Conveners
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 1
- Laura von Ostrowski
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 2
- Maximilian Hoth
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 3
- Borayin Larios (French Institute of Pondicherry and École française d'Extrême-Orient)
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 4
- Jacqueline Hargreaves (SOAS)
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 5
- Finnian Gerety (Brown University)
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 6
- Magdalena Kraler (Independent scholar)
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 7
- Matylda Ciołkosz (Jagiellonian University)
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 8
- Valentina Salonna (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 9
- Jürgen Hanneder (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 10
- Zoe Slatoff (Loyola Marymount University)
Inspiration: Inspiration panel 11
- There are no conveners in this block
The cakras of yoga have fascinated interpreters ever since the tantric body entered Anglophone discourse and scholarship in the late nineteenth century. While multiple authors in this period advanced biomedical interpretations of the tantric body, the consensus of modern scholarship is that the tantric body is a ‘visionary’ body or mental construct without empirical basis. This essay seeks an...
Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī’s poem Padumāvat, composed in Old Awadhi in 1540, is the most famous Sufi composition of the premākhyān genre. Due to its popularity, it has been adapted into Persian and several South Asian languages. The Middle Bengali version, called Padmābatī, was produced by the excellent poet Ālāol in 1651. He not only retained most of the yogic elements from Jāyasī’s work,...
This paper examines the centrality of Kuṇḍalinī among the early modern globalizers of yoga, especially Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda, as well as several more minor figures. While neither man referred to his system as “haṭha yoga”—of which Vivekananda is famously quoted as being dismissive at best—both put forth frameworks that are perfect examples of what James Mallinson has...
The Yogapañcāśikā might be one of the earliest attempts to integrate Haṭha and Rājayoga with Pātañjalayoga. The text is cited by name in a Sanskrit work called the Vivekamukura, which may have been composed in the late sixteenth century. Unlike other compilations on yoga from the early modern period, the Yogapañcāśikā is a short work of merely fifty verses that cites only the...
The Aparokṣānubhūti, attributed to Śaṅkarācārya, although probably written closer to the early sixteenth century, emerged as part of the growing response to the increased output of haṭhayoga texts. It incorporates a unique fifteen-part path of rājayoga—including a redefined, brahman-centric version of the aṅgas of Patañjali that similarly culminates in samādhi—into the Advaitic core...
As recent work on Pāśupata asceticism by Jonker has shown (2021), liberating “union” (yoga) with Śiva was to be achieved through the practitioner’s self-induced death, by the method known to later yogic traditions as “climbing up” (utkrānti), whereby the soul leaves the body and ascends. In this paper, I explore this idea from another direction, through a granular examination of Pāśupata...
Jaroslaw Zapart, PhD, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilizations, Jagiellonian University.
My research revolves around the North Indian bhakti traditions of early modernity and concentrates on the analysis of religious ideology. I also deal with selected aspects of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, pertaining especially to the tathāgatagarbha (buddha nature)...
Topics: Haṭhayoga, Textual Studies, Yoga History, Mantra
Unlike its Tantric and Āgamic scriptural predecessors, where mantra plays an elevated role within the doctrinal systems of Mantramārga praxis, in most medieval Yogaśāstras that feature Haṭhayoga, teachings on mantra are largely absent or assume a lesser status. The Dattātreyayogaśāstra states that Mantrayoga can be “mastered by...
Gurani Anjali (1935-2001) arrived to the United States in the 1950s before the major influx of immigration from India that would follow in the 1960s. She eventually established Yoga Anand Ashram in Amityville on Long Island, New York, where she taught Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophy within the context of the United States’ countercultural and post-countercultural periods. Central to Anjali's...
In this paper, I will introduce my practice-led research Acoustemologies of Breath: Sounding and Listening in Contemporary Yoga, undertaken in collaboration with Professor Isabel Nogueira at UFRGS in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I take inspiration from Steven Feld’s (1992) concept of ‘acoustemology’ to theorise ‘sounding’ and ‘listening’ as a way of knowing in contemporary yoga practice. I foreground...
The Tamil yogin Sri Sabhapati Swami (ca. 1828–1936) is known for his elaborate visual depictions of the Royal Yoga for Śiva (Śivarājayoga), but much lesser known is the attention paid to musical poetry, mantra, and sound within his Sanskritic publications that span Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, and English language worlds. In addition to lyrical songs and poetic compositions, Sabhapati also included...
Lucy May Constantini – PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at the Open University
lucymay.constantini@open.ac.uk
Yoga Darśana, Yoga Sādhana: Introspection, Inspiration, Institutionalisation
22-25 May 2024 University of Hamburg
Blended Ontologies: entanglements of yoga, martial arts and postmodern Indian dance
Abstract:
Emerging out of New York in the second half of the...
