A Wish-fulfilling Gem on Yoga: Āsana in Premodern India

The much anticipated work by Dr Jason Birch entitled, ĀSANAS OF THE YOGACINTĀMAