It's my great pleasure to welcome Professor Jim Mallenson to uh today's lunchtime lecture. He will ask the question: what is the purpose of yoga, transcendence or transformation? And it's the first in our series titled Transcendence or the Quest for the Divine. Please help me welcome Professor Jim Mallinson.

Thanks very much to Christine and also to Professor Jane Shaw, who uh can't be here today, but who invited me to give this lecture. And thanks very much to all of you for coming along. So the the the question in a in a nutshell, what I'm asking today is how did we get from this? This sort of ascetic fakir uh Indian practitioner who calls himself a yogi, as we'll get to to this, all right, which has been a question that's been puzzling me for a long time. And I think I've worked out quite a lot of it, and that's what I'll try and tell you today. Now, why should I be able to tell you anything about this? Well, I spent a lot of the late 80s, 90s, 2000s in India wandering around with these traditional sort of Indian sadhus and holy men. You can see that's me on the far left there. To the extent that in 2013 it was, I was honored with the title of Mahant by one of the lineages of yogis in India. This is a sort of cross between a brigadier and an abbot. Um, I I hasten to add it, it's no indicator of sort of spiritual advancement, and it's a long story, but that just shows you I've had a very deep engagement with that tradition for a very long time, and my academic work has sort of played off that, it's basically been trying to understand that whole world. I was trained as a Sanskritist as an undergraduate, and I then went, came to London to do a master's in anthropology, but then decided uh to continue using Sanskrit in my research. And so my uh PhD, which was back in Oxford, was a what we call a critical edition of a text on physical yoga. Now, this was I started this in 1995, and it's hard probably to realize or even remember, but at that point yoga was still quite a fringe thing. It wasn't until the end of the 90s, and I'll come on to that, that it became this huge sort of globalized phenomenon that we see today. So at the time I thought I was doing something, or certainly my parents thought I was doing something very perverse by choosing this extremely obscure Sanskrit text about a very obscure, even within the tradition, obscure practice, which involves turning the tongue backwards to uh drink the nectar of immortality that's supposed to be dripping from the top chakra in your skull. Um, but I persevered, it was it was a wonderful experience. Um and that just sort of set me off on this path of using primarily uh textual sources to try to make sense of the history of yoga. Now, the reason I chose that text is because I was looking for a Sanskrit text to work on, and the only Sanskrit texts of any relevance to that world I was living in are these ones on physical yoga practice, which at the time I didn't realise was significant, but I think that is, you know, it's quite quite crucial, but I probably won't have time to go into why that is. So, what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna give you a potted history of yoga, but really focusing on physical yoga practice. Of course, there's quite a lot more to many traditions of yoga beyond physical methods, but physical methods have always been part of it in one way or another. And to do that, I will I wondered about whether I should include this section, but I will, it's fairly brief. But I'm just gonna say what's not yoga, okay? Because often you will hear people say that yoga is 5,000 years old, all right? And that is generally based upon uh these very small seals from the Indus Valley in the northwest of India, also Pakistan now. Uh, this is actually in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Uh there are quite a few of these tiny, they're tiny little things, less than an inch, you know, probably half an inch square. Uh and here's a couple. So the bit at the top is created by a seal. The two at the bottom are the actual seals that you press themselves. Now the one on the bottom left uh is that was responsible, and I think I've got a close-up of that, yeah. Um that was discovered in the Indus Valley in about 1930 or in the 20s, and Sir John Marshall, who was leading the uh the excavation there, he declared that this was uh an image of the Hindu god Shiva. Okay, Pashupati is also known as Pashupati means the lord of beasts. You can see surrounded by animals, and also Shiva is associated with yoga practice, all right, and he and it looks like he's sitting in some sort of yoga posture. But that has since been uh debunked really by sort of sober analysis, in particular as an Indian art historian Doris Srinavarsan in the 70s or the 80s, and she noted or identified that in fact this has much greater similarity with uh the what's known as the trans-Elamite culture to the west of India at the same period, so third millennium BCE, and that rather than a three-headed uh ithiphallic uh deity with the ithiphalicness, I hope everyone knows what that means, being uh being evident, that in fact the what looks like the the penis of the of the image is a belt or the the sort of lurbid of the girdle hanging down, that what looks like the three faces are in fact ears, and that the face itself is a bullheaded deity, okay, which this trans-Elamite culture had, and we get find very similar uh images from there. And also the um the posture, what I would add to this this, I think, convincing analysis is that the posture itself uh does not resurface or does not appear in the Indian tradition either in iconography or in text until about a thousand years ago. Okay, so one would then have to explain why there's a more than 3,000 year gap uh in evidence for that practice. So, yeah, not yoga. Um now here is where I ask uh who hands up who would like to learn how to do the original yoga, the first form of yoga. One or two. Okay, now put the other hand up and uh keep them up for well no keep them up for at least 12 years, I think. Is it okay? So this so this is what something that sort of provoked my recent inquiries. So actually, the same instance of this Kumbamela festival where it's made him a hunt, I was talking to this Sadhu Amar Bharati who I'd met a few times, sadly no longer with us. Uh, and he's he at that point he'd held his arm in the air for 40 years, I