Yoga: The Indian Tradition.

• Author: Larson, Gerald James
• Position: Book review

Yoga: The Indian Tradition. Edited by IAN WHICHER AND DAVID CARPENTER. LONDON: ROUTLEDGE-CURZON, 2003. Pp. xii + 206.

Perhaps the most difficult problem in dealing with yoga is to determine precisely what is meant by the term. One approach is to allow for the greatest diversity. In such a broad approach the term "yoga" may be taken to refer to any of the sets of ascetic spiritual practices, involving breath exercises, disciplined bodily postures, and so forth, characteristic of South Asian religious traditions. This would include Hindu. Buddhist, Jain, Tantric. Sikh, and even Sufi religious traditions in South Asia from the time of the Indus Valley civilization up through and including twentieth-century Neo-Hindu and Neo-Muslim traditions. Also to be included would be the various guru-oriented international spin-offs (Iyengar Yoga, Siddha Yoga. Transcendental Meditation, and so forth) that appeared nearly everywhere in the latter decades of the twentieth century. This is the sort of understanding of yoga that emerges from the work of Mircea Eliade in his now classic. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, 1959). and Gcorg Feuerstein's The Yoga Tradition (Delhi. 2002). The obvious difficulty in such a broad approach is that yoga traditions become so all encompassing as to become historically diffuse, theoretically vacuous, and semantically meaningless. Eliade's work, for example, while filled with fascinating materials that justify his claim that yoga is a "protean" spirituality that is a "characteristic dimension of Indian spirituality." sometimes also borders on becoming a potpourri of arcane oddities, which perpetuate the worst cliches about a fabulous "mystic" or "fantastic" India!

A second approach at definition is to limit the notion of yoga to its strict philosophical identity as one of the six classical systems of Indian philosophy, to what is usually referred to as Patanjala Yoga, that is. a philosophical system of yoga as compiled in a text known as the Yogasulra in the first centuries of the Common Era by a certain Patanjali. The Yogasutra is nearly impossible to decipher by itself and is most often read together with a set of interpretive commentaries by Vyasa, Vacaspa-timisra, Vijnanabhiksu, et al. Sometimes this system of philosophy is called Patanjala Samkhya, for example, in S. N. Dasgupta's History of Indian Philosophy, vol. I (Cambridge, 1963), because of the system's close affinity with the Samkhya philosophy of India...