The goal of yoga

 

Answering a challenge to formulate the goal of yoga in a single page, I can start by saying that it won’t even take me a page.


Yoga has many meanings and the first reports on yogis were as miracle-workers. However, the very first recorded definition of yoga, in the Katha Upanishad, has nothing to do with paranormal powers. It describes yoga as “silencing the mind, shutting out all thoughts”. A similar definition is given in the synthesis by Patanjali, the Yoga Sutra: “Yoga is the stopping of the modifications of the mind.” Some technical explanation about the preparations may then be given, but the definition itself is very simple: emptying the mind. Not too easy (“next week, don’t think of a monkey”), but certainly simple, like the zero among the numbers.

No goal need be defined. Silence is just silence, it is not in the service of anything else: "What's the use? No use! I just sit."

The conjunction with the doctrine of reincarnation (which also exists in cultures that don’t know of yoga), central to Jainism and Buddhism, is now generally believed east of the Indus, and also among Western yoga practitioners. It says that the goal of yoga is the stopping of the wheel of reincarnations. Possibly this is based on empirically-gained knowledge of the reincarnation cycle by practising yogis. The Buddha claimed to know all his incarnations, but accomplished yogis I know, report never to have had such experiences. At any rate, reincarnation is a separate doctrine not necessary for the notion and practice of yoga.

The conjunction with the doctrine of kundalini (energy lying coiled at the base of the spine which can be awakened and raised to the crown) is even younger, and was unknown to the first yoga writers. Here again, kundalini exists separately from yoga: it has been reported to rise in non-yogis, spontaneously or under the influence of drugs, and is known in cultures that don’t know yoga, such as those of the San (Bushmen), who dance to create a “warm feeling in the back”, or the Australian Aboriginals. In China, it was applied in a meditational practice, the “microcosmic orbit” where energy is led up the spine by the attention and the breath. I suspect that “kundalini yoga” came about as a variation on this Chinese practice, but am still looking for more relevant information. At any rate, yoga can be understood without reference to kundalini.   

In China, a practice of yoga (meditation) existed in parallel with the yoga outlined in the Upanishads and the ensuing Indian tradition. Zhuangzi speaks of “turning your eyes and ears inwards”, “shutting out your own thinking” and “remaining silent”. His simple definition is “sit and forget”. So, let’s cut out all the crap, all the visions and “spiritual experiences”, and focus on this demanding but very straightforward practice: emptying the mind.    

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The Vienna conference: Philipp A. Maas on "Postures in the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra"

 

           

 

 

At last resuming the report on what retained our attention during the Vienna conference (September 2013) on the history of yoga, we summarize Philipp Maas's findings.


Already since his master’s thesis, Maas has been focusing on the Samādhi Pāda of the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra. He reexamined the authorship question, confirming the impression of Johannes Bronkhorst (1985) that the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra, dated to the 4^th century CE, is composed of two layers of text. The oldest is the Sūtra or aphorisms part, itself composed of older materials. The second is the Bhāṣya or commentary, by the same author.

 

The earliest religions, as Maas understands it, are two. The first is the Vedic religion, in which the world and the achievement of desires are manipulated by Brahmin priests. Within this tradition, new techniques were developed including asceticism and abstention. The second are the ascetic reform religions, centred on the notions of karma and rebirth. In successive births, fate is determined by past lives and possible to overcome. Suffering can be overcome. Against them, Brahmin dominance was restored because foreign kings allied themselves with Brahmins to gain legitimacy. Under the Gupta dynasty, a new synthesis was established, known as Hinduism, as a response to the reform religions. One approach is in the Yogaśāstra: adopt concepts from the reform religions. The world is made up of many puruśas and one prakṛti. Consciousness without objects is not normally possible; the trick called yoga is to achieve this: consciousness resting in itself. After liberation, there is isolation of the puruśa.

Verse 2:46-48 deals with Āsana, containing the famous saying: sthiraṁ-sukham-āsanam, “the posture is stable and pleasant”. Among the oldest references to posture is this text passage. After the āsanam definition, Patañjali adds one more sentence: “It arises by means of relaxation of effort or by meditating on infinity.”

This might be a compound adjective instead of a juxtaposition of equal adjectives (dvandva): sthiramsukham. Vācaspati Miśrā interprets it as “steadily comfortable”. This is more correct than modern commentators. Vijnānabhikṣu, on the other hand, renders: “steady and comfortable.” To sum up: sthira adverb and sukha adjective, or both as adjectives. To me this distinction sounds like much ado about nothing, since the effective meaning of the phrase is clear enough.

 

In manuscripts we find descriptions of the padmāsana, svastikāsana, daṇḍāsana, bhadrāsana, etc., as is comfortable, in constant serenity. As the Patañjali Yoga Sūtra Vivāraṇa says: “In a quiet place, facing east, offer worship and sit comfortably.” Sometimes lying down on a couch and remaining flat may be advised (śavāsana). At any rate, the more recent contortions and inverse positions are absent. The only aim of āsana is to create the best physical conditions for meditation.

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The Vienna conference: Dominik Wujastyk on the Buddhist element in the Yoga Sutra

 

 

    At the conference on "Yoga in Transformation" (Vienna, September 2013), Prof. Dominik Wujastyk highlighted some less frequently realized Buddhist elements in Patañjali's Yoga Sutra. The final editing of the Yoga Sutra is conventionally dated to the 4th century (though the text's core may be centuries older), some 4 centuries after the final editing of the Pali canon and at least 7 centuries after the Buddha. 

 

    Among the more obvious and widely acknowledged Buddhist elements in the Yoga Sutra are the four Brahma-Vihara-s (divine states): maitri (benevolence), karuna (compassion), mudita (fellow-joy) and upeksha (indifference), all four together attested in the Buddhist canon. Incidentally, the Buddha's choice of the term Brahma-Vihara is very inconvenient to those who would like Buddhism to have been a "anti-Vedic revolt".

 

    Already in the interbellum, Louis de la Vallée-Poussin of Ghent University noted a number of items in the Yoga Sutra that could only be properly understood by taking the Buddhist or Jain surroundings into account. Among these are such key concepts as kaivalya, "isolation" (corresponding to Jain "kevala"), karma, duhkha ("suffering"), and, most consequential and controversial of all, isvara. Wujastyk didn't go into the latter example, but I will apply his insights here.