think, and he said to me, This is the ancient yoga. And I thought he was pulling my leg, obviously with the other hand, but now I think he was actually onto something. When it comes to physical practice, so that what I'm the sort of main gist of my talk is that until about a thousand years ago, the only body practices we see associated with yoga are these kind of physical mortifications, and then there's a big shift uh about a thousand years ago. So the having hopefully convincingly debunked the Indus Valley assertion, what when we do first start getting evidence of yoga practice is about 500 BCE. So the time of the Buddha, and in this area, if you see to the to the far east of the map of India, there you see Magadha. Uh, and in that region, in about the 5th century BCE, there was very exciting things going on in terms of uh religious practice. So there are these new doctrines appearing of reincarnation, so the idea that after you die you're reborn. Uh, this is a new doctrine within the Indian tradition, uh, that your rebirth is based upon, is is kind of governed by your previous actions, so karma. Also the idea that this repeated rebirth is unpleasant, you know, that the kind of essence of existence is suffering. And then some of these, some of the teachers of the period said actually there are ways to get off this cycle. So yoga in various forms is a method of getting off that cycle. But there were people wandering around in this region at that time, teaching all kinds of different methods. So the most famous of them all, of course, was the Buddha. Uh, and uh and he's not normally associated with these practices of austerity, but in fact, we do get some rather fine statue uh from the Gandhara region of northwest India and now Pakistan uh from sort of from about 2,000 years ago. And we get very good information on what was going on in this period from the stories of the Buddha, the Buddha's life story. So he goes around uh meeting all these different teachers and trying out what they what they were up to. And amongst these groups were various people doing these really quite extreme sort of mortifications and austerities. So the Buddha says that he fasted until you know his his stomach was like it was on fire and hot coals inside and his ribs were protruding. Uh he says he stood up for long periods, sat down without moving for long periods, but held his held his breath until his head felt like it was going to explode. And the sort of regular accepted narrative is that he then decided that these practices were no use. Okay, I think I've got a close up now. Actually, there's some amazing descriptions in the Pali Canon of you know how uh how emaciated he was and his eyes turning into sockets and so forth. And you can see that there's quite a lot. I've had a very lucky to go to Pakistan in 2020 and get to visit the various museums where these uh lots of these statues are on show. Um yeah, so the narrative is that he rejected these practices and then took on the the middle way uh between uh extremes. But in fact, that seems to be a later development in our historical sources. And it seems that in the earlier teachings, and and the question of course arises: if he rejected these practices, why did they make statues of him emaciated like this? And in fact, early on it seems that uh this kind of uh uh ascetic mortification was seen as a key stage in his practice. And we also have from this period we have travelers' reports of some rather wonderful stories in the histories of Alexander the Great. Um I've got an image here, obviously not from that period, but from a uh French illustrated manuscript of the Alexander romance. And Alexander, well, there's a couple of instances in his histories of where he met what in Greek are called gymnosophists, sort of naked philosophers, it translates as. Um, and it's not depicted here, but in in the uh stories, particularly in Strabo, we get the best best uh uh retelling of it. Uh they're meant to be holding these painful, difficult postures in the hot sun all day long and so forth. So we get kind of corroborating travellers' reports, which is always a useful source in in the history of India in particular, because Indian sources tend not to be great historically. Um, and then so we know from this period, we know from the epics, so the famous Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata Ramayana, which were composed, earliest parts of them are probably third or fourth century BCE, from the the Pali canon of the Buddha uh and from our historical sources of the period, mainly Buddhist, we know that there was a sort of complex of um of painful ascetic practices that that uh these these holy men and it are stories, it's almost always men. We do get one or two women referenced in the early early stories, but here's a kind of depiction of it's an illustrated manuscript from the British Library of the Ramayana of the sage Vishwamitra performing a range of these penances because he wanted to elevate his his position, he wanted to go from being a Rajarashit to a Brahmarashi. So there's a technical distinction, and this was a way he would bring this about. Uh so you see on the far left, he's hanging upside down from a tree, and we find that reported in the Pali Canon. Uh, it's called the bat penance. Buddha doesn't say he tried that one. And most of these things are still practiced in India, and I'm going to come back to that. Um, although that one seems to have died out by the end of the 19th century. Then to the right of that, so these are all showing Vishwar Mitra doing his various different things. To the right, holding arms up in the air, right of him standing on one leg for long periods. And I think the one above the water body, I think the idea is probably these meant to be levitating, I'm not sure, because we'll come back to that. But I think I think it's it's hard hard to be certain, but I think he's meant to be doing breath practice, some kind of breath restraint, which is often associated with the power of flight. Then below him in the water, there's this, we get many tales of ascetics spending uh in the winter spending long periods either having freezing cold water poured over them or being immersed in freezing cold water. To the right of him uh sitting surrounded by hot fire, by fires in the hot season. So so actually, and then above that one, underneath the rain cloud, so