Lecture tag: Yoga
It’s a kind of magic: The powers of yoga and their interpretation
Majewski Lecture
Flying through the air, the remembrance of former existence, being insensitive to pain – all these phenomena are known as the ‘power’ of Yogins and are usually regarded as signs of a successful practice of Yoga. Already in the oldest texts, such as the Mahabharata (400 BCE- 400 CE) and the Yogasutra (4th-5th century, CE), they are called bala (power), siddhi (achievements) or vibhuti (manifestation of might). In academic contexts these powers were rather neglected since they have often been interpreted as an expression of ‘magical thinking’. The discussion of some of these academic views will be followed by an analysis of the description and interpretation of Yogic powers in the Yogasutra and the Mahabharata. It will be shown that the authors of these texts used their own philosophical framework for explaining the ‘conquest’ of the objects of Yogic practice.
New Manuscript Evidence for the Practice of Numerous Yoga Postures (Āsana) in the 16–17th centuries (HT15)
Many of the āsana of modern yoga are not mentioned in the well-known scriptures of Haṭhayoga, such as the Haṭhapradīpikā. This has led to recent claims that relatively few āsanas were practised in traditional Hathayoga and those we see today are largely the invention of twentieth-century Indian gurus. In this talk, these assertions will be assessed in the light of three unpublished manuscripts which contain long lists of āsana. It is apparent that brief references to eighty-four āsanas in the early literature on Haṭhayoga were replaced by actual lists and descriptions of eight-four āsanas after the sixteenth century. During this time in the history of yoga, medieval yoga practices were synthesised with more orthodox Brahmanical literature including Pātañjalayoga.
Jason Birch completed his DPhil in 2013 at the University of Oxford. The title of his thesis is, “The Amanaska: King of All Yogas: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation along with a Monographic Introduction.” For first half of 2014, he was a visiting scholar at Loyola Marymount University where he taught courses on the history of yoga and Sanskrit for a Masters program in Yoga Studies. Since that time, he has been a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.