whether or not it is really a hand that I am seeing—were known with certainty, infallibly. Early twentieth-century Cartesians such as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer considered such propositions “basic” in the further sense that the justification for everything that we believe about the world (i.e., everything we know outside of math and logic) derives from their certainty, the certainty of basic propositions. However, it seems a person can be wrong about an appearance (“No, it really looks more like a foot”), and no one has been able successfully to specify justification-transfer rules needed to justify an “observation statement” that is about a physical object, e.g., “I see a hand,” from a basic proposition, “It looks as though I am seeing a hand.”
With these two cracks in the dike, a flood of further objections has sent philosophers scurrying to other positions, externalist like Nyaya, as well as to coherentism, a kind of life raft for internalists (every belief helps to justify every other in a big circle of mutual support, i.e., coherence).
35. Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (1977), 76; William Alston, Perceving God (1991), 79.
36. Among Ian Stevenson’s many books and papers, probably Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1974) is the best known and most often cited. But let me recommend in addition a study in which the main types of evidence for reincarnation are laid out in the manner of a philosopher (where Stevenson shows the importance of children’s spontaneous acts): Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987). There is also in particular Unlearned Language (1984), which presents the evidence of xenoglossy.
37. There are some pretty good philosophic engagements with the broad topic of survival—Robin Harwood, The Survival of the Self (1998) and R.W.K. Paterson, Philosophy and the Belief in a Life After Death (1995)—but these do not really wrestle with Stevenson’s evidence or theories (though Paterson has three or four pages of sympathetic discussion of some of Stevenson’s evidence in the midst of a broad examination of parapsychology, 180–84). Paul Edwards presents an unfair treatment in Reincarnation (2001), more about which at the end of the section.
There is an excellent philosophic study of some related evidence, again, not so much for reincarnation as survival: Stephen Braude, Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life After Death (2003). Intentionally bracketing the spiritual theories that incorporate a view of the continuation of consciousness, Braude shows that survival or persistence, however interpreted, is the best explanantion of certain evidence. His conclusion is that certain indisputable facts push even the philosophic skeptic to admit survival as the best hypothesis.
38. I was quite delighted to find this statement by Stevenson at the end of his Reincarnation and Biology ([1997], 180–81):
Having drawn attention to the limitation of genetics and environmental influences in early life, I need now to state that I do not propose reincarnation as replacing these factors. I regard it as a third factor that may fill some of the gaps in the knowledge we presently have about human personality and, as the cases of this work suggest, about the human body also. I turn now to some of the implications of the acceptance of reincarnation as such a contributing factor.
The most important consequence would be acknowledgment of the duality of mind and body. We cannot imagine reincarnation without the corollary belief that minds are associated with bodies during our familiar life, but are also independent of bodies to the extent of being fully separable from them and surviving the death of their associated body. (At some later time, they become associated with a new physical body.) In saying this I declare myself an adherent of interactionist dualism. Proponents of dualism do not deny the usefulness of brains for our everyday living, but they do deny that minds are nothing but the subjective experiences of brain activity. How minds and brains interact during life is part of the agenda for future research, but that is equally true of the claims confidently made by many neuroscientists who assert that minds are reducible to brain activity. We need not, however, be misled into mistaking claims for accomplishments.
39. See Trends in Rebirth Research, ed. Nimal Senanayake (2001).
40. The argument appears in the earliest stratum of Nyaya literature, the Nyaya Sutra, and remains intact through the centuries. Here is the version from Udayana (c. 1000) and his Atma-tattva-viveka (translation by me from V. Dvivedhin, 1986):
And, if it were the body that has consciousness, then a (newborn) child would not be able for a first time to make effort (to acquire something desired or to avoid something disliked). For, without desire or aversion, effort makes no sense. And without recognition (pratisandhana, recognitive synthesis) of how the desired is to be acquired, desire makes no sense. Inasmuch as (under the circumstances) there would be no memory (on the part of the newborn child) of the connection that has not been experienced in the current lifetime, such recognition (pratisandhana) would not happen (whereas in fact the newborn desiring milk reaches for the breast of its mother). And with respect to what has been experienced in another birth, the experiencer (presuming, ex hypothesi, that it is the physical body), having (been cremated and) turned to ashes, there would be no remembering by another (body, that is, still supposing counterfactually that it is the body that is the locus of consciousness). Furthermore, in this very lifetime the causal relation between (samskara-forming) experiences at the one end and effort (and action) at the other is definitely known. And so, in the absence of the one (experience, etc.), there is absence of the other (desire, etc.)—a proposition that is easy to grasp. (However, there is desire, etc., and so there must have been experience, etc.)
41. YS 3.18 is on the siddhi of rebirth memory. Krishna tells Arjuna in the Gita (4.5) that he can remember his previous births. And the common view in Buddhism is that this and other siddhis are by-products of mental concentration.
42. Let me sketch the background of the philosopher-yogin, Sri Aurobindo (Ghose), 1872–1950. As Aravinda Ackroyd Ghose, he received what was called at the end of the nineteenth century a Western education. After returning to India from England in 1892, Aurobindo became first a politician and then a yogin. Author of a long work of spiritual metaphysics, The Life Divine, as well as of several on yoga practice, most importantly The Synthesis of Yoga, he was also a poet and composed an epic poem, Savitri. Almost all of his writing is in English, but the sources of his philosophy are mainly in Sanskrit. The young Aravinda began learning Sanskrit at Cambridge University, but on his return to India he became an avid student of classical Indian culture and, as mentioned, a politician and later a yogin with a self-avowed “silent mind.”
In overview, we may say that Aurobindo uses the highbrow vocabulary of his Victorian education as well as the spiritual language of Vedanta and tantra to try to forge what he touts as a spiritual philosophy suited for our global society by being sensitive to science. How well the theory connects to biology, however, is questionable, since it is not clear that his use of the term “evolution” is scientific. But this is besides the point for our purposes, since here we concern ourselves not with the question of the connection of his views with science but with a metaphysical argument of his for reincarnation.
43. Here is a stretch of very abstract reasoning from Aurobindo, first considering and then rejecting the possibility that the One could simply assume our personalities each in turn without translife continuity, or with only, as in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, (illusory) karma-maintained continuity ending in dissolution of individuality in the single spiritual consciousness.
The One Being personalised would pass through various forms of becoming at fancy or according to some law of the consequences of action, till the close came by an enlightenment, a return to Oneness, a withdrawal of the Sole and Identical from that particular individualisation. But such a cycle would have no original or final determining Truth which would give it any significance. There is nothing for which it would be necessary; it would be merely a play, a Lila.… [On my theory in contrast] the progressive ascent of the individual becomes a keynote of this cosmic significance, and the rebirth of the soul in the body becomes a natural and unavoidable consequence of the truth of the Becoming and its inherent law. Rebirth is an indispensable machinery for the working out of a spiritual evolution.…
…It is through the conscious individual that this recovery [i.e., self-realization, spiritual enlightenment] is possible; it is in him that the evolving consciousness becomes organized and capable of awakening to its own Reality. The immense importance of the individual being, which increases as he rises in the scale, is the most remarkable and significant fact of a universe which started without consciousness and without individuality in an undifferentiated Nescience. This importance can only be justified if the Self as individual is no less real as the Self as cosmic Being or Spirit and both are powers of the Eternal. It is only so that can be explained the necessity for the growth of the individual and his discovery of himself as a condition for the discovery of a cosmic Self and Consciousness and of the supreme Reality. If we adopt this solution, this is the first result, the reality of the persistent individual; but from that first consequence the other result follows, that rebirth of some kind is no longer a possible machinery which may or may not be accepted, it becomes a necessity, an inevitable outcome of the root nature of our existence. (Aurobindo, The Life Divine [1973], 754–56)
44. Aurobindo, The Life Divine (1973), 671–78.
45. This is an old epithet used by Vedantins of all stripes that derives from several Upanishads. Aurobindo’s notion of Sachchidananda departs from the Advaita understanding in a theistic and tantric direction, with the Chit portion understood as “Chit-Shakti,” divine “Consciousness-Force” (to use his terms and spellings).
46. Paul Edwards, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (2001), which, sadly, was published just before his death.
47. Edwards, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (2001), 279.
1. Effort of will is implicit in the notion of samadhi. True, the word samadhi is used in the YS to articulate the summum bonum psychologically, and the metaphysics of the YS demands that effort be on the side of prakriti, our everyday intuitions be damned. But the very etymology of the word reveals a voluntarist sense. It is a noun derived from the verbal root dha, to put or hold, which when joined with verbal prefixes sam and a (long ā) to form the stem, sam-a-dha, as a verb is used in an active and voluntarist sense: “to place or put or hold or fix together…; to compose, set right,… put in order;… to effect, cause, produce” are some of the meanings listed in the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1851). I would not insist upon “ability to maintain trance” to render the word in the YS. But this translation fits nicely with the overall voluntarism of yoga practice.
The great scholar of yoga, Mircea Eliade, coined the term “enstacy” as a translation of samadhi. Unlike ecstacy (standing outside oneself), enstacy (standing within) comprises an inner bliss. Others, of course, have offered alternative renderings. My view is that the word should be anglicized (as it has been already in some circles). As an interpreter, I would prefer a translation with a voluntarist spin, something along the lines of “yogic accomplishment.”
2. Yogic trance, samadhi, has a cognitive dimension. Many of the siddhis are cognitive, and YS 3.25 says in general that “the object of any effort is known, whether subtle, hidden, or distant, by directing on it the higher light.” This connects the higher consciousness made available by yoga to the world. Furthermore, how could samadhi be part of what samyama is (control through conscious identification) and also transcend all powers? This is an outright inconsistency.
3. Throughout Hinduism, mantralike prayers—addressed to Vishnu, Kali, the elephant-headed Ganesha (ganeshaya namah), and so on—ask the deity to remove obstacles (vighna). Processes have natural flows, including, say, mastering Headstand (shirshasana) or writing a book, which, once the intention is set (presupposing a coherent plan), will be completed if no obstacles occur. Thus one performs mangala, does something auspicious, to invite the appropriate protection.
4. The word asmita is a synonym for ahamkara (egoism), which is alluded to at Samkhya-karika 3 and mentioned at karika 22 apparently as the principle of individuation; see Gerald Larson, Classical Samkhya (1979), which contains a translation, for these verses, 256 and 262–63.
5. Interestingly, one could also read YS 4.4 as proposing a teleological conception of the purusha, not of prakriti (as pronounced earlier in the text, viz., YS 2.21): the conscious being is impelled to embodiment. Thus we would have a conception similar to the Whiteheadean concept of God, who is always necessarily embodied.