    

    I advisedly write isvara without capital, because in Buddhism and Jainism it never had the sense of "Creator" (the universe's endless causal chain not admitting of a beginning) or "Supreme Being" -- and neither did it for Patañjali. The interpretation of isvara as "God", leading even to Madhva's 13th-century division of the Sankhya school (of which Patañjali was a consistent exponent) into Nirisvara Sankhya ("godless Sankhya", or just Sankhya) and Sesvara Sankhya ("Sankhya-with-God", being Patañjali's Yoga), is now a common assumption among Hindus. Yet, if Patañjali had wanted to define isvara as "God" and yoga as "Union with God", he would have said so explicitly. But he doesn't. Isvara is simply a person or consciousness unit without desire -- a realized being or guru, otherwise strangely absent from this yoga classic. If he had wanted to turn isvara into the Creator or so, he would have left us in no doubt about that.

 

    Now, in this paper, Wujastyk proposed to focus on a few cases that are not so well-known yet. The first one is YS 1.11, containing the word asampramosa, "(memory is) not forgetting". Numerous mediëval commentators and modern translators till today explain this from the root mos,"to steal", or medial "to disappear", so that "memory is non-slippage"; but in fact, it is a clumsy sanskritization of Pali mus-, "forget", corresponding to Sanskrir mrs-, "forget".,' attested in the Buddhist Sutra of Golden Light: "so that the memory may not be forgotten".

    The second one is YS 2.47, containing the word "anantya-samapatti", the attainment of infinitude. Many commentators and translators, mostly in the past, interpret this word with reference to Ananta, "the infinite one", a name of the world snake. In fact, among the 8 samapatti-s ("attainments") or stages of Buddhist meditation (several of which are continuations of practices the Buddha in his apprentice years learned from "Hindu" yogis), the 5th and 6th stages are called the Akasa-Anantya-Ayatana and the Vijnana-Anantya-Ayatana, i.e. focusing on the "infinitude of space" and the "infinitude of consciousness". Both the Buddha and Patañjali borrowed from an existing culture of meditation practices. 

 

    Finally, the reference in YS 4:29 to dharmameghah, "the cloud raining down righteousness", actually refers to one of the Buddhist descriptions of the duties of a king: being like a cloud (megha) that rains down righteousness (dharma) on his people. Wujastyk concludes what his data suggest, viz. that Patañjali was a child of his time, borrowing from or re-applying concepts from his intellectual environment, including Jainism and Buddhism.

Some commentators on the YS mistranslated phrases because they had become unaware of the Buddhist context. This observation can also be applied to passages not discussed here, such as the references to isvara, where an entire doctrine has been elevated among late- and post-mediëval Hindu philosophers attributing theism to Patañjali, all on the basis of a mistaken interpretation of the word isvara.

 

I might add that the reverse is also true: as Johannes Bronkhorst shows in his book Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahmanism, the Buddha repeatedly referred to passages of Yajñavalkya's Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, and Pali Canon editors misunderstood these passages because they did not recognize their referential character. This is what you can expect from Hindu sectarianism: as I first noted among Western followers of Hindu gurus, but later also among born Hindus: most people only know their own sectarian tradition and have no grasp at all of the larger picture. Both the followers of Patañjali and those of the Buddha were so fixated on their own sectarian traditions that they failed to see how their own respective masters had borrowed from other traditions, which were beyond their ken.

    Leaving Wujastyk for now and developing my own conclusions, I would say that this does not illustrate what most people would like to read into it, viz. that Patañjali was essentially a variator on Buddhist thought, and that everything profound in Hinduism is but an outgrowth of Buddhism. Instead, what Patañjali had in common with the Buddha was partly borrowed from the Buddha, and partly elements of an older tradition from which Buddhism had borrowed. This is already suggested by the common indebtedness to Kapila, the legendary founder of the Sankhya school whose conceptual framework Patañjali uses and who donated the land for the town in which the Buddha grew up, viz. Kapilavastu. Sankhya has influenced both the Upanishads and Buddhism, the main "orthodox" and "heterodox" traditions, and is thus a truly pan-Indian school.

 

Of course, it has been eclipsed at least by the time of Sankara (8th century) by Vedanta, and more recently totally eclipsed by theistic Vedanta, the conceptual backbone of the devotional (Bhakti) mass movement. Sankara also holds it against Patañjali that he doesn't quote the Vedas or concede to them any position of authority, which is perhaps not such a bad thing. At any rate, Hindus would do well to rediscover and revaluate Sankhya and admit Patañjali a place of pride within it.

Another far-reaching conclusion which I venture to draw from this analysis of misunderstandings: the commentators and even the masters, who together form the venerable "tradition", were only fallible human beings. The tradition contains many mistakes. Some stray examples from other fields: the Puranas discuss the relation between the Vedic seers Visvamitra and Vasistha in terms of caste rivalry, when caste was not yet an issue in early Vedic times; the Puranic genealogies of the Vedic seers conflict with the information on the seers which a close analysis of the Vedic texts themselves reveals; the Puranas call the Kanvas and Atris the first seer families, when the Rg-Veda clearly starts with the Angiras seers, etc. So, unlike traditionalist Hindus who crawl before tradition and venerate it to the letter, and whose boastful knowledge of tradition does not amount to more than quoting it by heart, we are free to dissent from tradition and deal with it critically.

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"Hindu" not synonymous with "Vedic"

Very many Hindus will agree with this statement, uttered on Rajiv Malhotra's list: "For a Hindu, it is mandatory to accept the authority of the Vedas." Very fundamental, and shared by many, yet demonstrably wrong.


1) When the Muslim invaders introduced the Persian geographical term "Hindu" into India, adding the religious meaning to it that has become central to "Hindu", they meant "Indian Pagan", nothing else. They excluded non-Indian Pagans, such as the idolators of Arabia or the Persian Zoroastrians, and the Indian non-Hindus, esp. the part-Indian Jews, Syriac Christians and Arab "sons-in-law" they encountered in Kerala. They made no difference between Brahmins and Buddhists ("clean-shaven Brahmins"), upper and lower castes, urbanites and forest-dwellers, temple-goers and worshippers in sacred groves or in the open air. This definition has essentally been adopted by VD Savarkar in his founding tekst Hindutva, and by laws like the Hindu Marriage Act, piloted by Dr. Ambedkar. The criterion "believer in the Veda" does not appear there.


2) Many Hindus, claimed as Hindus by the Hindu nationalists, don't acknowledge the Vedas as authoritative: the tribals, the ex-untouchables, many other communities such as the Lingayats. Patanjali, chided by Shankara for never ever citing the Veda, doesn't go by Vedic authority. Indeed, the Vedic seers themselves, the composers of the Veda, didn't know of any Vedic authority. They preceded their Vedic product and didn't extol or divinize it. Are you willing to say out loud that the tribals etc. in the present, as well as Patanjali and the Rishis in the past, are or were not Hindus? If so, one of the implications is that  Hindus are already a minority in India.

