SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This study of the body in Sanskrit sources on early haṭha yoga, eleventh to fifteenth centuries, asks how the texts describe the body such that physical practices are efficacious. The sources describe for the first time physical practices to achieve soteriological liberation and bodily sovereignty yet are accompanied by only a limited metaphysical framework. Three models of the body are analysed: the ascetic paradigm of ‘baking’ the body in the fire of yoga (pāka), conception and embryology (bindu and rajas), and the affective arousing processes, and materiality, of kuṇḍalinī. These models, and the governing principles of the saṃsāric body that are reversed through yoga, provide a framework for intra-corpus comparison of the sources’ heterogenous accounts. The study also draws on a wide range of related literature in adjacent fields to offer a select genealogy of ideas and contextualise the at times sparse accounts of the haṭha sources. The research question ‘what is the body’ is framed by and engages questions of materiality, affect and gender. The study focuses on the materiality of the body and its attenuation, and the inversion of physiological processes of sex, conception and sexuality. Key findings are that the sources articulate a prosaic approach to sex and sexuality that appears to be founded on an anti-procreative stance. This is not denial of pleasure and experience but acceptance and integration. The thread of sovereignty runs throughout: the yogi’s bodily, social and cosmic sovereignty is such that they attain absolute power over the physiological processes of their own body, appear to accrue power over others, and develop divine powers over the creation and dissolution of the cosmos. This contributes a nuanced analysis of the connectivities between physical or haṭha yoga and kingly or rāja yoga. iv The significance of this thesis lies in its new, sustained and in-depth interrogation of the haṭha sources in relation to bodily materiality and affect, and supplements and contextualises this discussion with recourse to a wide range of antecedent and contemporaneous literature. While situated in the hitherto privileged epistemologies of Sanskrit and textual studies, the study nevertheless foregrounds historically abjectified aspects of the body, i.e. materiality and gender, and speaks with both Indology and Religious Studies.