Drawing on survey data, interviews and field notes, this paper describes the economic, social, and ethical considerations balanced by mainstream yoga teachers in choosing where to teach – the politics of yoga spaces. Using three archetypal yoga spaces: church hall, multi-use gym, and yoga studio, the case studies highlight demographic trends and multi-generational perspectives, from older...
My name is Nikolai Suvorov, and I am a Ph.D. student at Universität Hamburg. In the recent past, I worked as a student assistant with Dr. Peter Pasedach. I worked on the creation of TEI (XML) transcript files of the two mahākāvyas surviving from 9th-century Kashmir, the Haravijaya and the Kapphiṇābhyudaya, and their commentaries, from digital images of the different witnesses represented in...
This paper investigates the transition of prāṇa from a central deity to a mere element of the material world, one that must be restrained and even stopped in favor of the mind and the eternal ātman. Given the Vedic and early Upaniṣadic importance of prāṇa and the breath, how can we understand the restraint of prāṇa — prāṇāyāma — in classical and later yogic teachings?
In the early Upaniṣads,...
The techniques and theories connected to Yogic breathing are confusingly manifold. In this lecture we shall follow the history of one hardly known idea connected with Yogic or rather meditational breathing, namely breathing through the pores of one's skin. The idea is not widespread in
literature, but has a curious reception history, since it crops up over a long span of time. It is...
A central practice to both premodern and modern yoga, prāṇāyāma (lit. “breath control”) is widely practised in yoga classes today. Yet, until now, it remained under-researched. Kraler’s PhD thesis “Yoga Breath: The Reinvention of Prāṇa and Prāṇāyāma in Early Modern Yoga” (2022) radically changes this. By carefully examining the history of modern prāṇāyāma between 1850 and 1945, it unearths...
What is an āsana for a sādhu? And what are the contexts and uses in which āsanas are performed? This presentation aims to unveil the different meanings of āsanas among contemporary sādhus, starting with āsana as the physical place to sit to practice any sādhanā. It will then present three typologies of āsanas – spiritual, physical, tapasic – and the contexts in which they are performed....
In the mid-1960s, the People’s Republic of Poland experienced a craze for hatha yoga. Popular magazines circulated self-help yoga instructions, well-known actresses endorsed its health benefits, and yoga classes could be found in central Warsaw. My paper provides an explanation for the (seemingly) paradoxical popularity of body-oriented yoga practices in a socialist country by tracing the...
The Patañjalayogaśāstra states that "the purpose of yoga is to stop the turnings of the mind". Similar aims for meditation are found in other historical texts such as the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā and the Buddhist Pāli Canon, whilst in contemporary contemplative practices the idea that one should quiet the "monkey mind" is widespread. Given what we know about the human mind today, it is...
One of the most enduring debates within the study of religion over the last century and half has been how to make sense of the plurality of mystical experiences found in the human record (James, 1902; Zaehner, 1957; Stace, 1960; Katz, 1978; Forman, 1990; Taves, 2009). This question, however, is not new nor confined to modern academic discourse and theological speculation. There is a rich...
There are many studies of yoga practice and philosophy, but less of the yogins themselves. Our study, part of a larger, four-year project on yoga in Finland, investigates the worldviews of yoga practitioners in Sweden using Q-methodology. The study constitutes the pilot phase of a larger study to be conducted in Finland. The theoretical assumption behind Q-methodology is that there is only a...
Positioning yoga at the intersections of the fitness and wellness industry, therapeutic culture and the landscape of contemporary spiritualities, this contribution presents an ethnographic and micro-sociological study of the ways in which modern postural yoga is taught, transmitted and interiorized in Euro-American yoga studios today. While most of the available literature to date concerns...
This paper explores the production of imaginaries and the processes of meaning-making vis à vis the politics of identity and power at the boundaries of Yogaland. Yogaland, as a spatial-temporal domain that is primarily founded on acts of imagination, is understood here as epitomising the institutionalisation of the expanding transnational modern yoga project. However, having been applied both...
In this paper, I will explore Gandhi’s engagement with various yogas and yogic texts as a case study for the role of various yogas—a cornucopia of practices—not simply karma yoga in his sociopolitical activism. His personal observances include various facets of yoga (emotional, physical, psychological, and moral) for personal empowerment and social uplift. Gandhi affirmed the value of...
Name: Marina Alexandrova, PhD
Position: Associate Professor of Instruction
Affiliation: Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Bio: Dr. Alexandrova is Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches a variety of courses on Russian cultural history, literature, and language. Her current research interests include the...