3) It is doubtful that those who wax eloquent about "the authority of the Veda" have ever read the Veda. For, the text of the Veda rarely contains commands. The Shastras contain prescription, but even according to the Veda-touters themselves, these are part of the Smrti, not of the Shruti/Veda. The Vedic hymns were poems, and then a comment literature that grew up around these, containing instructions for the accompanying ritual and interpretations of these, but no commandments comparable to the Ten Commandments. They are in the form a man addressing the Gods, not of God addressing mankind. But instead, many Hindus have hypnotized themselves to see the Veda as an alternative Quran, divinely revealed.

4) Hinduism is not book-centred. At most, some (by no means all) books contain reports of an experience, and this experience inspires Hindus. But the book itself is only a medium to this experience, a ladder which you throw away after having climbed to the top.

So, Hindus should disabuse themselves of the divinization of the Vedic Book, an attitude which makes them Indian counterparts of the Christians and Muslims, people of the Book. This should make them proud of their Rishi ancestors, who composed such beautiful poetry.

KE

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Drugs and yoga

 

 

(written in July 2013, published on 7 November 2013 in Bharat-Bharati))

 

A meeting with like-minded people

 

Very recently, I met several yoga initiates who told me of their experiences with ayahuasca, a “plant teacher” which they regularly took. For me, this was a blast from the past. Thirty or more years ago, I have taken LSD trips about a dozen times and two mescaline trips. Like a few friends, but unlike most contemporaries, I saw these psychedelics as a spiritual way rather than as a form of recreation. Nowadays, the accepted term would be “Shamanism”, a Siberian-cum-Amerindian tradition involving vision quests and journeys in the spirit world.  

Like many of my then friends, I quit the scene by age 25. By now, age 53, I was so completely out of it that I didn’t even think to myself of mind-altering substances as the explanation for a few strange things I saw about the people concerned. It was to my surprise that I heard the true story. Since one of them has wondered in my presence whether to keep on combining regular ayahuasca use with daily yoga practice, I have given the matter some thought.

Let me clarify first of all that I am not inclined to moralize about this. Those people and their motives are so recognizable to me. I am one of them, thirty years down the line. I also need not go into the medical drawbacks of drug use: these are together people who are in no direct danger of suffering the irritability or worse that I have seen in some users. Nonetheless, I am already showing my hand by adding that if I had remained in this scene, I would never have achieved what I have achieved now.

One reason why this revelation surprised me, is that by now I had become firmly convinced of the power of yoga to make these shortcuts to some kind of zero experience unnecessary. From Woodstock on down, numerous people have abandoned the drug scene upon initiation into yoga. As a yoga adept was introducing hippies at Woodstock to yoga, he explained: “Now the drugs do it for you. Then, you do it yourself.” On the other hand, I have to admit – and remember only too well – that there is a grey area of being attracted to both alternatives. When I was first initiated into Kriya Yoga by Swami Hariharananda and his Dutch assistant in Amsterdam, more than thirty years ago, I was actually in Amsterdam to buy drugs. I saw the poster announcing the initiation, went there quite unprepared, and my life changed profoundly. It still took a few years before I had quit the drug scene altogether, though. I also learned that the Swami had picked up his Dutch assistant, who by then had become an accomplished yogi, from the Indian gutter where he had landed as a drug addict. Once you discover yoga, it mostly means you choose the exit from the artificial paradise of mind-altering substances.

 

Patanjali’s definition

 

As Patañjali’s classical definition says: yogaścittavṛttinirodhaḥ, “yoga is the cessation of the motions of the mind”. It is as simple as that. By contrast, the complicated visions and sensations unleashed by psychedelic drugs are, as much as our everyday experiences, cases of “motions of the mind”. Yoga is not about visions and sensations, but about mental silence and peace.

Maybe that doesn’t sound very adventurous. Drug-taking is only rarely done to “escape from reality”, as the bourgeoisie thinks. It is mostly done out of adventurousness, because everyday life is rather boring while spirit journeys challenge your attention. Also, there is a curiousness for the world beyond that the “plant teacher” is revealing to you, a warm enthusiasm. So, the abstract proposition that instead you could opt for a way to silence and peace might seem dull by comparison. But this changes radically when you meet accomplished yogis, like Swami X and Swami Y [names withheld as I don’t want to associate respected people with my controversial self], who led the retreat where I met the people concerned. There you find and feel that nothing compares with yogic bliss.

Yoga is a way of turning inward. The sensations given by ayahuasca are not an external affair, one that can be seen by outsiders. This might give the impression that it is comparable to yoga. But by yogic standards, these “inner” sensations detract as much from pure consciousness as any outward experience would. Whether you are adventuring outdoors or sitting in your armchair enjoying the effects of ayahuasca, in both cases your mind is preoccupied with the sensations you encounter, not with the Self.

 

Shamanism and Yoga

 

But am I not being insulting to the Shamans and the spiritual traditions of their peoples? Many communities know of no higher state than that achieved with the help of “plant teachers”. For many thousands of years, varieties of Shamanism were the main religion of mankind. In China, the revival of openly practised religion is bringing to the fore Shamanic practices at the popular level, like people becoming channels for ghosts during exuberant public festivals. Daoism is in fact an evolved form of Shamanism; when a Daoist priest is ordained, he is given a list of spirits that he is empowered to command.

In India too, popular  religion still has many elements of Shamanism, such as ecstatic dancing. The Paraias (in English usually spelt Pariahs, the proverbial untouchables) are a community of drum-makers and drummers. They use the archetypal Shamanic instrument, nicknamed “the Shaman’s horse” because it is their vehicle on journeys in the spirit world, to whip themselves into a Shamanic trance. In that state, they are consulted for predicting the future. This penchant for the paranormal is still in evidence in a low-caste Indian community which we are all familiar with: the Gypsies, whose women are known as fortune tellers.

In recent centuries, purity-conscious Brahmins used to keep these Shamans at a distance (and vice-versa) because these were deemed to carry the world of the dead with them, with which they were known to communicate. However, at a longer distance in time they were some kind of Shamans themselves. The ninth book of the Ṛg-Veda is devoted to soma, “pressed juice”, the product of an uncertainly identified plant. The most popular theory identifies it as ephedra (whence ephedrine, a type of amphetamine or “speed”), but we are not sure at all.  Some modern moralistic Hindus deny that soma was a plant at all, they say the word soma referred to a yogic state. Others say it was the fluid state of a metal during the fiery stage of metallurgy. I am aware of these theories but till now, the “plant teacher” explanation is the most common and consistent by far. The juice is described as conferring a state of great clarity, incidentally also a property ascribed to ayahuasca, said to make its users “see through” situations and other people. Since man wanted to sacrifice to the gods the very best he had, soma was among the goods thrown into the fire in order to “feed the gods”; Indra is said to be a great consumer of soma.