there are ascetics who will never go inside in the rainy season, which of course is quite something in India. So those those are the sort of three seasonal practices, in fact. Uh the in winter in water, in summer surrounded by fire, and in the monsoon uh in the being exposed to the elements. Um and as I said, this kind of complex, this body of practices persists pretty much up to the present day. Um and just to point, I mean, they are so I'm the first time I brought up transcendence or transformation, isn't it? But they are seen, you know, the idea is you're transcending the physical um limitations of the body. You can overcome uh pain and and physical urges and so forth, is is is a point of it. But ultimately, it's a pretty nihilistic approach, and in fact, the most extreme practitioners uh would take it to the ultimate stage. As we see in this, this is I think I've got a close-up here, but this is from Mewar, so Udaipur in Rajasthan, probably late 18th century, and it depicts a whole bunch of different uh ascetic practices, including um, I mean, you can see here someone hanging upside down and far left on a swing. We'll I'll come back to that. I've got a couple more images of that. There, that's when people never sit down and they'll lean on a swing and and to in order to sleep. But also the top left, if I think I've got a close-up of that, yeah, you see an ascetic cutting off his head. And we do get travelers' reports of that as well, this sort of ritual suicide. So I really want to emphasize that this is not about you know long life and good life and and uh and and feeling feeling good with yourself, it's a pretty nihilistic approach to existence. Uh, and I've got a few images now of current practice. So, actually, the in the tradition that I'm part of, um this practice of sitting surrounded by fires in the in the hot season is is is kind of key to to their behaviour. I was in encouraged to do it at one point, but I I couldn't take four months off in the summer, sadly. Yeah, probably got away with it. Um and it's an 18-year course as well, in six, three-year stages. And the cult the final stage is this one where you sit surrounded by, and they did do this in the hottest part of the day, you know, sometimes it's 45 degrees or whatever, uh, hottest part of the day, and here you sit surrounded by a complete circle with a pot of burning cow dung on your head. Um so fairly tough. And then, and I until recently, actually it was 2009, well recently, gosh, it shows up, I'm getting old, but seven years ago, 2019, I was at this big Kumbamela festival, which happens every three years, and I was asking around whether anyone still did the freezing cold water practice, and I was like, oh yeah, yeah, your uncle guru next to you, he does it, he's doing it every night, four, well, every morning, 4 a.m. I said, but really? He said, Yeah, yeah. He said, Well, and he's doing it out the back of the tent. Um, and so I set my alarm, got up, four o'clock, crawl that, and it's cold. It's January, okay. So actually, it's surprisingly cold in North India, especially on the banks of the confluence of the two two big rivers. So it's uh it's very damp and misty and cold. And I found him here. Now, hopefully the video will work. So this is one of his devotees on the left, who every morning at 4 a.m. would pour 108 pots of freezing cold water over his head. Here we go. And at this point, there's that there's a week of the year between the when he he was also doing the fire practice. So by day, in the middle of the day, he'd go and do the fire. It was kind of it's spring basically, it was called Busan Punch Me at that time. And he's in the sort of cusp of the two, so he was doing both uh every day for a week. Now, every now and then I'm gonna allude to modern practice, what people get up to today, and of course, uh to show parallels with um or what people get up to, not necessarily in India, in the in the West, of course, famously the famous practitioner of this kind of thing, Wim Hof, immersing yourself in freezing cold water. Uh, and I'll come back to those parallels as well. And then uh there's the holding the arms up in the air, as I mentioned before. Here's an ascetic I met a while ago who at this point he'd been standing up for seven years. Um, again, not many women doing much of this stuff, but we do find in myth and in legend over the first millennium various stories of women doing similar stuff. Uh, most famously Parvati, who's the wife of the god Shiva, who I mentioned earlier as you know, being identified in that Indus Valley seal. Um, and she, in order to win Shiva's love, she under underwent various different austerities in legend in order to sort of uh wake him up, you know, stir him out of his meditation because the gods had realized that they needed to have a child to uh save the world from this demon that was gonna destroy the whole world. And so, yeah, she she undertook these great austerities and also with uh intervention from karma, so the equivalent of Cupid, uh she managed to succeed. But what I will say here um it's something that came to me only in recent years. So here's a this is we can find quite a lot of Mughal era miniatures. This is an ashram of female ascetics. I mean, I think this is interesting in the light of the fact that I'm not sure what the latest statistics are, but of course, yoga today is predominantly practiced by women. I think it's 70-75% women. Um here we can see a woman leaning on the swing, so that indicates that she's she's under undergoing this this penance, this vow never to sit down. Um we don't what I think is quite curious is we don't get any evidence, pre-modern evidence in India of women doing more, the more kind of body-positive yoga postures and practices and so forth. Not at all. Um I mean that's not to say that no one was doing it, but it seems that if so, it was extremely uh in in small small numbers. Right, so that as a quick rush through this whole sort of body of ascetic practice, now I'm moving on to the the other side of the coin, the the transformation, I suppose. We can look at this as more transcendence. You're trying to transcend the human condition uh through denial of the body, really. Um but then what happens from about a thousand years ago, we start getting evidence for a very different understanding of the role of the body in yoga practice. Um Christine mentioned