6. Abhinava too mentions this conception of the bodhisattva; see the end of the first selection from his works in appendix D.
7. Shankara uses the metaphor of the world as “play,” lila, “sport,” without purpose, according to his commentary on Brahma-sutra-bhashya 2.1.34 (Georg Thibaut, trans., The Vedanta Sutras of Badarayana [1962], 358–59). But it is the Vaishnava preceptors, Vallabha (c. 1500) along with the yogin and saint Chaitanya of the same time, and Chaitanya’s followers Rupa and Jiva Gosvami in particular who make the tasting of rasa in spiritual experience the leading motif of their Yoga philosophies.
On the Buddhist side, we might mention the Four Purities central to Tibetan tantrism, which as Vajrayana (lightning bolt) practices are meant to bring enlightenment in a single birth: seeing your body as the body of the deity; seeing your environment as the mandala (cosmic circle) of the deity; seeing your pleasures as the enjoyments of the deity; and acting only for the benefit of others.
8. Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 5:137 (letter dated 9 July 1897). The letter must have been published in an early collection since Aurobindo flags the passage in his Synthesis of Yoga (1973, first published 1914–1920), by quoting at length, 257–58.
9. Abhinava goes light on kama, sexual desire, as opposed to krodha, anger, in his commentary on Gita 3.37, a verse that seems to imply that both are obstacles: Arvind Sharma, The Gitartharthasangraha of Abhinavagupta (1983), 126–26. Rupa Gosvami puts passionate love and devotion to Krishna as more important than moksha, liberation, which is then no longer the summum bonum; Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, tr. D. Haberman (2003).
10. See Plato, Phaedrus (in the standardized pagination) 245c–246b and 253c–254e; Republic 435b–c, 436a–d, 437b–d, and 439c–442b; and Symposium 209e–212b, in particular.
11. Nyaya’s teleological argument is one of a host of theistic proofs put forth by Udayana (c. 1000) in his Nyaya-kusumanjali, ed. Goswami (1972). Of Udayana’s many arguments, Gangesha (c. 1325), the new logician, writes only on the teleological in a long section of the inference chapter of his Tattva-cinta-mani. That section has been translated (and analyzed) by John Vattanky, Gangesa’s Philosophy of God (1984). The simplest version runs: Earth and the like are caused (by a conscious agent, namely God), since they are (artifactlike) effects, like a pot. This and all of Udayana’s arguments are ably scrutinized by Gopikamohan Bhattacharya, Studies in Nyaya-Vaisheshika Theism (1961). See also George Chemparathy, An Indian Rational Theology (1972).
12. Officially the pramana, the knowledge source, for the existence and nature of God is scripture, according to Vedantic theists upholding bhakti, who often reject rational theology as irrelevant or inconclusive. My point is, however, about the views of the practitioner that seem implicit in what she says and does. In Buddhism, the origin would of course be (divine) “emptiness” or the Buddha Mind, which is not really an origin but serves as an absolute reality and foundation of everything (“everything is empty”). In tantra, the origin is the Goddess, nature not mechanical but infused with divine consciousness.
13. This is not the only source of bhakti. Music and other forms of beauty and art, even philosophy, are said to provoke bhakti, which has several wellsprings. But though the emotion is not just for the teacher aspect of the divine, this does seem particularly important. Compare YS 1.26 (appendix C), which conceives of the ishvara as teacher—a position we shall focus on at the end of the section.
14. The word maya is understood by Advaitins as illusion, but this seems wrong here. The word derives from the root ma, to measure, delimit, and here it suggests that the special divine descent is like the overall process of creation (sarga, here Krishna using the verb, srijami, “I create [by emanating]”), where God, or Brahman, measures itself out, i.e., delimits itself, in becoming the finite universe.
15. The translation is mine. The Sanskrit is from the edition by Gokhale (1950).
16. Compare the Christian idea in “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son” (John 3.16).
17. That the Gita is a yoga manual is recognized by tantrics such as Abhinava, who wrote an important commentary translated by Arvind Sharma (1983). The Gita is not to be understood as only a Vedantic text.
18. That bhakti brings the yogic goal is said explicity by Vyasa under YS 1.23, using the word.
19. The distinctiveness of the commentary attributed to Shankara—who may or may not be the eighth-century Advaitin (before he became an Advaitin)—crystallizes in the reading of this stretch of sutras on the ishvara, YS 1.23ff.: The Complete Commentary by Shankara on the Yoga Sutras, tr Trevor Leggett (1990), 107ff. Notably, Vyasa himself presents, under sutra 1.24, an argument for the existence of God (or the Lord, ishvara) that is much like the ontological argument put forth in the West by Bishop Anselm in the twelfth century. Nothing greater can be conceived, for if there were something greater, that would be the Lord. Shankara writes extremely long subcommentary on Vyasa’s commentary on this and the next sutra, 1.25, which says that the Lord has maximal knowledge, and the two authors—especially Shankara, who considers several ways the Lord could be known—achieve a great moment in rational theology.
Vachaspati (c. 950) also writes a lot of subcommentary on this stretch of sutras, but does not go in the direction of bhakti and its lore or of rational theology, but rather toward Samkhya and views and accomplishments attributed to its legendary founder, Kapila. Vijnana Bhikshu (c. 1500) assimilates the ishvara teaching into the Vedantic Brahman teaching explicitly and straightforwardly, quoting Vedantic texts. Shankara does too though less explicitly, and quotes the Gita. Vachaspati’s commentary is translated by J. H. Woods in The Yoga-System of Pantanjali (1914); Vijnana Bhikshu’s by T. S. Rukmani, Yogavarttika of Vijnanabhiksu (1981–1989).
20. That conception, “preferred divinity,” ishta devata, in turn, scholars call “henotheistic”; see the next note below.
21. This the “henotheistic” idea of Hinduism is traceable to the Rig Veda and is prominently expressed in the Gita as well as theistic Upanishads. From the Rigveda Samhita, tr. S. P. Sarasvati and S. Vidyalankar, 8 vols. (1977–1980) (I have made a few alterations):
They have styled him Indra (the Chief of the gods), Mitra (the Friend), Varuna (the Venerable), Agni (Fire), also the celestial, great-winged Garutma; for although one, poets speak of him diversely; they say Agni, Yama (Death), and Matarishvan (Lord of breath). (Rig Veda 1.164.46.)
The divine architect, the impeller of all, the multiform, has begotten and nourished a numerous projeny, since all these worlds belong to him. (Rig Veda 3.55.19.)
The ten hundreds stand there as one; I have beheld the most excellent form of the gods. (Rig Veda 5.62.1.)
His steady light, swifter than the mind, stationed throughout the moving world, indicates the way to happiness. All the gods are of one accord and one intention; they proceed unobstructed according to a single will. (Rig Veda 6.9.5.)
The following verses from the Gita express the henotheistic idea transparently: 4.11, 9.23–24a, 11.15–16a, and 11.37b–38.
22. The formulation by the great Nyaya rational theologian Udayana (c. 1000) gives the example of weaving as well as of grammar. To the objection that at least some such tasks require that God be embodied, whereas God is not embodied, Udayana replies by quoting the Gita, verses 3.23 and 3.24: (in effect) God becomes embodied from time to time. These verses indicate the avatara doctrine; Krishna asserts that he must work to maintain the worlds since people everywhere (in all crafts) follow his example: Nyaya-kusumanjali, ed. Goswami (1972), 599. (N. S. Dravid has translated this work: Nyaya-kusumanjali of Udayanacarya [1996]; our argument appears on 414–15.) Gopikamohan Bhattacharya, Studies in Nyaya–Vaisheshika Theism (1961), 133, cites the commentary of Vardhamana (Gangesha’s son, c. 1350) arguing against the further objection that a body as a locus of works is also the locus of pleasure and suffering and thus incompatible with the nature of God. Vardhamana replies that though to God there attaches no unseen force (adrishta) that compels embodiment, that of individuals does force God to take a body—compare Gita 4.7 (see appendix B).
Dan Arnold connects the Mimamsa doctrines of the eternity and unspoken character of the Veda (not spoken by any person, apaurusheya, including Shiva, Vishnu, and so on) to the arguments of Jerry Fodor that the view of language as convention faces the difficulty that the stipulations that form conventions (“Let ‘apple’ pick out apples”) presuppose a language of stipulation (or whatever the generative engine): “On Semantics and Samketa” (2006). Fodor speculates that the brain is hard-wired in “mentalese,” that there is a core language that is not conventional. In other words, not all language is learned or even invented, since there has to be a language of invention. Here from a very different angle we see the strength of the criteriological argument of Udayana.
23. The alankara shastra, which is concerned mainly with poetics, is historically rooted in the Natya Shastra, a text as early as 200 B.C.E. that is an extraordinary how-to compendium for actors, musicians, dancers, carpenters, costumers, stage managers, and (above all) authors in putting on together a spectacle (probably for several days) in which theater was at the center. In the midst of details about musical instruments and dialects is advice to authors to try to evoke rasa, aesthetic relishing, of the dominant or abiding human emotions, sexual feeling, mirth, grief, anger, vitality, fear, repulsion, and wonder.
In a famous verse (6.16), Bharata lists eight rasas: “The erotic, comic, tragic, furious, heroic, frightening, gruesome, and the marvellous—these are the names of the eight ‘relishings’ known in dramatics.” He goes on to define rasa and to detail its relation to other types of psychological state. Through these ideas, the Natya Shastra stands as the foundational text not only of classical Indian dramatics but also, as mentioned, of the alamkara shastra, the classical aesthetics and literary criticism that stretches through the very latest and best Sanskrit authors. An excellent translation in two volumes is by Manmohan Ghosh (1961–67).
24. The secrecy of the Kaula rituals and the requirements for admission are apparently meant to exclude those unable to appreciate the occult. This is the rough equivalent of the need with respect to aesthetic objects to be aesthetically prepared, to be a like-hearted, sahridya, member of the audience—to use Abhinava’s term for the connoisseur. The uninitiated would disrupt the ceremonies, like someone laughing inappropriately during a play.
25. Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (1932), 168–71. Masatoshi Nagatomi explains the view of the great Yogacara philosopher Dharmakirti of the seventh century that to reject compassion is impossible, as it is transformative. Compassion becomes, for the advanced practitioner, the inherent nature of her consciousness—in a striking use of a substantivalist metaphor—its very stuff: “Manasa-Pratyaksha: A Conundrum in the Buddhist Pramana System,” included in Nagatomi, et al., Sanskrit and Indian Studies (1980), 246–47, including a long quotation (in English) from Dharmakirti’s Pramana-varttika, chapter 2.