So, with a little exaggeration: before the Brahmins, heirs of the Vedic seers, became dry scholars, they were tripping poets getting high on soma juice and composing drinking carols now known as Vedic hymns. A remnant of it is what I witnessed when I stayed at Banaras Hindu University during the Night of Shiva (Śivarātrī, an annual festival): very scholarly professors getting high on bhaṅg, a cannabis brew. Another remnant is perhaps in evidence in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra: whereas the Buddha lists truth, non-violence, non-stealing, chastity and non-intoxication as his five basic rules (pañca-sīla), Patañjali’s list of five basic rules (pañca-yama) is identical except that it replaces non-intoxication with non-covetousness. Apparently Patañjali didn’t want to go as far as to categorically forbid intoxicants. He also admitted that taking drugs is one of the ways to attain siddhis, “achievements”, i.e. special powers. Especially clairvoyance is said to be an effect of the mental state conferred by plant teachers. But then, these siddhis only detract from the real goal of yoga.

Till today, you can see some Sadhus smoking their chillums full of marihuana. But rather than taking them as role-models, you should be aware that they only exemplify the freedom which Hinduism grants to its followers. These men can do their thing, but they are of low rank in the natural hierarchy. Gurus who intoxicate themselves with alcohol or drugs are not taken seriously. It is a bit like consuming meat: the majority of Hindus do eat meat, but they venerate vegetarians and rank them as more virtuous. So, even those who cannot do without their chillum, do realize that their intoxication is only a phase, and that they still have a long way to go.

 

An evolutionary view of yoga

 

As we have been taught, according to Mircea Eliade, yoga is an evolute of Shamanism. I am aware that among many Hindus, this view will not go down very well; nor among modern Westerners. Hindus will object that yoga is eternal, that the Vedic hymns were an expression of a yogic state, and that it is blasphemous to derive yoga from anything else. Westerners, who recently have been taught to approach every subject with the dogma of equality, will object that this evolutionary view establishes an inequality: Shamanism is the childhood stage, yoga the next, more mature stage. Still, I stand by it.

The ordinary people in India are the same as the people everywhere else, but the tradition to which they are exposed is – dare I use the word? – superior. The difference is that they know they have the example of liberated masters living in their midst. For them, venerable beings are not just talked about in sacred books, they are alive and nearby. The people may not practise yoga themselves but they know they can turn to yogis, who radiate the fruits of their meditation to their surroundings. It simply feels very good to be in their company once in a while. India is not so great in some respects, but at least it has this cardinal virtue: whereas people in most places are like orphans left alone, ordinary Hindus are like children playing in the park while their mother is watching.

Hindus like to boast that the evolutionary theory is already present in the series of Viṣṇu’s incarnations: fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, then a dwarf starting the sequence of human beings. We see in this system that lower animal species are followed by higher animal species (fish, reptile, mammal), then half-men and then full men. So, they should make no problem in applying the evolutionary model to their own tradition. It has been found that some motifs of the yoga tradition are already known in other, even reputedly “primitive” cultures. Thus, the practice of meditation was also known among the Greek Stoics, who sat every morning for “staying in the present” (i.e. preventing the mind from wandering to memories of past experiences and plans for the future). The concept of kuṇḍalinī, an energy working its way up the spine, is also applied in Chinese energy-work (qigong), where the “microcosmic orbit” (xiaozhoutian) is practised: the energy is led by the breath/attention upwards along he spine, then downwards again. But even among the distant cultures of the San (Bushmen) and the Australian Aborigines, the awareness of the rise of heat in the spine is known.  So, whatever its precise history in India, kuṇḍalinī yoga is only a mature form, developed in India, of a reality intuited among a number of divergent peoples. It is a knowledge that, once developed, people in all countries can profit from.

Similarly, the yogic value of non-violence has an interesting prehistory. When eating animals was abolished, sacrificing animals was eliminated with it. But earlier, when animals were indeed sacrificed, explanations were constructed why this was not really slaughter, why it was better for an animal to be sacrificed rather than just eaten. While some violence was deemed necessary to bring the proper sacrifices to the gods, the priests were at the same time embarrassed to inflict this violence on the sacrificial animal. This was but the Indian form of a phenomenon also witnessed among the Amerindians and other Shamanic cultures: hunters begging forgiveness from their prey for killing and eating it. So, Hinduism shares a certain inspiration and outlook with the Shamanic cultures, but it has taken this a step further: while other cultures still kill and eat animals eventhough they say sorry, Indians (or at least some norm-setting classes of Hindus)  have abolished animal-killing altogether and taken to vegetarianism. Admittedly, India was helped by its climate, which allows for eating vegetables all year long, whereas natives of Canada or Siberia in their cold climate have had to await modern times to acquaint themselves with the vegetarian alternative. Even in this respect, I would venture to utter the S-word: India’s climate is superior.

So, India has started with a Shamanic culture, preserved much of it, but has gone beyond it in some respects. This way, experts on the inner life went from “making spirit journeys” to meditating. They went from drug-induced altered states to mental stillness. From Shamanism to yoga.

Liberal Westerners will hold it against you if you dare to see an inequality between Shamanism and the yoga system. They cherish this new dogma that all worldviews are equal. And they can get nasty when you posit an inequality between two worldviews. Well, no matter, for the inequality is real. Children do not go from primary to secondary school  because they feel like trying something different, but because, in their natural urge to expand and learn, they understand that secondary school is more advanced. So also, methodically developing peace of mind is more advanced than conversing with spirits.

 

Conclusion

 

In our post-Christian society, it was perhaps inevitable that people went back to pre-Christian cultures to explore Shamanism. It is also a pleasant break from humdrum existence to have a vision quest, go to a sweat-lodge, dance sky-clad in the forest under the full moon, spend the night lying in your own grave, and indeed take ayahuasca. But now we have to move on.

Ken Kesey, the writer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as well as an LSD pioneer, was arrested after the state of California outlawed the use of LSD. According to Tom Wolfe, who wrote a book about Kesey’s exploits (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), he was allowed to shorten his incarceration in exchange for giving a speech on TV explaining to his followers why the LSD experiment had lasted long enough. He said that LSD had functioned as a door, an exit from the highly conditioned existence in bourgeois society. But once you have opened the door, you don’t stay there to play with it. You go in. And so, he told his audience, it is time to leave the door behind, to throw away the ladder that brought us up, and to go beyond. 