that I uh ran this project starting in 2015 in which we edited ten uh key Sanskrit texts on physical yoga practice. The oldest of them is a text called the Amritha Siddhi. And this was a very exciting uh for me anyway, edit uh process of um of editing this text. The the teachings of it are attributed to this Siddha, this kind of uh adept yogi called Virupa, who has a rather wonderful kind of uh set of tales. He's now much better known in Tibet than in India. He's not very well known in India at all anymore. Uh the best story about him is that he was um boozing in some tavern and the the landlady called Last Orders because the sun was setting, and he said, and he just and then he pointed at the sun and stopped it from setting. Okay, and carried on, carried, I don't know, maybe you had something to drink with the other arm, I don't know. But he's stopped it from setting. Then the king got worried because the the sun had stopped in the sky and came along and said, What do you want? and whatever. That's the sort of most famous legend associated with him. But the teachings of this text are not associated with boozing at all, they're quite quite different actually. Um, so it's called the Amritta Sidhi, which means Sidhi is hard to translate, but Amritta very much, very clearly means immortality. So the idea is that through mastering the practices taught in the text, you transform your body and you become immortal, and you can wander around the world doing what you want. So quite different from what we've been looking at so far. Uh I yeah, in a few places here, if you want, and maybe easy to do online, I don't know if it'll work this, but I thought I would try it anyway. Uh, there's a QR code because all these output, all these books I've produced are open access. And you can just download them for free if you want. Um, so the really exciting discovery, actually, incidentally, uh, working on that text is a bigger image of it, is that it was um written by Buddhists, not Hindus. So that really had, you know, that sent me down a major diversion that I was not expecting at all because up to that point, you know, we everyone had assumed that the earliest texts on physical yoga would be written by Hindus, particularly the followers of Shiva, but this this overturned that. And it's pretty clear that subsequent texts take on the teachings from this text and adapt them. So it really is like the the source text. Uh, a quick modern parallel, of course, people may have been um hearing this this fellow's been in the news recently, hasn't he, of wanting to live forever. Although, sadly, I think, I mean, try not sadly, he's got some nasty illness now. But there's there's this seems to be a sort of a move, doesn't there, particularly within sort of Silicon Valley types to body hack and aim for immortality. Um, the practices, I'll go back actually, the practices associated that taught in this text, they are they were they're still found in, well, they're found over the subsequent centuries in yoga texts, but they don't seem to be practiced in there uh really in India anymore. But because the text was Buddhist, its teachings did move wholesale to uh Tibet quite early on. And in fact, that's why we have so I'm going backwards now on my slideshow, but that's why we have this this uh 12th century manuscript from Tibet, which was enabled us to identify the earliest teachings. Um and it what seems to have happened, is this gonna work? Yes, what seems to have happened is that the physical practices taught in that text, which basically involve holding the breath and then somehow, well, through these three particular physical techniques, making the breath shoot up the central channel. And they then got incorporated into bet to a an older uh method of physical cultivation. So this is the only evidence we now have for these practices being done, and you'll see this guy doing it. It does look painful. So the idea somehow is that by compressing and holding the breath and then dropping yourself down onto the bottom of your spine, that makes the breath shoot up the central column, and that uh is is key to achieving the higher states of the practice. Now, both so around about a thousand years ago, 11th century, 12th century is when we first start seeing texts on this kind of more body-positive approach to yoga, uh, including so it's not until then also that we we find the now kind of iconic balancing and contortionist practices of yoga. And a lucky discovery I made with a colleague in 2016. We were en route on a big journey across India, and I I discovered I'd read this obscure Hindi article from the 50s about this gate in this small town near Baroda, which happened to be en route, and I thought, let's go ahead and have a look at that because this article said that these images of these sort of famous yogis, these sculptures on the bottom row were there. I thought, why not? You know, this is interesting, um, purely because I'm interested in the early iconography. It dates to about 1230, this gate. But then when we looked up in the brackets at the top there, we were astonished to see various depictions of yogis in balancing postures. And these are these are the earliest known images of yoga postures of this kind, you know, other than so prior to this, prior to this period, apart from the mortifications where you hold your arms up in the air or stand up for long periods, the only other postures that are taught in yoga text are seated postures for meditation. So we get this sort of this uh revolution at this period. There's also an inverted um uh uh lotus posture. I did I did have you can sort of see from there that I it took about three goes to get decent photos of of this place. Um but the first time, the first photos I got of it did have a because of course people say, well, you can maybe you've just turned the picture upside down, but the first time there was a pigeon sitting on the top, and you can see what the pigeon's done to the statue. So I I promise you that is how it's meant to be, and the same here. Um so of course the question arises: what was going on? You know, where where did all these practices why did they suddenly appear at this period? Now there's clearly, particularly looking at that text, Amrit-Siddhi, there's clearly something going on, some kind of exchange with China, okay, uh, in the some of the principles that are taught within