Haṭhayoga’s Floruit on the Eve of Colonialism

Abstract

My doctoral thesis (Birch 2013), which was supervised by Alexis Sanderson at the University of Oxford, contained a survey of texts on Haṭhaand Rājayoga. One of the challenges of completing such a surveywas that very fewof the texts composed from the sixteenth to eighteenth century had been critically edited or studied academically. Inspired by several exemplary surveys of Śaiva literature in Sanderson’s articles (e.g. 2001, 2007 and 2014), I visited a large number of libraries in India in an effort to consult manuscripts of unpublished yoga texts. By the end of my doctorate, it was apparent tome that yoga texts composed on the eve of colonialism provided new insights into the history of yoga and,more specifically, are crucial for understanding how Haṭhayoga changed after it had been codified by Svātmārāma in the Haṭhapradīpikā (circa mid-fifteenth century). In fact, after Svātmārāma had successfully transformed Haṭhayoga from an auxiliary practice into a complete soteriological system, there began what might be considered the floruit of Haṭhayoga, insofar as its literature flourished, its systems of practice accumulated more techniques and it became, particularly in scholarly compendiums on yoga, almost synonymous with the auxiliaries of āsana and prāṇāyāma. Building on my doctoral research, this article aims to provide a framework for examining the textual sources of Haṭhayoga that were composed from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. After a brief summary of the early literature of Haṭhayoga, I shall discuss some of the salient features of the late literature by dividing the texts into two etic categories; ‘extended works’ and ‘compendiums.’ The extended works expatiate on Haṭhayoga as it was formulated in the Haṭhapradīpikā, whereas the compendiums integrate teachings of Haṭhayoga within a discourse on yoga more broadly conceived. Both categories include scholarly and practical works which, when read together in this way, reveal significant changes to both practical and theoretical conceptions of Haṭhayoga. Such a reading also illuminates several developments of this time that foreshadowed, and in some cases inspired, the transnational yogas of the twentieth century. The article concludes with a brief discussion on the regional extent of the literature on Haṭhayoga during this period and how the codification of its praxis and theory appears to have diverged in different regions.