Well, if he didn’t say that, at least he should have said it. I am at any rate willing to repeat it. To the people concerned, my message would be: I love you, I even understand you, but you would be wise to move on. Especially now that you have such a promising alternative.

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Atheism in Indian philosophy

(In Cork, Ireland, on 20-22 September 2013, the British Friedrich Nietzsche Society organized its regular conference, featuring the book Also Sprach Zarathustra and the relevance of Nietzsche in the Asian philosophies. I was due to read this paper there, was prevented from doing so by other pressing duties, but this is my text in hand-out form. A fully referenced paper with bibliography will appear shortly.)

 

Friedrich Nietzsche was not familiar with Indian philosophy (much less even with Chinese philosophy), though he was in a position to be fairly well-informed about Indian thought. This was a cornerstone of the Indo-European philology then animating German intellectuals and progressing fast under the hands of the Orientalists. G.W.F. Hegel already wrote a philosophical discussion of the Bhagavad Gītā in 1829. Even earlier, J.W. Goethe and Franz Schubert praised Kālidās’s play Śakuntalā. Arthur Schopenhauer practically built his philosophy on the precedent of the Upaniṣads, the “confidential teachings” of the Veda (“knowledge”) collections of hymns,  and on Buddhism. So, through his knowledge of German philosophy, Nietzsche must have been exposed to some conclusions of Indian thought. But for his direct knowledge about it, he learned little from the discipline of Orientalism, then very much flourishing in the German speech community and certainly accessible to a professor of Classical Philology. Instead he relied on the theories of colourful amateurs like Louis Jacolliot. Nietzsche therefore didn’t know, or at any rate didn’t let on, that the godless philosophy which he tried to found, already existed in India. He also didn’t know that, centuries ago, this Indian atheism had ended up largely losing the battle against a revitalized theism. His Christian critics must take heart from this development, showing how history proves that religion is anchored in man’s nature: if you chase it away, it returns with a vengeance. This paper deals with what he missed, and how the Indian atheist schools of thought reflect several typical Nietzschean themes.

A practical matter: since this is a survey covering a lot of ground and addressing a non-Indologist audience, a few background facts have to be explained at the outset. Writing appeared in India ca. 300 BCE, after which a flood of writings come to our attention. It is a common mistake to date the ideas expressed therein to the last centuries BC. Some of them may be far older, but have appeared in writing only when that medium became available. A fact of Indian intellectual life is the towering position of the Veda (“knowledge”), four collections of hymns dating to beyond 1000 BC, and their ancillary literature. According to a now-common opinion, gradually developed as the memory of their composition receded, the Veda-s were divinely revealed at the beginning of time. In reality, the names of their composers are known, elements of their genealogy, historical facts such as battles and celestial configurations, and geographical data such as the names of mountains and rivers. They take the form of man addressing the gods – the reverse of the Ten Commandments or the Quran, where God addresses man. Either way, the Vedas dominate the intellectual landscape. The orally transmitted stories about human and divine history are collected in the Purāna-s (“antiquities”), a very large body of literature written down in the 1^st millennium CE or even later. Though lip-service is paid to the Veda’s, the Purāṇa stories have far more influence on the life of the masses, together with the two epics, Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, written down around the time of Christ but their core narratives much older. However, these stories have little relevance for our history of philosophical atheism.

 

Free death

A lot of Hindus boast that one can call oneself a Hindu and be other things besides, “even” an atheist. Thus, Vināyak Dāmodar Sāvarkar in his epoch-making book Hindutva (“Hinduness”, 1923), the manifesto of Hindu nationalism, writes that even an agnostic or an atheist can be a Hindu. And the current internet paper Centre Right India argues: “The Vedas in Hinduism are not absolute, and have been criticized by people who did not subscribe to their view, since time immemorial. This did not make the critics any less Hindu. Indeed, Hinduism is not alien to atheism, or agnostic schools of thought.” (Pulakesh Upadhyaya: “Atheism and Hindutva – Carvaka to Savarkar”, 3 July 2012) However, this view of matters only covers exceptions. The typical modern Hindu, of Nietzsche’s day as well as of our own, will use “atheist” as a swearword. His main religious practice consists in offering worship through a devotional ritual (pūjā) to a “chosen deity” (iṣṭa devatā).

A theme pioneeringly dealt with in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is “free death”, taking one’s own life. Sāvarkar himself was an atheist, he refused religious funeral rites, but in 1966 he chose to die by sallekhānā, i.e. fasting unto death, as is fairly common since time immemorial among Jain and other monks. Nietzsche probably didn’t realize that the “free death” he advocated was common not just among the pre-Christian Romans  (advocated by Seneca) but was still alive as an ideal among Hindus, or at least among their religious personnel. Another committer of fasting unto death was Gandhian activist Vinobā Bhāve. On his deathbed in 1982, under popular applause, he received a visit from the Prime Minister Indīrā Gāndhī. But at the same time, secularists in the media were fulminating that he should be imprisoned and force-fed as he was “trespassing against the law of the land”. Strictly speaking this was true, as the British colonizers had enacted a law against suicide and euthanasia in the 19^th century, which was still on the statute books. This law was inspired by the purely Christian principle that man is not the master of his own life and death, only God is. But the positive reaction of the people to Bhāve’s self-choice of his death showed the native sensibilities accurately: they were convinced that if certain conditions are met (for this should of course not be done lightly, e.g. out of youthful lovesickness), a free death is acceptable and even the best course of action.

 

Atheism: heterodox

Meanwhile, “Hindu atheism” is mostly bygone glory. Today’s Hindus use “atheist” as a swearword to designate the enemy or to make the difference between themselves and “godless Buddhism”. Yet, Hinduism has a powerful premodern tradition of atheism. It has been superseded by theist philosophies at least from the 9^th century CE, and by 1500 it was not even a memory, as we shall explain.

On the one hand we have a number of schools deemed heterodox, i.e. not in awe of the Veda-s. Buddhism, famous for its doctrine that all is suffering caused by desire, and that the way out of this vale of tears is meditation upto the point of liberation, doesn’t altogether deny the existence of the Vedic gods. These are narratively used in the Buddhist canon to ask the Buddha, who has just reached Liberation, to teach his way to others. The Buddha advised both his monks and lay politicians that a community functions best if its religious traditions are upheld, e.g. its festivals and pilgrimages associated with the Vedic gods. His monks would later take the Vedic gods all the way to Japan and build temples for them there. However, the gods play no role whatsoever in the Buddha’s analysis of the human condition and method of remedy, neither in its moral nor in its meditative aspects. You as an individual have earned your merits and demerits and you yourself have to work them off and earn your liberation; no god or other being can do it in your stead. In 2005 there was a textbook controversy in Thailand, where the Buddhist clergy objected to the mentioning of God in schoolbooks, as this “illusion” had no place in Buddhism and had allegedly been smuggled in by the Christian missionaries.