the text, of the the kind of design, the understanding of the yogic body or the subtle body, there are really strong um parallels. And in fact, the whole one of the the last sort of key to understanding that text was realizing that the metaphors that it used to speak of the body were alchemical. So this idea of the body as a kind of alchemical chamber, and that by various practices you can convert the vital fluids and vital energies and then raise it all up and sublimate your existence. Um, and that we find in somewhat earlier Chinese texts, and there's definitely something going on there, but I wouldn't say, and this there's clearly influence. I I'm being a bit vague here because this really hasn't been explored properly. In fact, I've just uh put in a proposal for a big project to look closely at the interplay between India, China, Tibet, and Persia in pre-modernity in these body cultivation practices, because China has a much older tradition, in fact, of this sort of body-positive approach to the to existence, I suppose. So this is from the Mawang Dui uh cave tombs dating to the second century BCE. So there's this ancient tradition of body cultivation, physical practices, and exercises, which we don't find in in India. And in fact, curiously, we don't I mean we don't find it in the West. It's sort of hard to imagine, is it? But it's not really until late 19th century that exercise became a thing in the West as well. But in China it was very much a thing from very early on. In fact, I think we get a textual reference from the 4th century BCE in China, but it was very much in a different world, a different milieu from what was going on, what I've been talking to you about in India. It was very aristocratic, it was geared at longevity, and then the people who really perfected it are said to be able to attain immortality. So again, there's a strong suggestion that some of the ideas that came into Indian yoga came from China. But what I will say is a lot of the practices of Indian yoga we do not find in China. And my hunch is that they are somehow uh indigenous to India, uh, but it's it's hard to hard to be sure. Um here I've just got a couple of nice images because when now in the so now in the early second millennium CE, um, when we find these postures coming into Indian yoga texts, uh, I read there's there's this text called the Hatra Pradipika. I'll say a bit more about it in a second, but uh it's the first to teach these two. And these two we find um we do have parallels in older Chinese material as well. But again, as I say, I'm it's all a bit vague to me, and I'm hoping if you know if I'm if I'm lucky to get this ground and have a we've got a good team that are ready to go to try to make sense of exactly what was going on. I was talking to someone earlier, just before I started, about the dhanurasana. The one on the on the right, it is on your right, the bow posture. Um, because generally I think in modern yoga that's taught as a sort of you lie on your front and then hold your feet and you arch your back like that. But in fact, it's pretty clear from the earlier text that you it says you hold your both big toes and then make like you're drawing a bow. So that's so that's curious that in fact the form of the postures can change over time as well. Uh yeah, and as I mentioned, it's during this, it's with this new dispensation of yoga that we find balancing postures coming in. We have absolutely no evidence for them prior to about the 11th century. The one on the right here, the Myord Arsenal, the Peacock pose, that uh is that's actually the first one to appear uh as a yoga asana in a Sanskrit text again around the 11th century. Umso in this period, so there's this text called the Hartra Pradipika, which I'm just at the end of a project editing. Um, we get these teachings on these sort of therapeutic cleansing techniques for cleansing the body. There's six of them. This is one of them is called Nauli. In fact, this is my teacher on the left demonstrating it. Um they appear from nowhere as well. I these I have, you know, again, my hunt with these ones, I think it's not impossible, but there's sort of some very ancient practices of forest-dwelling yogis because they're all. I mean, not to go into too much detail, there's the ways of giving yourself an enema and things like that. It's way it's basically ways of cleansing and looking after the body without needing a doctor, effectively. It makes you completely self-sufficient. Oh, here's another one, yes, the um neti, where you put a string through your nose and then out of your mouth and clean your nasal passages and try not to gag. Um, and this text I mentioned, the Hutra Pradipika, this is from the 14th century. So, what happens after that Amrita Siddhi text? We over the next two or three centuries, we loads of different Indian traditions, Hindu traditions. The Amrita Siddhi is the only Buddhist one, and then lots of different Hindu traditions produce their own texts on physical yoga. And then in around early 15th century, uh, this scholar, Swatmarama, he wrote a text called the, or compiled and wrote, a text called the Hartra Pradipika. Um he and he says at the beginning, this is for people who are confused because there's so many texts and teachings out there. I'm gonna tell you, you know, I'm gonna make sense of it, and that's what he does. So I've just come almost at the end of a, because it's taken about five years, with a German team editing this text because it'd never been done before, despite being the most popular, probably the most influential text on physical yoga today, uh, it's never been edited properly. And the reason for that is because there's about 200 or 250 manuscripts, and we had this amazing German team. We looked at over 200 manuscripts and we've produced a new edition, which is actually about uh well, I the the pre the the sort of known form of the text, which have been translated, I think, uh more than a hundred times, super popular, but it was based on a much later, slightly incoherent version of the text, and we've managed to identify a much earlier, much more coherent form of it. So, yeah, if you that QR code, you can see our online edition and translation. Um, and the book hopefully will be out in the beginning of next year. So he sets out Swatmarama, and I argue actually in my introductory chapter to the book, not only does he look