26. The Buddhist transformation theme is not only karmic but innatist. As does what we saw in chapter 4 of the Yoga Sutra and its siddhi tradition, the Buddhist tantric picture comes to include manifestation from the top, or from the inside out. Consciousness is inherently compassionate and wise, hence the six perfections of those who awaken to its intrinsic and transformative influence, in the later conceptions. Indeed, the assimilation of the perfections to yogic siddhis is made explicitly along with an innatism totally consonant with that of the YS: see Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (1932), 20 and 26–29, in particular. In brief, the perfections are the natural flowers of enlightened consciousness.
27. We noted a rough equivalent of the Gita’s karma yoga in the “giving” enjoined in early Buddhism; see chapter 3, note 43, and, again, Egge, Religious Giving and the Invention of Karma in Theravada Buddhism (2002). Ellison Findly argues, in Dana: Giving and Getting in Pali Buddhism (2003), that the emergent institution and practices of giving to monks and nuns (of various classifications) were absolutely at the center of the culture of early Buddhism. In Mahayana or northern Buddhism, it is remarkable that the first of the six perfections, paramita, exhibited by the perfect individual, the bodhisattva, is dana, giving or charity. Furthermore, in karma yoga the giving has to be directed through bhakti, and so the heart is arguably in the lead. The karma yoga teaching of the Gita crucially includes bhakti, as does the way of the bodhisattva. Look again at the Four Purities of Vajrayana, above, note 7.
28. Rupa Gosvamin, Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, tr. D. Haberman (2003), the first “Wave of the Southern Quadrant,” verses 23–217.
29. My translation. See also (in appendix A) Katha 2.1.12:
That one that is difficult to know, hidden, immanent, set in the cavern (of the heart), resting in the depths.…
From the same Upanishad, Katha 4.7 (R. Hume translation, 1921):
She who rises with life (prana),
Aditi (Infinity), maker of divinity,
Who stands entered into the secret place [of the heart],
Who was born forth through beings—
This verily is That.
30. Swami Muktananda, Play of Consciousness (1978), 159.
31. See note 21 to appendix D below on the mantra hamsa, which is the favorite of Abhinava’s Kaula tradition.
32. Purananda’s Shat-chakra-nirupana, “Description of the Six Chakras,” was translated and popularized by Sir John Woodroffe in The Serpent Power (1928). Hiroshi Motoyama edited and polished a few verses, including verse 26, in Theories of the Chakras (1981), 173: “He who meditates on this Heart Lotus becomes like the Lord of Speech.… This Lotus is like the celestial wishing tree, the abode and seat of Shiva. It is beautified by the Hamsa (here the Jivatma, the individual soul) which is like the steady tapering flame of a lamp in a windless place.”
33. Satyananda Saraswati, Kundalini Tantra (1984), 164.
34. Aurobindo, The Life Divine (1973), book 2, part II, chapter 25, “The Triple Transformation,” 889–909.
35. Like Vivekananda and Satyananda Saraswati and others, Aurobindo is often counted a neo-Vedantin because of his championing of ideas of the Upanishads. I, however, have been calling him a tantric. The lesson perhaps is that in different ways tantra permeates neo-Vedanta.
Many of Aurobindo’s major works were first published serially in a journal of yoga entitled The Arya, 1914–1921. The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga were later extensively revised. The epic poem, Savitri, marginally unfinished at the time of Aurobindo’s death (1950), was published posthumously. Talk of a psychic element and psychic transformation occurs throughout, especially his later work, but part of a chapter near the end of The Life Divine (1973) is right on point: “The Triple Transformation,” 889–918.
36. Aurobindo, The Life Divine (1973), 225.
37. Aurobindo, The Life Divine (1973), 893:
On this ignorant surface we become dimly aware of something that can be called a soul as distinct from mind, life, or body; we feel it not only as our mental idea or vague instinct of ourselves, but as a sensible influence in our life and character and action. A certain sensitive feeling for all that is true and good and beautiful, fine and pure and noble, a response to it, a demand for it, a pressure on mind and life to accept and formulate it in our thought, feelings, conduct, character is the most usually recognized, the most general and characteristic, though not the sole sign of the influence of this psyche.
38. Rupa Gosvamin, Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, tr. D. Haberman (2003), the second “Wave of the Southern Quadrant,” verses 291–93, in particular.
39. The poem by Jayadeva, the Gitagovinda (c. 1150), is a fine literary example of the Vaishnava motif of divine love play. An excellent translation is by Barbara Stoler Miller, The Love Song of the Dark Lord (1977).
40. Yogic traditions converge on the desiderata of a healthy body and mind, freedom from destitution, availability of spiritual instruction, and sufficient leisure for practice.
41. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), 118–92.
42. As explained in chapter 4, this realm is continuous with others.
43. In a different context (economic strategies for development as opposed to Yoga philosophy), Amartya Sen puts forth a similar idea, a model of people as having “basic capacities”; see“Goods and People” in his Resources, Values and Development (1984).
44. There is sometimes a sense—following the Gita or another assurance—that if one is a sincere seeker then rebirth as a seeker is secure. This may be true, but there would seem to be very real possibilities of slippage (I may speak for myself), at least in a future life. So over the long run, one might, like Rawls, want the least advantaged to benefit from inequalities.
45. The Sanskrit (spelled in the indological fashion): agnim īḷe purohitam yajñasya devam ṛtvijam / hotāram ratna-dhātamam. For the translation, I follow the gloss given by Jagannatha Vedalankara, which is published (in Sanskrit) in two places: Bhargo Devasya Dhimahi (1992), 21, and Agni-mantra-mala (1976), 78.
46. The textual case to be made with respect to the Veda is beyond my personal competence, and I do not think that a yogic and occult interpretation has much standing among professional vedists. But even among indologists there are some who suggest such a reading, e.g., J. Gonda, The Vision of the Vedic Poets (1963), chapters 11 and 12 in particular. And there is no lack of scholarly support among the traditionally educated in India, for example, K.V. Kapali-Sastry, Rig-Bhashya Bhumika (1952), as well as Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire (1973). The idea is explicitly expressed in the Gita (15.14) as well as in the Upanishadic theme of interiorization of the sacrifice (see the second section of chapter 3 here as well as appendix A). A particularly apt passage is Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, chapter 5, sections 6–9.
47. See again note 21 to appendix D on hamsa. The mantra, so ‘ham (I am That), which has the advantage of being only two syllables in length, may be superior in another respect too: as pointed out in the note, it reads backwards (roughly) as “Hamsa,” which is a symbol of the jivatman. Also, the sound ham (hum) is a so-called seed mantra for the throat chakra. No wonder Shankara identifed the Upanishadic verse where it appears (Isha 16) as a mahavakya, great statement (though his stated reason is just the meaning, which he takes to be identity of self and Brahman)! Surely, moreover, we would join distinguished lineages in uttering it, a mantra that almost competes with om (and nothing can compete with om) for endorsement in yogic texts. However, the sound “nim” in agnim (fire) is often taken in tantric traditions to be a heart mantra, and although the word’s sense may be different from that of so ‘ham, it would be intended to pick out the same referent.
1. I have checked all occurrences of the word yoga that have been flagged in indices of eight or nine translations as well as several editions and, most importantly, the concordance compiled by Colonel Jacob, A Concordance to the Principal Upanishads and Bhagavadgita (1891, 1963, 1082 pages). But the colonel misses a few occurrences, especially forms of the root from which yoga is derived, and I suspect that there are others I have not noticed (though probably not too many). Rather arbitrarily, however, I am not including the passages in which forms of the verb appear. These are more controversial occurrences of the “self-discipline” idea, and the passages translated are sufficient to make the connection between yoga and the early Upanishads.
On the basis of research and arguments by J.A.B van Buitenen, I am not including the stretch of the Maitri Upanishad where the usage occurs (dramatically in 6.25, where the word is used not only in the sense of self-discipline but also in that of union, The Maitrayaniya Upanishad [1962], 85, in particular).
2. Shankara, c. 700 C.E., the oldest Sanskrit commentator whose texts are extant, wrote on eleven Upanishads and quoted four others (see the quotation below from S. Radhakrishnan). Shankara’s rival Ramanuja, c. 1050 C.E., did not write commentaries on individual Upanishads, but includes in his Shribhashya hundreds of sometimes long quotations from the fifteen quoted by Shankara, plus four or five in addition. On most of these, Ramanuja’s follower, Rangaramanuja, c. 1600, wrote commentaries.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads (1953), traces the history of Western translation, making several learned comments (21): “Prince Muhammad Dara Shikoh’s collection translated into Persian (1656–1657) and then into Latin by Anquetil Duperron (1801 and 1802) under the title Oupekhat contained about fifty. [H. T.] Colebrooke’s collection contained fifty-two, and this was based on Narayana’s list (c. AD 1400). The principal Upanishads are said to be ten. Shankara commented on eleven, Isha, Kena, Katha, Prashna, Mundaka, Mandukya, Taittiriya, Aitareya, Chandogya, Brihadaranyaka, and Shvetashvatara.… [Beyond the fifteen or so known and discussed by classical Vedantins] other Upanishads are more religious than philosophical.… They glorify Vedanta or Yoga or Samnyasa or extol the worship of Shiva, Shakti, or Vishnu. [Scripted is then the following footnote.] There is, however, considerable argument about the older and more original Upanishads. Max Mueller translated the eleven quoted by Shankara together with the Maitri. Deussen, though he translates no less than sixty, considers that fourteen of them are original.… English translations of the Upanishads have appeared in the following order: Ram Mohan Roy (1832), Roer (1853) (Bibliotheca Indica), Max Mueller (1879–1884) (Sacred Books of the East… [and Professor Radhakrishnan continues to list eight other translations prior to his own in 1953].”
3. “Secret doctrine” is not a bad translation for the word upanishad, since the meaning is most literally that which is gathered from a guru in a “sitting” with student practitioners, as scholars have shown. However, “mystic doctrine” seems to me better.
The proposition that there are yogic requirements to be eligible to receive what appear to be metaphysical doctrines reverberates throughout yogic traditions, tantric traditions in particular. For example, in the Kularnava Tantra (KT) Shiva tells Devi that there is no point in telling the truth about things unless one has become ready for it by lifetimes of yogic discipline. This is a main theme of KT chapter 1 (see appendix D).