However, from its early centuries there developed a devotional Buddhism in which prayers are said to the Buddha or a related entity in order to take away your demerits and your sorrows. Indian Buddhism was finished off ca. 1194 by the Islamic invaders, so it could not degenerate all the way, but in East Asia, varieties of the devotional “Pure Land Buddhism” attract the loyalty of most lay Buddhists.

Lokāyata, ”worldliness”, a sceptical yet ascetic sect, is popular among modern Marxists but despised by rivalling contemporaneous philosophers. This school was radically anti-religious and rejected the concepts of supernatural beings, eternal soul, life after death and reincarnation. Makkhali Gośāla, who preached contemporaneously with the Buddha, compared life, considered a source of endless suffering by the Buddhists, to a fish: alas, it has fishbones, but these can be discarded, and then we can enjoy the fish’s flesh. Similarly, life contains suffering, but this can be minimized and reasonably dealt with, and the rest can be a great source of joy. This outlook can be likened to Epicureanism.

Jainism is an ascetic tradition that upholds the “extremism” in ascetic practices which the Buddha as a moderate ended up rejecting. It has remained confined to India until the modern age, and to a few million adherents in the business class. The lay Jains chose this line of work because it does not entail any form of violence, the gravest sin in Jainism. This is a fully atheistic religion. It doesn’t believe in God (singular or plural) in any form. However, they do practice religion and worship in temples, but these are dedicated to human beings who have achieved the state of liberation.

 

Atheism: orthodox

On the other hand we have several philosophies deemed orthodox, which once were atheist in outlook. Later they disappeared or conformed to the rising wave of theism. The Vedic school of philosophy par excellence, the Mīmānsā, “hermeneutics”, focused on the interpretation of Vedic ritual. Though working in a context which was religious par excellence, it said that the gods invoked are but labels of components of the ritual, existing only by the mental effort of their worshippers. This school is regularly credited with being the first articulately atheist school in the world, certainly the first one which takes the human fact of religion into account but gives it a non-theistic explanation. After a high tide, it was eclipsed in the early second millennium.

 The Sāmkhya (“enumeration”, viz. of the 25 substances which make up the cosmos) school ended up classified as “orthodox” but is in fact non-Vedic. The well-known philosopher Śaṅkara, really more of a Veda theologian than an autonomous thinker, criticized it for never referring to the Vedas. It must have been in existence for a long time, and Vedic literature also borrows from it. Well-known is the Sāṁkhya simile from the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (300 BCE?) that an unborn and three-coloured (black, red and white) woman waves goodbye to an unborn man who has had his pleasure with her but has had enough, and receives another unborn man who has his pleasure with her. The woman represents nature, wherein three qualities can be discerned, represented by the colours (more on these below). The men represent the different units of consciousness, or persons. Some persons have enjoyed nature long enough, lose their interest and seek liberation; other persons are still busy enjoying all that nature has to offer. The one nature and the many consciousness units form the two poles that make up the universe. The liberation of consciousness amounts to its separation from nature. Note that God plays no role whatsoever in this system. However, it lost its steam in the first millennium CE, and after a blip of revival in ca. 1400, it ceased being a living school.

Vaiśeṣika (“distinction-making”, “focused on particulars”) taught that the universe consists of a finite and unchangeable number of smallest particles, and these are eternal. The universe has never been created: either it is eternal or it has been created, but if so, it was created by an eternal uncreated being, which only shifts the burden of eternality to a purely supposed rather than an actual being. So we might as well assume the eternality of the universe. However, later this school united with the theistic Nyāya (“judgment”, logic) school and became theistic.

Uttara-Mīmāṁsā (“later hermeneutics”), better known as Vedānta (“final part of the Veda”), forms a deliberate continuation of the Upaniṣad-s (“confidential teaching”), the philosophical closing texts of the Veda-s. Unlike the Vedic hymns and the ancillary Brāhmaṇa-s (“priestly books”), concerned with ritual, the Upaniṣad-s deal with knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the Self (ātman), i.e. pure, unconditioned, impersonal consciousness. Their central doctrine is that the Self is fully the same as the Absolute (Brahman), like the drop is made of the same substance as the ocean. It follows that the unchanging and undying Absolute is nothing but consciousness. The different subschools of Vedānta will try to define the exact relationship between the Self and the Absolute. The best-known worldwide, and the most popular in the modern West, is Advaitā Vedānta (“non-dualistic Vedānta”), thought up by Śaṅkara in ca. 800 CE. This teaches the uncompromising unity of the Self and the Absolute. For Westerners tired of Christian dualism, this is welcomed as a relief. However, in real life, Śaṅkara also worshipped the gods, just as the Stoic philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius religiously observed his daily sacrifice routine after his philosophical meditations. Śaṅkara is venerated in India for his debating skills and for the institutions he founded, but his non-dualistic viewpoint has largely been forgotten. It is at any rate much less representative for Indian thought than his Western fans assume.  

His simple and radical scheme was soon sidelined by the far more important dualistic (or nominally “qualified non-dualistic” and “difference-yet-no-difference”) schools of Vedānta. These schools, which elbowed out the remaining non-Vedānta viewpoints, effectively became the framework of the religious wave at the mass level, Bhakti (devotion). Among the gods of Hinduism, one was chosen, extolled and worshipped. In most Hindu temples, five gods are worshipped of whom one is central: Viṣṇu (“the all-pervader”), Śiva (“the benefactor”, actually an apotropaic euphemism for the storm-god Rudra, “the red/furious one”), Devī (“the goddess”), Gaṇeśa (“lord of groups”) and Sūrya (“the sun”). By contrast, Brahma (“increase”) as the personification of the Absolute is practically not worshipped. In devotional Hinduism, as theorized by the dualistic Vedānta philosophers, the situation is like in Christian mysticism: the supreme being is mostly conceived as a person and one can ascend to God but never unite with Him. One can contemplate Him but never be His equal.

This way, we have gotten modern Hinduism: a landscape studded with temples and idols, a shrine or separate room in the houses for devotional rituals (pūjā), and but very rarely an odd intellectual who stands aloof from the belief in a supernatural being. Atheism has been in the ascendant for some centuries, but that was two thousand years ago.