at all these texts, but he's going out and interviewing living yogis because we get these vernacular terms coming into the Sanskrit. There's a sort of complex philological argument, but I'm I'm convinced that not only is he a textual scholar, but he's also an anthropologist going out and talking to yogis and combining the two. And he then divides yoga practice into uh says asanam kumbakam chitram mudrakyam karanam tatha atta nadanu sandhanam abhyas anukramu harpei. So those are the that corresponds to the four chapters of the text. So asana, posture, kumbaka, breath retention or breath control, and then mudra are these sort of uh physical practices for manipulating the vital energies in the body. So the practice I mentioned at the beginning of my PhD of turning the tongue back and uh drinking the nectar of immortality, that's one of these um mudras. And that set the blueprint, really. From then on, all texts on yoga kind of use that as the blueprint for its practice. And also the way that he presents it, it's very non-sectarian, and through his presentation of uh these techniques, they were then taken on by a wide range of traditions which previously hadn't even been interested in yoga, and yoga, particularly physical yoga, then becomes kind of central to uh Indian uh religiosity to core, one might say. Oh, I've got a what have I got here? Yeah, and just to emphasize, so it's got a lot of text on the screen there, but just to emphasize the the body positive approach of this new dispensation of yoga, if you I won't bother reading this one out because I've tried to leave some time for questions, but you can see at the body the results of success in this practice, which is called hutta, thinness of the body, clear complexion, uh bright eyes, good health, um, etc. etc. So it's clearly physical benefits. And then an uh an earlier text, actually, which again I've edited or I haven't given you a QR code for that, that says this can get out of hand, but I get I think this this shows interesting parallels with today as well, in that if you get your practice right, you're meant to become extremely good looking and attracted to the opposite sex. You look like the god of love, and when that happens, a great obstacle can arise for the yoga if he's not careful, overcome by his beauty, women want to have sex with him. And then there's this idea that by losing your semen that you lose all your yogic prowess, which again we find earlier in Chinese sources. But uh and then so, yeah, as I said, Swatna Rama with this text, he kind of just sets the template for yoga as subsequently understood and taught. But we do get a bit of proliferation of the techniques. The early sources will often say there are 84 postures. Well, in fact, they'll normally say there are 84 luck, which is 8,400,000, and that then the god Shiva distilled them down to 84, but they never name them, they might name one or two. Uh, later texts expand on that, so we get a few illustrated manuscripts um showing them all. Then another text that I've recently published with a couple of colleagues uh teaches 112 postures, it's probably written in the 18th century. Um so we get the yeah, one reason I wanted to mention this actually is sometimes it's said uh not least because of a brilliant book published by a friend and colleague of mine called Mark Singleton in 2010 called Yoga Body, in which he shows that uh much of what is taught today as yoga was actually a a concoction of the 20th century. It included ancient elements, but a lot of other things were brought in. But that would often get sort of misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted as saying, oh, he's saying that all yoga is a 20th century phenomenon and it wasn't of interest in India. Uh, all the physical aspects weren't of interest in India prior to the 20th century. But this text, which is from the 18th century, is mainly about postures. Okay, so there was something going on in India before engagement with sort of globalized um uh understandings of of health and physical practice and so forth. What what that was, I don't know, but it was there was an increasing interest in India. Okay, so what happened? I've I hope I've demonstrated this sort of shift in the textual teachings on yoga around a thousand years ago. What happened? Is there a synthesis? Well, there is to some extent, but um until the 20th century, really the only evidence we have for anyone practicing any of this stuff is by these more um by by these ascetic, these sadhus, these yogis who've renounced normal existence, are trying to uh transcend mundane existence. And so this is a curious incident. I'll just give you a couple of um uh examples of practitioners who somehow they somehow they incorporate this new dispensation, but then they rework it in a very Indian way. They they take on the teachings, but they rework them to fit their their paradigm of understanding of what what it means to be practicing yoga. So there's this um this uh ascetic Fakir Puranpuri, who again another lucky break I had actually is about 15 years ago, discovered because thanks to Google Books, his life story was uh published in this magazine, the European magazine. We had a pre- we had a short form of it, which was published in an academic journal, and it alluded to the long version, but this was published anonymously. And anyway, just by searching for a term, somehow this came up for me in Google Books. Now he lived in the 18th century. The reason we have his life story is because he ended up functioning as a sort of go-between, maybe as a spy with Warren Hastings, who was the governor general of the East India Company in Calcutta, and the Tashi Lama in Tibet, who was the regent because the Dalai Lama was too young. Um, Puranpuri, in about 1750, he goes to one of these Kumbamela festivals and meets a guru there and says, Look, I want to I want to undertake one of these penances. And he's given a list of 18, and I'll come onto that in a sec, but I'll just tell you a bit more about him. So he chooses putting both his arms up in the air, holds both his arms up in the air for 45, 50 years or something, and travels to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Moscow, he gets as far as Moscow, uh, Tibet. Yeah, he spent has quite a lot of going back and forth from Tibet, and that's why I think that's why we get his life story written down by the um