4. Upanishads are a genre of Sanskrit literature. The genre demands speculative philosophy, as it presupposes yoga practice. The philosophy is actually not all that difficult to interpret. The disputes among the Vedantic subschools focus mainly on Brahman and its relation to the individual consciousness, and on this topic different Upanishadic passages say different things. In my own interpretation of particular passages (and all translation involves interpretation), I generally (but not always) follow Shankara along with the elegant English of Sarvepalli Ramakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads (1953), who himself seems usually to follow Shankara.
5. Vedantins are not the only philosophers with reverence for the Upanishads, not the only ones to try to assimilate scripture into a web of belief also informed by sense perception and inference. For instance, Nyaya philosophers join others in the Hindu mainstream in taking liberation to be the epistemic province of the Upanishads. On this subject—not on everything—the Upanishads are the pramana, the knowledge source. The knowledge sources include sruti, scripture or revealed hearing, but only on mukti and, with qualifications, dharma is sruti not liable to be trumped by weightier authority, Nyaya insists. And even on the Upanishads themselves, Vedantin voices are not the only authorities. An example is the question of what type of knowledge is enjoined by the Upanishads. The great “New Logician” Gangesha (c. 1325) agreed with the Vishishtadvaita Vedantins that the Upanishadic sources do not mean propositional knowledge. In enjoining knowledge of self, something like self-perception, an immediately intuitive consciousness, is the end in mind, he says (in his mukti-vada, Tattva-cinta-mani II, part 2, ed. N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya, 1999, 429–30, my translation):
So much being said, let us take up liberation: “Verily the self is to be learned about, thought about, and made immediate in meditation [made real to experience, sakshatkartavya],” is a scriptural statement (that is pertinent). And from (other) scriptural statements learning that the self is distinct from the body and the rest, we discriminate, singling out scientifically (by shastric means) the types of things that words pick out (padartha, the “categories”), carrying out the thinking (the manana enjoined), which becomes firm about it through considering the possibilities of it being understood (in a wrong way).
And it is incorrect that (directly) from knowledge of (the fundamental) truths produced in conformity with scripture there ceases to be, for the one for whom this has become immediate, false cognition along with (perverted) dispositions, the seeds of transmigratory existence. For such is not found with such phenomena as directional confusion (on the part of someone dizzy where knowledge does not end the dizziness).
The point is, as Gangesha goes on to say, that yoga practice is also necessary, not just intellectual understanding of the Upanishads. Here we may be inspired, then, by the Nyaya interest in yoga.
6. Mircea Eliade, Yoga Immortality and Freedom (1954), finds first and foremost Vedic tapas (ascetic heat) as a concept continuous with yoga, 106–14. K. S. Joshi, “On the Meaning of Yoga” (1965), supports this conclusion with better citations and argument.
7. Early Vedic usages of the word yoga are principally yoking or joining, a pair of animals, for instance, and more abstractly any connection between two things, including even an application of a rule to an instance. See the discussion in the last section of chapter 1.
8. The Maitri belongs to the Maitrayaniya lineage of the Krishna Yajur Veda. There is no commentary by Shankara, and hardly any scholar assigns it to the oldest and principal group, partly because it gives the name Shiva to its all-in-all theistic conception of Brahman, the Absolute. In verse 4.5, it mentions the triad of classical Hinduism, Brahma, the Creator (the word is masculine in gender, as opposed to the word for the Absolute, brahman, which is neuter), Vishnu, and Rudra (an early name for Shiva). Max Mueller, however, argues persuasively that the language and style (a certain use of euphonic combination or sandhi) of the Upanishad point to an early date. See The Upanishads in the series edited by Mueller, The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 15, part 2 (1884), xlvii–xlviii. However, the Maitri is pretty clearly later than the advent of Buddhism.
The Maitri is a theistic Upanishad with a remarkable use of the word yoga in 6.25. However, van Buitenen (see note 1 above) has cogently argued that the passage is an interpolation. Tantric texts may deserve the credit for the new meaning of mystical union—or the Gita the credit for yoga-yukta, united (with your higher self) through yoga, an expression that occurs repeatedly.
9. See again, above, note 6. Among the most resonant passages from the Rig Veda employing the word tapas is a line from 10.129, the “Hymn of Creation,” verse 4: “That One was born by force of tapas (ascetic heat).” This is echoed, for example, by Katha 4.6 (“the One born of old from tapas”). Mundaka 1.2.11 is a clear example where tapas means in general yoga practices (though it is usually translated “austerities”).
10. This is to follow the recension that the Nyaya philosopher, Gangesha, apparently has, since this is what he quotes (using standard transliteration): ātmā vā are śrotavyo mantavyo nididbyāsitavyaḥ (Tattvacintamani II, part 2, ed. N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya [1999], 396). Other recensions add the word draṣṭavyaḥ (is to be seen) after are, but almost all Vedantic as well as Nyaya philosophers remember the theme of the verse as that the self is to be learned about through hearing, thought about, and made immediate in meditation: shravana, manana, and nididhyasitavya.
11. Gangesha, for example, discusses at length libertation in connection with the Brihadaranyaka quotation (Tattvacintamani II, part 2, ed. N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya [1999], 429ff). See note 5 above.
12. Although “immediate meditational experience” is controversial as a gloss, Gangesha apparently has an Upanishadic edition that includes the word sakshatkara—put before the eyes, made immediate in experience—as part of the Upanishadic text (Tattvacintamani II, part 2, ed. N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya [1999], 429).
13. The Sanskrit edition I use for the following translations is Ten Principal Upanishads (1964), which also contains Shankara’s commentary. All translations are my own. One previous English rendering more than others has guided my eye and ear: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads (1953). I have also consulted R. Hume (1921), Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads (1973), V. Roebuck (2000), and E. Easwaran (1987).
14. Brihadaranyaka 4.3.9-10 uses loka in a similar way, where there is no suggestion that the “world” seen would be other than this world we ordinarily see, though now known as the Brahman: “‘An ocean, a single seer without duality becomes he whose world (loka) is brahman, O King,’ Yajnavalkya instructed. ‘This is his supreme way. This is his supreme achievement. This is his supreme world (loka). This is his supreme bliss. Other beings live on just a small portion of this bliss.’”
15. For the mainstream yogic understanding of the breaths, see Iyengar, Light on Yoga (1979), 45, “prana… which moves in the region of the heart and controls respiration; apana, which moves in the sphere of the lower abdomen and controls the function of eliminating urine and faeces; samana, which stokes the gastric fires to aid digestion; udana, which dwells in the thoracic cavity and controls the intake of air and food; and vyana, which pervades the entire body and distributes the energy derived from food and breath.” Swami Satyananda, Asana, Pranayama, Mudra, Bandha (1996), discusses the five “airs” as part of the pranic body, providing a drawing (364–66). The notion is in the earliest Upanishads (e.g., Brihadaranyaka 1.5.3) as well as the Yoga Sutra (3.39 and 3.40).
Here is also an interesting passage from Aurobindo, Record of Yoga (2001), II:1462:
There are five pranas, viz.: prana, apana, samana, vyana, and udana. The movement of the prana is from the top of the body to the navel, apana from Muladhara to the navel. Prana and apana meet together near the navel and create samana. The movement of vyana is in the whole body. While samana creates bhuta from the foods, vyana distributes it into the body. The movement of udana is from the navel to the head. Its work is to carry the virya (tejas) to the head. The movement of udana is different to the Yogin. Then its movement is from the Muladhara (from where it carries the virya to the crown of the head and turns it into ojas) to the crown of the head. [All spelling following the original.]
16. Shvetashvatara 2.10 is echoed by Gita 5.11.
17. On Shvetashvatara 2.11, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1953) quotes (translating) the Lankavatara Sutra of Buddhism: “In his exercise, the Yogin sees (imaginatively) the form of the sun or the moon or something looking like a lotus, or the underworld or various forms such as skyfire and the like” (721).
1. The translation here is my own, as is that of all the verses to follow. The Sanskrit is taken from The Bhagavad Gita with the Commentary of Shri Shankaracarya, ed. Dinkar Vishnu Gokhale (1950).
2. For example, the great historian of religions and interpreter of Yoga, Mircea Eliade, History of Religious Ideas (1982), II:241: see above, note 43 to chapter 4, where Eliade is quoted.
3. In the classical Vedantic concept as articulated especially by Ramanuja, God is a much more powerful being than, say, according to Nyaya. But in no Vedantic theology is God free from universal laws in self-determination. The Vedantic is not the Cartesian voluntarist God who can make 5 + 7 = 13. Thus the mention of God’s own yoga in Gita 11.8 can be interpreted as a vision of the laws and principles of manifestation.
4. The Bhagavad Gita with the Commentary of Shri Shankaracarya, ed. Dinkar Vishnu Gokhale, (1950). Matthew Dasti helped me choose the passages that appear to be the most relevant to yoga practice, leaving out the stretches of text more exclusively devoted to metaphysical conceptions. Among translations by others that I have consulted and that inform the effort here are, in order of my sense of helpfulness and debt: Franklin Edgerton (1952), J.A.B. van Buitenen (1981), and Barbara Stoler Miller (1986). Both Shankara and Ramanuja wrote extensive commentaries that I have consulted, using Shankara’s in particular as a dictionary. I have not consulted any English translation of Shankara, but the translation and commentary on Ramanuja’s Bhashya by J.A.B. van Buitenen, Ramanuja on the Bhagavadgita (1968), has been invaluable.
5. The idea of self-enlivening, bhavana, is crucial to the aesthetic tradition drawn on by Abhinava Gupta; see the second section of chapter 5.
6. Conscious identification and control, samyama, is perhaps the absolutely most important concept of the Yoga Sutra; see the discussion of siddhis as flowing from samyama in the first section of chapter 5.
7. Janaka is a king who is a character in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and is often mentioned as an example of a yogin who lives in the world.
8. Compare YS 1.12: “Restriction of fluctuations is accomplished through practice (abhyasa) and disinterestedness (vairagya).” It seems likely Patanjali knew the Gita, partly because abhyasa, practice, is vague and vairagya, disinterestedness, not so vague, hence an odd coupling and memorable phrase.
9. See note 3 immediately above.
1. Philipp Maas, Samadhipada (2006). Maas’s apparatus includes twenty-one published editions of the YS as well as manuscripts in eight alphabets from different regions of India. For YS chapters 2 through 4, I have relied on Vimala Karnatak (ed.), Patanjala-yoga-darsanam, 4 vols. (1992), which follows the sub-commentaries (on Vyasa) by Vachaspati (c. 950) and Vijnanabhikshu (c. 1500).