 

Sāṁkhya

Buddhism describes Sāṁkhya as its own source, founded by the sage Kapila who gave the Buddha’s wandering ancestors a domain where they could build the settlement Kapilavastu (“Kapila’s habitation”), in which the future Buddha was to grow up. Patañjali’s Yoga (“discipline, control”), now reckoned as a separate philosophy, was anciently (and rightly) considered an application-oriented subschool of Sāṁkhya. Like Buddhism, it vaguely  recognizes the existence of the gods (unless our understanding of the Sanskrit words is anachronistic) but gives them no place whatsoever in its analysis of the human problem nor in its proposed way out. Only in the modern age have theistic Hindus magnified the religious element in it and renamed it as Seśvara Sāṁkhya, i.e. Sāṁkhya-with-God. Even then, the relative absence of God contrasts conspicuously with the really theistic systems.

The monistic Vedānta philosophy, which won the day in Hinduism and is espoused by most sects in its theistic form (Bhakti, “devotion”), criticizes Sāṁkhya for not basing itself on the Veda-s, i.e. for being a real philosophy rather than a scripture-quoting theology. However, Vedic texts refer to some typical concepts of Sāṁkhya, which has its sources much earlier. Its dualism of consciousness vs. nature (reminiscent of thinking vs. extension, res cogitans vs. res extensa) is in fact an elaboration of the common-sense view, contrasting with the mystical attractiveness of the heady Vedānta view. In the latter, everything is the Absolute, so all is one --  gee, that’s cosmic! In Sāṁkhya, by contrast, the irreducible separateness of the different “persons” or units of consciousness is taken for granted. Your memories make you unique and separate from me with my memories, we are distinct persons, and there is no reason to remedy this condition.

Had Nietzsche known it sufficiently, he could have approved of Sāṁkhya’s atheism. It is reminiscent of his beloved pre-Socratic philosophies. The great Sāṁkhya classic, the Sāṁkhya-Kārikā (2^nd century?) does not even mention a supreme being. In Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (“aphorisms on control”), some concessions are made to believers, but Yoga is defined purely technically as the silencing of the mind, not as a “union with God”. The late Sāṁkhya-Sutra (14^th century), operating in a religious landscape that had become completely theistic, argues elaborately against the existence of God, and in favour of the eternality of the universe. But perhaps its relative pessimism about the world’s inherent suffering, radicalized in Buddhism (“all is suffering”), can be reckoned as un-Nietzschean.

 (Bhadāraṇyaka 4,4,5; Taittirī

Karma: beyond good and evil

A very prominent doctrine in Indian thought is that of reincarnation and karma. In the Vedic hymns (pre-1000 BC), the word karma still had its etymological meaning "do, make", whence "action, ritual". Therefrom, it came to connote “action at a distance”, viz. between the ritual and its intended fruits, e.g. restoration of health, victory on the battlefield, a woman saying yes etc. Even the Mīmāṁsā philosophers, sceptical of the involvement of any divine persons in the ritual, believed in the magical “action at a distance” of the Vedic rituals.

In the Bhagavad-Gītā (200 BC?), the word karma-mārga, “the way of ritual action”, still has this meaning (and not “doing your duty”, “ethical living” “the yoga of action in the daily life”, as is often said since Swami Vivekananda gave it this meaning in ca. 1895): it refers to Vedic ritual. There, it contrast with jñāna-mārga, “the way of knowledge”, developed in the Upaniṣads after and in reaction against the emphasis on ritual action in the Vedic period; and with bhakti-mārga, “the way of devotion”, chiefly devotion to the deified hero Kṛṣṇa, the proper and innovative message of the book, hugely influential in popular Hinduism. The way of knowledge is chiefly concerned with meditation, as the path to knowledge of the Self, i.e. pure consciousness, the object of most philosophies and the goal of most Hindu monks. The way of devotion means the religious practice maintained by the vast majority of Hindus, viz. worship of the gods, mainly one’s own “chosen deity”.  

Meanwhile, without letting it give a new meaning to the term karma, the Gītā introduces the notion of reincarnation. It attaches no moral sense to rebirth yet, just like the reincarnation beliefs attested elsewhere, e.g. among the Levantine Druze and many Amerindians, but affirms that dying is like undressing before going to sleep and getting dressed again tomorrow. It is part of Kṛṣṇa’s exhortation to the hesitant hero Arjuna, that it is alright to do battle: you need not be afraid to die, nor have scruples to kill, because if you die or if your enemy dies, it is only a temporary phase while moving on to a next life. No specific link, moral or otherwise, between this life and the next is posited here. It is the naked theory of reincarnation that we find here, without the moralistic interpretative apparatus which later Hinduism and Buddhism have attached to it.

We should be careful not to amalgamate this doctrine too easily with Nietzsche’s “eternal return”. The reason for this eternal return is that the number of possible causes is finite while time is infinite, so that the chain of causes effecting the present state of affairs will necessarily repeat itself. Reincarnation is distantly akin, it may stem from a similar intuition, but any non-superficial comparison will find them different.

Then, “action at a distance” is reinterpreted and applied to the successive incarnations. The moralistic version, popular among the masses east of the Indus, including the East-Asian countries where Buddhism has spread it, views the contents of the next life as a reward or punishment for one’s acts in a previous life. Good and evil get a very prominent place here. Unlike Immanuel Kant’s notion of doing the good for its own sake, and virtue being its own reward, good and evil acts here get the power to determine one’s apparent “fate” in the next life. A secular view of life posits no link between one’s fate and the moral quality of one’s acts: even a saint can get robbed or killed. Here, by contrast, morality controls the universe, which is inherently moral.

However, there exists a more subtle version of the karma doctrine. When we die, the motive force that spurs us on to return to this world in a new body is desire. Our deeds and experiences have shaped a pattern of non-satisfaction due to preference and aversion, and this leads to seeking new chances to satisfy these. Therefore, if the desire is quelled, and neutrality takes the place of preferences and aversion, there is no motive force anymore that drives you to a new birth. That is how desire leads to rebirth, while the cessation of desire leads to liberation or nirvāṇa (“blowing out”). But outside the circle of ascetics, this more subtle version of the karma doctrine is little known. Note that this version is “beyond good and evil”.

Few people realize (and many Hindus will be startled if not angry to hear us assert it) that the karma doctrine is inherently linked with atheism, even in its vulgar moralistic version. Because the world is deemed inherently just, with a certain type of deeds automatically leading to a certain type of experiences, there is no need for a Father in heaven to dispense justice. In history, the most atheistic schools, especially Jainism, have had the most radical and uncompromising conception of karma. You are deemed stuck with your own karmic record, you have to work it off yourself and bear all the consequences yourself for any karma you incur further. No other being, whether human or divine, can relieve you of even the smallest quantity of karma. By contrast, in theistic Hinduism, lip-service is paid to the notion of karma, but in fact it is very watered down. People pray to a divine being for the diminution of karma, somewhat like Catholics can buy indulgences to be freed from so many years of purgatory. 