the what's he called, the governor of Varanasi at the time, Jonathan Duncan. But anyway, more pertaining to I could talk about him at at length, amazing, amazing life. So we have a really detailed uh autobiography. Um but he lists the 18 things that this guru told him he could choose from. Okay, so amongst those 18, I've written out three. So there's standing up for long periods, number one, number 11, Urdubahu, Arms in the Air, which is the one he chose, number 16, five fires, sitting surrounded by fire. Okay, so far, so ascetic. But then also he includes number eight, Chaudasi Asan, the 84 postures, which we'd never heard of until these body positive texts come along. But for him, uh they become sort of content, well, he doesn't undertake them, but they become really painful contortions, and we get a couple more. We do get the also number nine there, Kapali, which is a headstand, uh, which I'm I'm gonna move on, but um, that can be reinterpreted again as a method of asceticism. I'm talking too much as ever, so I may not I want to leave some time for questions. Um and then we see here an example of how these new postures, these new practices get incorporated into the old uh techniques of body mortification and asceticism. This is quite common actually at the end of this fire pennance for some of these sadhus to do uh yoga postures. And again, a quick nod to modernity, globalized modernity. Of course, nowadays we have hot yoga, various different forms understanding of hot yoga, and they will often, you know, in in understanding the explanation of that, they'll often look back to these um this this idea of the fire penance and doing what they call tapas, all these methods of austerity in India are known as tapas, which has this idea of heating heating the body. So there's that as Puranpuri, and then another character who I find uh fascinating is is called Haridas. And what I haven't really said about, I haven't said anything about in the early when we do get an understanding of what one wants to happen to one's mind in the early teachings of yoga, uh, the ultimate aim, so when it gets uh set out by Patanjali in the famous Yoga Sutras written about 400 CE, the ultimate goal is what's called samadhi, and that is defined, I've got that on a slide coming up, but defined as Yoga Shittavritina Rodhaha, which means the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. So basically you're just completely catatonic, is the idea. And if you go into samadhi, uh you're meant to, you know, you can be um completely unaffected by what's going around on around you, and you can stay in that state for weeks on end, and we get practitioners of so this painting is of the Darbar, so the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore in about 1830. And I've got a so I've highlighted the uh Swami Haridas. So he famously, well, famously, it was it was a big deal at the time, even in in Europe and in England. He uh there we got it, so that's a close-up of him there and another image, and we have lots of accounts from various sources, including nobility at Ranjit Singh's court, but also quite a lot of European soldiers and adventurers and travellers who were there. And he buried himself um alive in Samadhi in the ground, uh, underneath this pavilion in at the Lahore fort. And I went there in 2020. In fact, speaking to the curator of the fort, he said that um oh yeah, he did it in the lawn. And I said, No, no, all the sources say it was underneath the Baradri, which is this building here. He said, Oh, well, I've got a key to go down there. And he haven't been down there for 20 years. So he went and got the key and opened up this door, and you can see you go down these steps, and this is clearly where Haridas did it. And but then it opens up into this huge underground vault. But it says in the reports that he was put inside a box. But I'm quite skeptical. I don't know. Although I must say that everyone there was convinced. All the reports are completely credulous. And they're not necessarily, you know, they're quite skeptical themselves, but they say they don't think there was any opportunity for deception. But as you can see here, there are various sort of openings and there are ways you could get in and out of here. So it may, and there are a few other reports of other people doing similar things where they were uh cheating. Um anyway, it was a he supposedly stayed for 40 days completely in Samadhi. And when he's when he's when he's opened up, when he's brought out, he one of the things they say is he flicks his tongue for. So he's basically used this Kitri mudra practice, the tongue drinking the nectar of immortality thing that I've mentioned, that's part of the body positive yoga, in order to stay in that state. Um I'm going to jump over this one. I sort of mentioned it. Here's another nod to uh modernity David Blaine, who did something similar, suspended in a perspective's box over the Thames about 10 or 20 years ago. Who apparently did lose. I looked this up. I think he was taking fluids, but he wasn't eating, and he lost about 20 kilos or something and was severely malnourished at the end of it. Uh okay, now right, I'm gonna leave any time for questions. I will quickly run through a quick rush through modern yoga. Um I mentioned earlier, late 19th century, early 20th century, we get this new globalized sort of physical culture movement. And in fact, practice by women was key to this, was an important driver in all of this. Uh, and that this woman from America, Genevieve Stebbins, with her harmonic gymnastics, that was became very popular around the world. So that's one sort of strand of physical culture practice. Also, bodybuilding. This chap, Eugene Sando, did all these world tours, and he was, he was, he went to India and he was popular in India. Um, and some of these ideas then started to be taken on in India. There's an interesting character, the Maharaja of Old in Maharashtra. He uh became a uh strong proponent of the Surya Namaskara, so the sun salutation, where you do this sort of sequence of prostrations and practices, strengthening the body. And this was kind of interestingly associated with the independence movement in India. He would he was advocating these practices for India's youth to you know strengthen themselves so they could rise up against the colonial oppressor. Um curiously, uh well, he was I'm not