2. Stephen Phillips, “The Conflict of Voluntarism and Dualism in the Yoga-sutra” (1985).
3. The word atha, now, is viewed within traditional circles as a ritually auspicious way to begin a text (mangala: see note 54 to chapter 3).
4. See note 7 to chapter 1 on chitta.
5. Probably what is meant is that these are five major types, not that all fluctuations of chitta fall into a clear subcategory. Emotions, for example, seem to be left off the list that follows.
6. This is a definition of nonveridical cognition that sounds a lot like that of Nyaya; see note 10 to chapter 3.
7. Yoga clearly involves control over desire (a form of prana) as well as thought and emotion. Although desire is not on the list of types of fluctuation at 1.6, chitta should be thought of as comprising it.
8. An alternative translation: Afterward, from perception of the purusha, there is lack of desire for (manifest or unmanifest) phenomena.
9. The stretch of sutras beginning here (1.23) and running through 1.28 is discussed in the second section of chapter 5 on bhakti.
10. The match of compassion and the painful (duhkha) here is in accordance with the traditional matchings of rasa (aesthetic relishing) with bhava (natural emotional state); see the second section of chapter 5.
11. Sutra 1.35 seems to say that mental silence arises from observing sense experience. Vyasa, however, gives a different spin: by concentrating on a particular sense-organ activity along with the nature of its objects in general—e.g., the tasting organ and taste in general—one gets an experience of a subtle, prephysical evolute of nature, prakriti. This is important feedback, for it confirms a person’s trust in yogic teachings and practices and thus helps to lead to mental silence.
12. An alternative translation for 1.37: A mind (is quiet and restrained) whose objects are no longer colored by desire.
13. The technical term, samapatti, has been variously translated and interpreted. Integration of the parts of the being in a yogically balanced fashion is a reading slightly different from yogic balance, with samapatti as yogic integration (a rendering that is true to the etymology of sam + ā + the root, pat).
14. The word prajna is employed in Mahayana Buddhism to capture the sixth and best attribute of a bodhisattva, the “perfection of wisdom and insight,” prajna-paramita.
15. The last two sutras (1.50 and 1.51) are discussed in the book, pp. 85–86.
16. Sutra 2.5 frames the mistake—the “spiritual ignorance,” avidya—in the reverse of the typical order in tantra. There the mistake is not to see the eternal, etc., in the noneternal, etc.
17. The notion of moral payback implicit here in 2.14 is discussed in this book at the end of chapter 3.
18. See, above, pp. 144–45, on the idea, “All is suffering.”
19. This sutra (2.21) together with 2.18 presents a wonderfully teleological conception of prakriti, nature. Though these links between nature and the conscious being look rather like metaphysical patchwork, at least now we can understand the urge to practice yoga: it is in nature, in her essential heart .
20. Vyasa interprets 2.23 as saying that the conjunction, though misleading for the moment, leads eventually to the genuine perception of the conscious being’s own powers as well as the separate powers of prakriti—in consonance with the optimistic, teleological outlook of 2.21 and 2.18.
21. For example, nurturing thoughts and feelings of nonharmfulness is a practice to be employed to check a feeling of wanting to injure someone.
22. According to the tantric interpretation of Swami Satyananda Saraswati (1976), this sutra (2.37) says that from mastery of this niyama the yogin or yogini comes to live in an atmosphere of abundance, impersonally enjoying, so to say, the wealth of the world.
23. Freed from concern for wealth, you are relaxed enough to remember—by way of triggering samskaras formed in previous births—activities in previous lives, including what it was you did that is key to your present personality and station in life. Thus this sutra does not have to be read theistically. The theistic interpretation—here I follow Swami Satyananda (1976)—has it that, cleansed of personal interests, you can discern God’s reason for giving you the current birth along with your individual dharma, what you should try to do or be.
24. Sutra 2.45 is discussed in the second section of chapter 5.
25. 2.46 is the famous sutra on asana. The point seems to be that whereas it is perhaps not so hard to do an asana and make it firm and steady if you put in the effort, mastery entails the ability to do it effortlessly, easily, with pleasure (sukha).
26. Possibly, in accordance with modern tantra, the last part of the sutra (2.47) encourages, in certain asanas, meditation on kundalini, the serpent power, the shakti in the lowest of the seven centers, chakras, according to the occult physiology.
27. Sutra 2.52 echoes Isha Upanishad, verse 15: “The face of Truth is covered with a golden lid.”
28. The classical commentators take sutra 3.3 to indicate a transcendence of subject/object consciousness. But it may mean an utter absorption in an object with no self-consciousness. See, above, notes 1 and 2 to chapter 5, on samadhi.
29. An alternative translation for sutra 3.6 following Vyasa: The yoga of conscious identification (samyama) is to be developed in stages.
30. In other words, samyama is intrinsic to, though perhaps not fully developed in, the practices of nonharmfulness, cleanliness, asanas, and so on, according to sutra 3.7. B.K.S. Iyengar makes much of a mutual entailment of all the limbs (or in a weaker version, mutual support), in his Tree of Yoga (2002) and elsewhere. The limbs are not stages, in this view, but rather to be practiced simultaneously.
31. For instance, a person might constantly concentrate on om to the point that a moment of perishing consciousness and a moment of arising consciousness would have exactly the same content, presumably for long periods.
32. Properties and moments of change of property fall into discrete units—it seems to be assumed here in accordance with Buddhists and others. States of mind, perceptions, rememberings, etc., are momentary. However, the changes would occur in chitta, mind stuff. This and the last sutra (3.14 and 3.15) are metaphysical statements, combining the picture of the mind as a kind of substance with that of a serial nature for mental occurrences.
33. Sutra 3.17 seems to endorse the philosophic task of differentiating the likes of use and mention, sense and reference, object and view, or word, meaning, and reference. But how, then, could the siddhi be credible? (None of my philosophy colleagues has it.)
34. An additional sutra does not appear in most published editions I have seen, and Karnak (1992) does not include it. But there is no harm in looking at it in a note:
3.21´. etena śabdâdy-antar-dhānam uktam.
By this (by the information in 3.21) is explained the disappearance of sound and so on.
As the representations of Maas, Samadhipada (2006) make plain, sutras in manuscripts were often written entirely embedded within the commentary by Vyasa. And here indeed Vyasa uses almost the very words of 3.21’ in his commentary on 3.21.
35. Vyasa explains that the “cosmic becoming,” or “universe,” mentioned in sutra 3.26 consists of seven worlds, or planes of being, ranging from our world of earth (bhu) to the three worlds of the Brahman along with three intermediate worlds.
36. The interpretation of this siddhi as intellectual knowledge, as expertise in astronomy, is implausible. The implausibility urges us to find a metaphor. Unfortunately, there is no consensus about what occult phenomena may be meant. And it is interesting that usually long-winded Vyasa has practically nothing to say about this sutra (3.27) or the next, and we are left wondering what kind of knowledge, jnana, is intended.
37. The last three sutras (3.29–31), and perhaps the next, appear to express the tantric occult physiology of chakras and energy canals. Vyasa talks, however, about elements one interior to another, suggesting cylinders, as in the sheath or kosha theory.
38. Counter to the mainstream, I think the word pratibhad (3.33) is an adjective, qualifying an understood samyamat.
39. Sutra 3.36 makes a strange use of the word varta (normally “news,” not “smelling”), but I follow Vyasa in completing the list.
40. Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga-sutra of Patanjali (1979) thinks—contrary to Vyasa—that sutra 3.38 may be referring to an astral or subtle body as opposed to the physical body. Swami Satyananda, Four Chapters on Freedom (1976) says this is a very advanced siddhi that should not be tried at home.
The conceptual problem is that chitta is individuated by purusha: one chitta, one individual conscious being, that is to say, one mind, one purusha. And each mind has its own body, one would think. But this sutra says otherwise. Bodies can be controlled by alien chitta, which here seems less thought and emotion than a kind of psychic energy.
41. See note 15 to appendix A on the five breaths or pranas.
42. Ether is the medium of sound, according to mainstream classical Indian physics. There are also other conceptions, as noted, some of which relate the elements and subtle elements of Samkhya to koshas and chakras.
43. Feuerstein, The Yoga-sutra of Patanjali (1979), 118, cites the Mahabharata (12.318.7) for assigning the siddhis in general to the subtle or pranic body as opposed to the physical.
Vyasa provides the list of eight: shrinking, expansion, lightness or levitation, extension (wide occult reach), freedom of preference, general mastery, creativity, and wish-fulfillment. See also, in appendix E, my comments under verse 3.8 of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika for a slightly different list from King Bhoja (c. 1050) and the HYP commentator, Brahmananda (nineteenth century).
44. Sutra 3.48 is not to be interpreted as promising omnipotence but presumably mastery over one’s own prakriti, although it does say pradhana, which means the principal or root.
45. Other translators and interpreters take sutra 3.53 to refer to differentiating material things of the same type, two pots, for instance. However, since two pots cannot be in the same place (at the same time), a better reading seems to be that the discrimination is to be between consciousness and nature—which do occupy, so to say, the same place at the same time, at least in the sattvafication of nature. This interpretation also accords better with the topic of the immediately preceding and following sutras.
46. The stretch of sutras opening the fourth book, 4.1–4, is discussed in the first section of chapter 5.
47. All voluntary action has chitta, mind, as the purusha’s instrument or intermediary. People are numerous, acting in diverse ways, but an action on anyone’s part involves chitta, which is of a single type for everyone. As remarked, some have translated chitta as mind stuff (e.g., J. H. Woods). In Samkhya, and sometimes in Vedanta too, it is considered a kind of subtle matter. It is the receptacle or locus of samskara, mental dispositions, such as skills, memories, and habits.
It is my view that it is pretty consistently treated by Patanjali as a third basic kind of existent, especially here in the fourth chapter, along with consciousness (purusha) and nature (prakriti). Of course, the official position is to make it part of prakriti.
48. The implication sutra 4.7 seems to make is that the yogin is free of karmic payback, but perhaps the idea is a little more elaborate. The yogin’s karma could be of such a universal or harmonious order that it invites no payback, as in the theme of the Gita. In any case, the sutra does not deny that the yogin acts and thereby makes karma.
49. This is the first time the word vasana has been used. Previously, the theory of karma had been couched in terms of samskara, mental dispositions. The suggestion seems to be that vasana—like Ducasse’s talents and deep dispositions that could bridge lifetimes (see chapter 4)—are translife samskara, whereas at least some samskara perish with the death of the body.
50. Here (4.10) we get an idea of connection, albeit obscure, between mental dispositions and desire, or, as say the commentators, desire to live, ashisha (āśiṣa). The next sutra (4.11) says that it is a causal connection, and Vyasa and his followers try to spell it out more precisely. I speculate that Patanjali sees the eternity of the purusha projected into nature as a desire to continue forever in one’s current identity. Vijnanabhiksu constructs an argument about the permanence of chitta, the substratum of desire and mental dispositions. It echoes Udayana’s argument for rebirth, reviewed in chapter 4.
Sutra 4.10 echoes Buddhist teaching. Compare the Second Noble Truth: “Suffering comes from desire (which has no beginning).” It’s as though near one’s core, though not part of one’s genuine essence, there is a desire component, perhaps common with all life. The sutra also reinforces Vedantic readings and the Vedantic tendency to see chitta as a form of prana (breath, life energy), a universal vital substance to which desire is natural.
51. This claim of causal relationship mirrors the structure and interrelationship of the Four Noble Truths: “Eliminate desire, and suffering, its fruit, will be eliminated.” Vyasa’s reading, through the notion of alambana, dependence (of x on y), does express this structure as 4.11’s main point. But the terms of the relationship, which he understands to be determined by content, are not for him in either case subconscious mechanisms but rather consequences of action understood hedonically, in terms of pleasure and pain; Vyasa’s “six-spoked wheel of existence,” which really has only five spokes, similarly parallels and contrasts with the famous twelve-spoked wheel of early Buddhism, the bhava chakra. It runs: 1) from virtue, pleasure, and from vice, pain; 2) from pleasure, attachment/attraction, and from pain, aversion; 3) action (to acquire what attracts or to avoid that to which one is averse); 4) consequences of action (in benefits to others or injury); 5) virtue and vice—and so on, around again. The Buddhist wheel includes death and rebirth.
52. This and the following two sutras, the triad 4.12–14, address the metaphysics of time from a Samkhya perspective.
Vyasa takes a straightforward interpretive route, proposing a realism about past and future that is severely qualified. The past and the future do not exist in the same way as the present. The future exists as “to be manifest” and the past as “having been experienced.” Nevertheless, we, and especially yogins, have knowledge of things past and future, and so there must be truth makers (facts of the matter) grounding the knowledge.
53. Vyasa interprets the subtle (sukshma) in sutra 4.13 as applying to the past and the future, which is generic, unmanifest, or potential. Nature, which is composed of the three strands, sattva, rajas, and tamas, is the font of all possibility. Indeed, in a sense all particulars preexist (or postexist) in that they are true potentials within prakriti, combinations of the strands. This is the doctrine of sat-karya-vada, the “preexistence of the effect,” which is aired at length in the subcommentaries.
The point from the perspective of yogic practice is apparently to have a view that would give us a sense of nature as a whole—including the three times—and that would lead us to indifference to particular happenings. This in turn, would be, in Patanjali’s conception, a step toward utter transcendence.
54. Sutra 4.15 begins a stretch of text that is, in my opinion, Patanjali’s best philosophizing, best stretch, that is to say, of argumentation concerning mind and consciousness. The most compelling arguments of the entire YS occur here.
Counter to the Samkhya theme of seeing everything as like everything else in being a transformation of prakriti, the passage opens with the current sutra establishing “mind” (chitta) as—let us say, to make the point clear—belonging to a distinct category. Chitta is different from worldly things, as well as different from consciousness. Patanjali’s philosophy has been mislabeled a dualism. For all intents and purposes, it posits a triplicity of consciousness, mind, and object. Note, furthermore, that minds are paired with purushas, with individual conscious beings: one purusha, one chitta. Of course, chitta is also colored and variously determined by objects and natural processes.
In terms, then, of the three categories, Patanjali’s yoga could be characterized as the bringing of the chitta under the control of the purusha, free from the influence of prakriti. The mind becomes an instrument like the hand, which one can hold still or move purposefully, not like a neighbor’s radio, over which one has no control.
55. Objects exist independently of cognition. The question at the end of the sutra (4.16) helps us to see this quickly—whatever be the arguments of idealists, Buddhists and others, who would convince us that objects are mind dependent. The fluctuations of our chitta, i.e., what objects are to us, are, of course “mind dependent,” being composed of chitta and shaped—I would say in opposition to the standard interpretation of Patanjali—in part by the individual conscious being (who practices yoga and samyama in particular). The world is common to everyone, though I have my individual chitta and you yours, with mine conforming (to some extent) to my volition and yours to your volition.
56. B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali (1976), suggests this interpretation of 4.17, which is different from Vyasa’s. Another possibility for the “according to” phrase is: “depending on the coloring conferred.” This would continue what appears to be engagement with Buddhist idealism. One concedes the “grain of truth” in the opponent’s position: our individual expectations and conditioning determine, as you Buddhists insist, what objects are for us differently from what they are for others—and it all comes out determined in the best way when we practice yoga (or the Eightfold Path of the Buddha). Here we all agree. But let us not concede the essential, namely, here, the view of objects as real and external to chitta.
57. Each individual knows his or her own mind and is capable of controlling it, not other minds. At least, normally this would be the case. Knowledge of one’s own mind as embracing fluctuations over time proves the enduringness of oneself as the knower.
This argument is standardly used against Buddhists who would deny the separate existence of a self, as discussed in chapter 4. Only a self that endures is capable of the knowledge that we have of our minds fluctuating in one way at one time and in another way at another, or, in a different conception, has memory of cognizing something earlier. Memory dispositions, samskara, formed by previous experience are triggered and cause remembering. In the YS’s conception, the individual who has knowledge of certain fluctuations occurring at a certain time and of others occurring at other times is one and the same, that is to say, unchanging.
There would seem to be, on this view, no possibility of unconscious mental fluctuations. The tie between the purusha and its chitta seems implausibly tight. But again, the yogic point would be that the individual can take control.
58. Here again (4.19) Patanjali sides with classical realists, Nyaya philosophers, and others, against Buddhist idealists (and Advaitins and others): cognitions are not self-luminous since they are themselves known. Cognitions are instruments of a self’s knowledge of the world, according to Nyaya, and themselves have intentionality—or a content, an object-directedness—evidenced in terms of the things known. But cognitions (jnana) can be cognized as cognitions, through apperception, anuvyayasaya, an after-cognition, in Nyaya. Patanjali appears to have similar views about chitta. Here Nyaya’s cognitions are fluctuations of chitta. So since chitta is perceived, it is not self-luminous.
59. In the context of the classical arguments, nonsimultaneity of self-and object-cognition—sometimes presented as phenomological fact—buttresses the view of cognition as other-illumined, para-prakasha. Here (4.20) the point seems to hook up with the supposition that the purusha is required for the mind to be known. Two sutras below (4.22), it is claimed that the chitta, the mind, can know simultaneously the purusha and the world, under certain conditions.
It is tempting to read 4.20 as presenting a battle over the directedness of chitta, whether to cognize self or world. Thus it would show the true dualism of the old Yoga worldview, to choose world or self. I take it that part of the “tantric turn” is to deny that the yogin cannot know the world at the same time as the self is known. However, that idea seems already present with the message of 4.23, which is then a “tantric” sutra, like many in YS chapter 3. The right reading here seems to be that the chitta cannot cognize both itself and the world at the same time, not that it cannot reflect the purusha and cognize itself at the same time (as asserted in 4.23).
60. A unitary purusha is required to know chitta, not one cognition after another, as, for instance, Nyaya holds. Here Patanjali sides with Nyaya’s adversaries who advocate the self-illumination thesis. Such a regress argument against “other-illuminationism” is often repeated in philosophic texts as a mainstay of “self-illuminationism.”
The point here (4.21), then, seems to be to insist that the mind is a unitary substance subject to fluctations, as opposed to a stream of individual cognitions occurring one after the other. Note that the Buddhist schools share with Nyaya the picture of cognition as serial. Patanjali takes a different view, which he supposes allows him, but not Nyaya, to avoid the regress objection.
Consciousness rests with the self; it is intrinsic. The conscious being grasps mentality in a single swoop, so to say, past, present, and future fluctuations not yet manifest. It does not grasp chitta by means of other chitta. Otherwise, there would be an insuperable gap. An unbridgeable gap would also open were we to think of chitta as incapable of cognizing itself. The pertinent background assumption seems to be that the purusha uses chitta when it is no longer moved by the world, to self-cognize and to reflect the purusha’s spiritual reality.
Remembering too would be impossible on the serial view, which sees cognition as fleeting. One could not simultaneously know that one is remembering something or other and actually remember the something or other, nor, again, could one remember perceiving it.
61. The first word of this sutra (4.22) is chiti, power of consciousness, not chitta, mind. Perhaps it should be thought to designate the purusha, but I have translated it as I understand it, namely, as chitta or a form that the mind can take. The word recurs in the very last sutra, 4.34.
Different readings are offered by the classical commentators and, as might be expected, by modern interpreters. Vijnanabhikshu, for example, finds here a double reflection theory: the reflection of the purusha in the mind doubles back such that the mind as seemingly conscious is located in the purusha, who is, then, the knower. Vachaspati interprets the sutra in line with his view that the higher mind (buddhi) is the knower in everyday knowledge, not the purusha.
My reading is in line with the following sutra, 4.23, which says explicitly that the chitta is capable of knowing both the purusha and the world. Here, it seems to me, we have either the breakdown of the metaphysical dualism of purusha and prakriti as classically interpreted or a psychological bridge concept, actually both.
Practicewise, the sutra makes entire sense. One tries to still the mind in order, within the mind, to know the self.
62. This sutra (4.24) continues the argument against the philosophers of other schools. In Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant is famous for supposing that the mind synthesizes impressions and thoughts in concepts, with the unity of the deepest organizational concepts provided by the unity of the self. That is to say, the unity that makes thought possible is the “transcendental unity of apperception.” Kant’s idea is not too removed, it seems to me, from Patanjali’s here. The chitta unifies the information of the senses, in part by absorbing the information stored in samskara (formed in the current life) and indeed that of the deep activators than span lifetimes, vasana.
63. In this fourth chapter it is at this point, sutra 4.25, that Patanjali turns away from the holistic goal of transformation to the other-worldliness of kaivalya. Note that the sutra can be read as indicating a process, suggesting that a yogin who sees the distinction would naturally want no part of nature. And that idea would be compatible with the idea of another yogin, the tantrini, let us call her, who would not abandon embodied existence. Mahayana Buddhism sees the choice as between becoming a “solitary buddha” (pratyeka buddha) and a bodhisattva.