               

The parable of the three stages

             A detail worth analyzing is how the age-old Sāṁkhya cosmological scheme of triguṇa, “three qualities”, authentically fits the famous parable of Camel-Lion-Child. Like we have a yin/yang bipolarity in Chinese thought, we have a tripolarity in Indian thought. Every society of gods or men was deemed to be divided in three parts, having to do with order, action and sustenance: (1) sattva, “beingness, truth, goodness”, the pole of calm, clarity and order, symbolized by the daylight, the white colour and the majestic heavens; (2) rajas, “turbulence”, the pole of dynamism and passion, symbolized by the twilight, the red colour and the stormy atmosphere; (3) tamas, “darkness”, the pole of inertia, materiality, quantity and sustenance, symbolized by the night, the dark colours and the all-bearing earth.  (To complicate matters and take the equivocity of symbolism into account, the twilight with its moderate temperature and sacral mood can also count as sattva, the daytime with its heat can also count as rajas.) 

          In society, the three poles correspond to three social functions and the classes performing them: (1) order and legitimacy are the province of judges, poets, priests and of the king in his sacral role as embodiment of a nation’s sovereignty; (2) action is the province of administrators and soldiers, and of the king in his role as commander-in-chief; (3) sustenance is the province of the farmers, craftsmen and other producing classes, of healthcare providers and entertainers, and of all members of society in so far as they partake in the process of fertility and multiplication. The scheme corresponds as follows with the Puranic divine trinity (trimūrti): the creator Brahma corresponds to the dawn, or rajas; the sustainer and solar deity Viṣṇu to the daylight, or sattva; the leveller and moon-god Śiva to the night, tamas.

          In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in the protagonist’s first sermon, he discusses the three transformations, the three phases of growth. Firstly, the human mind becomes a camel, slow and eager for heavy loads, obedient but strong, labouring and blindly following. This is evidently the pole tamas. Secondly, it becomes a lion, full of fury and passion, not obeying the “you should” commandment, but asserting his “I will” volition and his freedom. This is visibly the pole rajas. Finally, it becomes a child, light and innocent. This is the stage of transparency, of the third pole, sattva. This way, Nietzsche’s newfound simile actually corresponds to an age-old thought model, best articulated in Sāṁkhya.

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Yoga is not religious

 

Yoga is Hindu, but it is not religious. When Hindus go deep into the issues raised by the San Diego court verdict ("yoga is not Hindu"), they are bound to encounter some problems with their own tradition.

In my opinion, Christians who allege that Hindus mix up yoga with the worship of another supreme being than the jealous god Yahweh, have a point. And Hindus who think that yoga implies the worship of a Hindu god likewise have a point,-- the same point. But those are modern Hindus who talk a lot about yoga but are unlikely to practise it. Contemporay Hinduism is a lot more God-centred than the ancient originators of yoga, such as Patanjali, or even the late-medieval pioneers of Hatha Yoga. Ancient Yoga was certainly “Hindu” in any normal use of the term, but it was not theistic.

On Rajiv Malhotra’s discussion list, where the verdict is debated, one Hindu recently quoted Arya Samaj fouder Swami Dayananda Saraswati with approval as asserting that Yoga is “restraining all activities (vritti-s) of mind (chitta) from all evil and unrighteous affairs and fixing the same in God alone, for the bliss and beatitude is Yoga and disobedience of God's injunction and indulgence in evil thoughts and deeds is Viyoga, i.e., remaining away from God”. I am not sure about the exactness of this “quote”, but it gives the gist of Dayanada’s thinking, and it certainly renders the thinking of this particular Hindu and many millions of contemporary Hindus.

In reality, yoga is not about evil at all. It restrains good motions of the mind (i.e. thoughts) as much as evil ones. Hinduism is quite conscious of good and evil, but unlike Christianity, it subordinates this concern (on which the Christian core doctrines of hereditary sin and salvation are based) to the concern for Liberation. Patañjali defines yoga as “restraining the movements of the mind”, full stop. Dayananda’s additional considerations of good and evil, and especially his bringing in “God”, are typical of modern devotional Hinduism or bhakti. This very successful movement, which eclipsed the non-theistic trends in Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta, Sankhya, Mimansa, Buddhism), is the historical antagonist of Hatha Yoga. It teaches that Liberation does not mean “isolation” (of consciousness from its objects, Patañjali’s goal), does not mean identity with the Absolute, but aspires no higher than watching God face to face, much like Sufi and Christian mysticism. It also rejects the emphasis yoga puts on techniques. If God’s grace is there to help you, what use are techniques? By contrast, yoga means reaching the goal, Liberation, by means of techniques.

The trouble already started with the Bhagavad Gita. I have it on good Hindu authority, but I have also seen it for myself, that the Gita is a work of “synthesis”. Then already, Hindus were enamoured of synthesis. Thus, this is where we first find the notion of an equality between three disciplines: karma yoga, “the discipline of action” (then meaning Vedic sacrifice, now moralistically interpreted as good works), jñana yoga, “the discipline of knowledge” (meaning Upanishadic knowledge of the Self, i.e. yoga proper), and bhakti yoga, “the discipline of devotion”. In fact, when Yajñavalkya introduces the notion of the Self, he pits its knowledge against the Vedic rituals. The ancient Vedas and esp. the Brahmanas (the technical manuals of ritual) are centred on karmakanda, “the (ritual) action half”, while the Upanishads are centred on jñanakanda, “the knowledge half”. While yogis would simply choose the latter, the Gita proposes a synthesis, viz. the third pole, bhakti.

The book discusses a number of then-popular Hindu philosophies, but interjects in every chapter one sentence that does not follow from these philosophies at all, namely that all this shall be given to you if you are but devoted to Me, Krishna. You can read Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra, but you will not find Krishna there. You can read the Buddha’s teachings on meditation, but Krishna is not there. Yoga can perfectly exist without Krishna.

Modern bhakti Hindus project their own bhakti beliefs on the whole of Hindu history. They deny the reality of change (both progress and degeneration) in Hindu history. In fact, it is they who realize the Westerners’ fond image of Hinduism as frozen in time, unchangeable. So, they rewrite the theory of yoga as dealing with God. In fact, the more God, the less yoga, and the more yoga, the less God.

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