actually I'm not sure if he taught the sun salutation as part of yoga, but prior to the 20th century, the sun salutation is certainly nothing to do with yoga, but now it's it gets incorporated into it. And the big incorporator, the big sort of synthesizer, was uh this teacher, Tirumulai Krishnamacharya, who was who taught yoga at the royal palace in Mysore. Uh, and here you see him with a group of his students. I think that's him standing on the arch, the student with the arch back. And he brought in you know aspects of all this global physical culture, also probably military drills. You know, there were British um uh troops in Mysore, it seems quite likely. This is all set out in my colleague Mark's book, by the way, uh Yoga Body. Um so but it wasn't really him that made things go super popular, that was down to a couple of his students in particular. So on the right there, BKS Ayengo, uh who famously was the yoga teacher of Yehudi Menuin, uh and then on the and in this slide, Patabi Joyce, who he created a new system, which he calls Ashtanga yoga. It's an old term, but it's a new system, where you have these complicated sequences of postures. Okay, and that really began to take on in the began to get popular globally. I mean, I say popular, but not hugely popular, but started to spread around the world in the 60s and 70s. And a a friend of mine, um, Tommy Wide, has written a wonderful book called The Trail, I think it's the Trail, not published yet, coming out I think next year. He's looking at how looking at the interplay between the East and West and how, you know, what came out of it. And he has a wonderful chapter, I've read a draft, on how these these hippies in a sort of commune set up in Hawaii, they were really quite they were going to Mysore, learning yoga from Patabi Joyce, then growing weed and all other nefarious activities that they were funding themselves from in Hawaii, but they were also going to New York and teaching in fitness studios and dance studios, uh, engaging with people there, and that's how yoga started to filter into kind of um you know started to take on in the 80s, but it didn't really go huge, go viral, I suppose, as we would say now, until the 90s. Um, this one particular teacher, Danny Paradise, he uh he was the teacher of Sting and Madonna. So, as I say, I started my doctoral studies in '95. It was still quite fringe yoga. By the time I finished in 2002, people suddenly started wanting to read my work, which was a nice surprise because it had become, it was literally in that period that it became this huge global phenomenon. I just got one last little thing I want to say, and then there should be a couple of minutes for questions. Um, just about how it's bounced back, you know, the continued interplay. So in 2011, I met this yogi for the first time, Anubnath, and he was performing all these amazing yoga postures. Um but included among which were these more older practices of mortification, like that. You can see that doesn't look like it's very good for you, does it? I don't think. Um I've got the two together. Yeah, you see those two together. Of course, Danny Parades. Now to go back to Danny Paradise, it's all going backwards and forwards. So he's doing this, even though that's not really part of the tradition of body cultivation. So that I'm not saying it's all one way or or or the other way, everything's going back and forth. And in fact, you know, this this denial of the body, this ascetic approach, mortificatory approach, you do find it in modern yoga practice. But also what we find is that um the new teachings are going back into the Indian ascetic tradition. So at the Kumbamela, that Yogi Anupna, this is in 2013 again, I saw him doing this posture, and I was very confused because this really isn't in any traditional uh yoga manuals at all. I didn't recognise it. And um and in fact, I'd asked him when I first met him, and I saw him doing various postures. I said, Where did you learn your yoga from? You know, what's going on? In fact, I was formulating, I was writing an article at the time saying that his particular lineage really didn't do any yoga postures at all. And here he was doing them in front of me. I was thinking this is all falling apart. Um and I said I said, Who was your guru? Who was your teacher? He said, Oh, it came to me direct from Guru Goraknath, who is the 12th century or 11th century founder of his lineage. But he was pretty handy on a smartphone, and he, I'm pretty sure he was self-taught, okay. And when I showed this posture, this picture to my friend Mark Singleton, who wrote Yoga Body, he said, Oh, that's from the third series of Patabi Joyce's Ashtanga Yoga. So here we see Kino McGregor, who's a very famous practitioner from California, doing that posture. So now we see the modern developments feeding back into the ancient traditions. So yeah, just to I better wrap up quickly, but I what's my main takeaway point? Well, I think that throughout I mean yoga is fascinating to study because it I mean I think most people just think of it as a method of wellness and looking after the body, but if one looks at its history, it um encompasses the two quite different attitudes towards the body. And I think these are fundamental really to the human condition and have been theorized in India for more than 2,000 years, that usually categorized as nivriti and pravti. So one is kind of dissing Nivrati is disengaging from worldly existence, and pravti is is engaging and wanting to live fully in the world, and they that's created a a great tension, which is at the heart of many of the great uh uh religious texts of India. So the Bhagavad Gita, for example, is the probably the most famous Hindu text is rejecting the denial of existence because Krishna is teaching Arjuna that you have to fight your your relatives basically, and that um and he wants just to renounce everything, go off to the forest. And and he's saying, No, you can do yoga, but that the yoga will give you the mental equanimity that will enable you to do what you have to do as your duty without um without suffering from the you know the feeling that you you shouldn't be doing it. Um and as I said, I think yoga encapsulates in studying the history of yoga, um, you have to engage with both those traditions to make an understanding of it. And I better stop in case anyone wants to ask a question. Thank you.