64. It is the chitta that is the beneficiary of yoga practice, according to the conception here (4.26).
65. Various theories have been offered, none obviously superior to the rest, about why the state is called Cloud of Dharma. I would like to say, with a touch of sarcasm, that it is because dharma is clouded, that is, duty abandoned along with the world in a kind of self-indulgence of expectation of self-bliss.
66. Sutra 4.31 may be read as an argument in favor of world abandonment. There remains little of interest once one has had a taste of self-absorption. This could be right.
67. Apparently, the individual nature of the yogin, that portion of prakriti making up his body and mind (and whatever subtle bodies too, presumably), would decompose into the generic elements or principles (tattva) into which nature can be analyzed. No longer would there be individual embodiment and continuity of karma across lives.
68. This sutra (4.33) seems to say—partly by the pragmatics of its placement near the end of the text—that just before passing into the state of utter self-absorption known as kaivalya, aloneness (an aloneness of contemplation of contemplation, so to say), the yogin can see the process propelling him to the summum bonum. If this is right, I should like to emphasize that such a person could not report his or her experience, since reporting requires use of mental and bodily instruments. Thus this sutra is speculation.
69. The use of the word chiti here (4.34) for the purusha’s power of consciousness suggests reading chiti at 4.22 (see above) in the same way, namely, as a conscious power inherent to the conscious being and as distinct from chitta. However, I stand by my rendering of 4.22, taking the usages to be different.
1. Teun Goudriaan and Sanjukta Gupta, Hindu Tantric and Shakta Literature (1981), present the history of indological study of Hindu tantra along with the broad divisions of tantric literature (1–31).
2. David White, The Alchemical Body (1996), 335ff.
3. This is a summary judgment that Professor Sanderson has made in many venues. See, in particular, the discussion in “Shaivism and the Tantric Traditions,” in The World’s Religions, ed. S. Sutherland, et al. (1988), 679–80.
4. Edwin Gerow, “Abhinava’s Aesthetics as a Speculative Paradigm” (1994), 186–87.
5. Indologists use the metaphor of “streams” of Shaivism, among which are Trika, Krama, and Kaula, which are streams of both practices/rituals and philosophy, whereas Pratyabhijna and Spanda are only philosophies. These five “systems,” if you will, are brought together by Abhinava, although before him they have different Agamas that do not, apparently, have the same views.
Trika gets its name from a “triad” of Agamas taken to be most important in convergence with philosophic or theological ideas, the “triad” of Shiva, Shakti, and their union, and other symbols or sets with three members; Krama from the psychological thesis that spiritual progress to enlightenment is a matter of a “sequence” of steps; and Kaula, of course, the “family” of seekers, though the word can mean the entire universe and has other connotations too (see note 12 below). Pandey, Abhinavagupta (1963), 594–97, identifies different meanings of kula, and, on 295–96 and 597–603, different meanings of trika.
It seems that the Kaula comes to be the preferred name for the umbrella of unification Abhinava achieves—like a stream that becomes a mighty river after converging with other streams, which then could be known by the other names, like the lower Mississippi thought of as the continuation of the Missouri.
6. According to Somadeva Vasudeva, who has translated and explained large portions of the Malini-vijayottara Tantra, Abhinava does not occupy himself very much with yoga because he takes this and other Tantras clearly to spell out the necessary practices. There is no need for him to detail them again; see The Yoga of the Malinivijayottaratantra (2004), 146.
7. The four, which Abhinava takes from various Agamas, are: the “nonway,” anupaya, for those whose immersion in the self is effortless, without practice prerequisites; the “way of Shambhu (Shiva),” shambhavopaya, for those from whom the effort needed is minimal; the “way of the Shakti worshipper (shakta),” shaktopaya, for those whose practice is to be mainly through the mind, involving meditation, japa (mantra repetition, in particular so ’ham), and tarka (spiritual reasoning: see below); and the “way of the minute,” anavopaya, for those whose natures are coarser, requiring more of the traditional disciplines of asana, pranayama, and so on. The four are not really separate paths but rather form a continuum starting with the fourth. See K. C. Pandey, Abhinavagupta (1963), 314–15, who cites Abhinava’s Tantraloka. Some of these terms—anupaya, etc.—have slightly different meanings with other authors and texts. See, e.g., Navjivan Rastogi, The Krama Tantricism of Kashmir (1979), 4–17.
Surprisingly, Abhinava says tarka (spiritual reasoning) is the most important “limb” (anga) of yoga, more important than any and all of the eight listed by Patanjali. Thus tarka is not (as with Nyaya) counterfactual reasoning meant to undermine an opponent’s position or to strengthen one’s own but rather something like Kant’s transcendental reasoning. That is to say, tarka is able to reveal the conditions of the possibility of our experience, which are, in brief, the tattvas or “principles” of Shiva/Shakti’s manifestation. Its importance derives from its ability to correct the dualistic misimpressions derived from sense perception, specifically that objects are discrete entities with nothing unifying them and that we as individuals are their perceivers.
Taken together, Abhinava’s criticism of the “eight-limbed yoga” (ashtanga yoga) of Patanjali and his advocacy of tarka show that for him the mind matters. Mental silence, chitta-vritti-nirodha (YS 1.2), is only a step along the path. It is to be interpreted as the ability to turn off mental chatter at will. The ability clearly does not preclude tarka, which we might render as “metaphysical reasoning.” See Paul Mueller-Ortega, “On Subtle Knowledge and the Refinement of Thought” (2005).
8. This is the main thesis of dozens of essays collected in Poet-Saints of India, ed. M. Sivaramkrishna and S. Roy (1996).
9. K. C. Pandey (1963) has to date presented the most comprehensive study in English. Much of the text has been translated into Italian; see Raniero Gnoli, Tantraloka (1980).
10. Pandey, Abhinavagupta (1963), 549. See also Pandey’s appendix B, 909–42.
11. Goudriaan and Gupta, Hindu Tantric and Shakta Literature (1981), 95.
12. Sir John Woodroffe (a.k.a. Arthur Avalon) composed a sketchy summary that includes translations of a few remarkable verses. He is also the general editor of a series of tantric texts in Sanskrit, including our Kularnava Tantra, which was edited by Taranatha Vidyaratna and published in Madras in 1916. That text, along with Woodroffe’s introduction in English and an eloquent summary by M. P. Pandit in English (more than a hundred pages in length and highly recommendable), was published in 1965, and the book has been reprinted several times since. It is listed as Arthur Avalon, Kularnava Tantra (1965). The Sanskrit I follow is from this edition.
Advanced teacher of Anusara Yoga Christina Sell flagged the Kularnava Tantra (KT) for me. She also transcribed a first draft of a translation that we made together.
M. P. Pandit’s summary is not only eloquent but also quite extensive, sometimes following the text closely. In addition, true translations of some portions of the Kularnava Tantra have appeared. The chapters on the guru, 12 and 13, have been translated in part by André Padoux, “The Tantric Guru,” in David White, ed., Tantra in Practice (2000), 41–51. This same book contains translations by Douglas Brooks, “The Ocean of the Heart: Selections from the Kularnava Tantra,” 347–60. Brooks translates about 80 verses drawn from almost all of the text’s 17 chapters (there are approximately 125 verses per chapter).
Brooks’s introduction to Kaula philosophy in Tantra in Practice, which is given in connection with the verses he renders, is the best I have seen, penetrating, concise, and comprehensive. Unfortunately, however, Brooks mistranslates the word kula as “heart.” This is at best a metaphorical sense that is not at all evident unless a lot of Shaiva philosophy is explained. The word kula means ordinarily “family” or any group closely connected through emotional or other bonds. A related meaning is the body, the “family” of limbs, and a third everything, the “family” of the universe.
Georg Feuerstein has translated chapter 9, on yoga, 134 verses, with an occasional explanatory comment: The Yoga Tradition (1998), 369–79. Feuerstein anglicizes the Sanskrit kula, treating it as a proper name. This practice would be fine if we were told the word’s range of meanings, the name’s connotations. Gudrun Buhnemann has translated chapter 15, on the “preliminary ritual,” puras-charana, in Ritual and Speculation in Early Tantrism: Essays in Honor of André Padoux, ed. T. Goudriaan (1992), 61–106. What Buhnemann describes as a “free translation” of the entire text by Ram Kumar Rai has been published, but I have, unfortunately, not been able to secure it. Goudriaan and Gupta, Hindu Tantric and Shakta Literature, also translate (elegantly) a few verses (93 and 94).
13. Chapter 3 of the KT takes up a traditional division of Tantras and Agamas into four, matching the four directions, adding a fifth, the Urddhva Amnaya, “Upper Road of the High Tradition”—a vertical axis distinct from the four horizontal directions. The five issue from the five mouths of Shiva, all leading to enlightenment but with the “Upper Road” as the best (3.19).
14. Presumably, Shiva refers here (2.3) to the “yoginis” who are said to have stood at the center of especially the early Kaula rituals.
15. As explained (note 13), from each of Shiva’s five mouths comes a different scriptural tradition. An alternative reading of 2.5 says “firmly established from mouth to mouth.” God (Shiva/Devi) is, nevertheless, here too implied as the founding Guru, the World Teacher, who stands at the head of the lineage, as (S) he does of all teaching of crafts. (See the second section of chapter 5.)
16. Although the Shaivite is mentioned separately, the Right-handed, Left-handed, and Siddhanta are usually considered forms or streams of Shaivism. Siddhanta Agamas are dualist, borrowing from Samkhya with less alteration than in other systems or streams. The Right-handed, M. P. Pandit writes (Avalon 1965:30), is “the path where karma, bhakti, and jnana are skilfully harmonized and synthecized” (italics in the original). The Left-handed is a path of transgression or reversal from “outward-directed” energies (pravritti) to the “inward” (nivritti), also according to Pandit (30–31).
17. An alternative reading of 2.9: it comes as a gift directly from Shiva.
18. This is to accept the alternative reading given by Vidyaratna in a footnote to 2.23 from one of his manuscripts.
19. There are three denominative verbs (verbs made from nouns) in this verse, all in the reflexive mode, atmane-pade (becomes), as opposed to the transitive or irreflexive, parasmai-pade (acts on). To preserve the construction in English, we might say, anglicizing bhoga, which means “enjoyment”: “On the Way of the Family, bhoga yogas, being-tripped-up dances, and life heavens, O Queen” (bhogo yogāyate sākṣāt pātakaṃ sukṛtāyate / mokṣāyate ca saṃsāraḥ kuladharme kulêśvari).
20. Here in honor of all Anusara teachers let me translate (with transliteration in the standard form) one more verse. Chapter 14, verse 38 is responsible, I am told, for the “Anusara” name: “śakti-pātânusāreṇa śiṣyo ’nugraham arhati / yatra na śaktir na patati tatra siddhir na jāyate.”
The student, the disciple becomes worthy and capable of Grace by aligning with (anusāra) the descent (or reception, literally, “fall”) of Shakti (divine energy). Where Shakti is not descending (alternatively, where the guru’s initiation has not been received), no perfection (siddhi) is born.
An alternative translation is provided by Brooks, “The Ocean of the Heart: Selections from the Kularnava Tantra,” 359. Brooks does not give, as I have, occult ambience to “descent of Shakti,” interpreting śakti-pāta as amounting to initiation and the grace received from the guru in the ceremony. The text is probably meant to be taken also in that sense. And the overall context of chapter 14 is against me. Nevertheless, double meaning is a virtue of the verses of KT as it is for poetry in general. The KT is elegant poetry, exhibiting all the tropes loved by aestheticians, including, to be sure, shlesha, the pun or double entendre. Unfortunately in English there is no way to render double meaning except by the artificial means of parentheses (no phrase in English means both descent of Shakti and initiation). Note that M. P. Pandit (Woodroffe 1965:104) in his summary reads the phrase pretty much the same way I do (or, I should say, I follow him): “The disciple receives the Grace according to the impact of the Shakti, shakti-pata; where there is no impact of shakti, there is no fulfillment.”
21. Here are the first and third verses from Paul Mueller-Ortega’s translation of Abhinava’s Anubhava-nivedana-stotra, “The Song of Praise Intended to Communicate the Direct Experience of the Absolute,” which has a total of four verses; from David White, ed., Tantra in Practice (2000), 585–86.
1. The accomplished Tantric yogin, whose mind and breath have been dissolved through complete immersion in the innermost object of perception, the supreme goal of yoga—such a yogin then abides with a silenced but open vision, the pupils of the eyes unmoving. Though he [is seen to] gaze still on the outer world, in truth his vision assuredly does not rest on its [apparent outwardness]. This is the seal of Shambhu—the shambhava mudra, the Shaiva “seal” of unitary consciousness, the performing of the ultimate “stance” of Shiva’s illumination.
This state of true and ultimate mystical vision, O Divine Master, is produced only because of your potent and illuminating grace. This is the domain of Shambhu, the gracious Lord, the true state of reality which is beyond the experience of… the fullness [of the conditions of ordinary awareness] as well as beyond even the [extraordinary] void states [of advanced Tantric meditation].…
3. In that state, whatsoever words may emerge from the mouth of such a yogin are, indeed, transcendentally charged mantras. The aggregate form of the body—within which the experience of pleasure and pain are constantly arising—that very bodily form [of the illuminated yogin] is nevertheless the mudra or seal that reveals [the experience of the Absolute].
The spontaneous and natural flow of the breath [which produces the natural mantric sound hamsa continuously]—that, indeed, is the extraordinary and highest yoga itself. Having directly experienced the unparalleled splendor, the illuminating glory of the divine shakti, in truth, what will then not reveal itself to me?
A word about the mantra, hamsa, which has both a literal and a figurative meaning as well as a distinct, double meaning when its two syllables are taken in reverse order, sa and ham. By attraction from the “Great Statement” of the Isha Upanishad, viz., so ’ham, its second or double meaning is: “I am He (the Conscious Being in the Sun and everywhere, the Absolute, the Brahman).” The mantra so ’ham has extraordinary resonance. It is the climax of the Upanishad, while the short Isha, which has only eighteen verses, comes first in traditional Vedantic collections (in both Advaita and theistic lineages). Then, there is the primary meaning of the word, hamsa, which is the Siberian crane—as I surmise on the basis of the evidence (against several divergent translation conventions, “goose,” “swan,” “eagle,” etc., partly because this bird, unlike the other candidates, flies over the Himalayas to summer in the north while wintering in India). Thus the secondary meaning, connected beautifully to the first, is the transmigrating individual, jivatman (see the beginning of the third section of chapter 5). Repeating this mantra thousands of times, the seeker hears so ‘ham equally with the generic name of his individual soul—the mantra is Abhinava’s favorite as well as glorified in numerous Kula texts, e.g., Kularnava Tantra, chapter 3, almost the whole of which is devoted to praising its virtues.
The text of the hymn I translate is from K. C. Pandey, Abhinavagupta (1963), 952–53 (placed immediately before the Anubhava-nivedana-stotra).
22. Lilian Silburn, Hymnes de Abhinava (1970), 37–47 and 85–97. My only criticism of the commentary, which runs several pages in inspired prose, is that the professor takes perhaps too much opportunity to elaborate Abhinava’s monistic philosophy. Some ideas of Silburn’s have the barest point d’appui in the poem’s actual words. Her comments are nevertheless usually insightful and informative.
23. Here and in the next verse, in-breath and out-breath are only meant in part (Silburn’s translation is in error here, 87). In breathing in, pranic energy flows up. In breathing out, pranic energy in the form called apana, down-breath energy, moves down. Air may in the first case be going in and down, but the pranic energy rises; similarly with out-breath, that is, the energy pushes down. The divinities are stationed in the prana, in the first two of five types (see note 15 to appendix A). This suggests endorsement of pranayama as a yogic method, but see again note 7 to this appendix.
The two energies are the portals for entry into the occult domain, where our ordinary faculties and activities become material for offerings by the various divinities to Shiva/Shakti (as Silburn points out).
24. The word vimarsha, translated here “self-consciousness,” means more broadly “reflection,” as in the mental effort required to make an inference. One “reflects” upon seeing smoke that wherever is smoke there is fire, and that thus there must be fire here too. With Abhinava and his predecessors in Pratya bhijna (Recognition) philosophy and the Spanda-karika (“Verses on the [Divine] Vibration [Creative of the Universe]”), the word is used for the process of self-realization, or self-immersion, where there is a recognition that comprehends both the universal/transcendent (“That”) and the individual/immanent (“This”): “That is This.”
The word lila, “play,” has Advaita and more broadly monist reverberations: see note 7 to chapter 5, above. Brahman self-manifests for the purpose of novel delight. Everything contributes to ananda from the right perspective.
The use of the masculine “Bhairava” so often together with the feminine “Bhairavi” suggests the figure of the Ardha-narishvara, Half-Female God, depicted in statues as divided at midline into, on the statue’s right, a divine male torso, etc., and, on the left, a divine female.
25. One may wonder whereto in our bodies are there references? The answer: certitude and rational intelligence. These are divinities in our body consisting of higher mind, to use the theory of the koshas; see figure 4A.
26. Here we see explicitly expressed the thesis that pride and egoism—so vilified in yogic traditions—are a force of divine manifestation, offered to the Ultimate by—we might note—the most tolerant and indulgent of the divinities, the Mother, Shambhavi, the Kind. Abhinava makes explicit which deity reigns in which region of the divine lotus in a couple of verses such as this one. For the other identifications, I rely on Silburn (1970).
27. The Sanskrit word translated “imagined possibilities” is vikalpa, imagination in the technical sense of not being about the present or past but rather the future. But these are really thoughts that present life “options,” so to say, the imagined possibilities of getting what we want and avoiding what we want to avoid that our chattering minds occupy themselves with daily.
28. The six philosophies are those that are Vedic in lineage and, let us say, religious practice, though all hardly regard the Veda in the same way: Mimamsa, Vedanta, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, and Yoga. The thirty-six categories are of Shiva/Shakti and their manifestation according to the Trika school (which Abhinava infuses into his overall Kaula). The expression translated “proprietor of the field,” kshetra pati, echoes the Gita, chapter 13.
29. J. L. Masson and M. V. Patwardhan, Santarasa (1969). The Sanskrit text that I translate appears on 115–17, and Masson’s and Patwardhan’s translation on 130–35.
30. There is no need to amend and read, following Masson and Patwardhan (note 5, p. 130), vishayasyaiva for vishayasyeva. The point is that unlike sensory objects, the self is also subject, and so the self is object “as it were” (iva).
31. This is not to accept Masson and Patwardhan’s emending to yoga, “in connection with,” from ayoga, “not in connection with.”
32. Masson and Patwardhan say (note 3, p. 132) that they cannot understand the reason for the citation. But this is easy. The Yoga Sutra claim is that samadhi as an experience leaves “traces,” samskara, the mental dispositions we have so often discussed. But these that lead to spiritual tranquility are special traces, special dispositions, in that they push one to shanti and further experience of samadhi. Sly Abhinava has referred us to a transformational theory of the YS that stands in tension with its official dualism: the mystical state has worldly consequences.
1. George Briggs, Gorakhnath and the Kanphata Yogis (1938), provides novel-worthy descriptions of yogins in this tradition coupled with textual background. Finding descriptions of what he views as a similar lineage in the early epic the Ramayana and elsewhere, Briggs argues that the lineage may be very old indeed. There is, he judges, evidence for similar yoga practice in Vedic times in a hymn about a muni (sage/mage) with wild hair, as suggested also by a few other scholars, as he points out (210–12).
2. The Hathayogapradipika of Svatmarama, with the commentary Jyotsna of Brahmananda, ed. and trans. A. A. Ramanathan and S. V. Subrahmanya Sastri (1972), and Hathayogapradipika, trans. Swami Muktabodhananda (1993).
3. Asanas are named and some briefly described. For details, I recommend Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar and the publications of the Bihar School of Yoga—including the HYP translation and commentary already mentioned—but also especially Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha. Precise physical instructions are given over dozens of pages.
4. Wind is fourth in its subtlety, air being known by touch and sound, whereas ether, the fifth element, akasha, is known only by sound, earth by all five sense modalities, water by four, and tejas, the fiery element, by three.
5. See note 25 to chapter 1 for a comment on verse 2.46 in the context of a yoga class.
6. See note 43 to appendix C for Vyasa’s list of eight siddhis in his commentary on YS 3.45. King Bhoja (c. 1050) has a practically identical list as the one here in his Rajamartanda commentary, which is an independent commentary on the YS (not a subcommentary on Vyasa), also under 3.45, although instead of prapti, cognition at a distance, Bhoja has kama-vasaya, dwelling wherever desired; Dhundhiraj Sastri, ed. (1930, 1982), 158.
7. Ramanathan and Subramanya Sastri, eds., The Hathayogapradipika of Svatmarama (1972), Brahmananda’s commentary, 75 (in the Sanskrit page-numbering).
8. Ramanathan and Subramanya Sastri, eds., The Hathayogapradipika of Svatmarama (1972), 85, the English quotation. Brahmananda’s complaint runs on 181–85 in the separate Sanskrit page numbering.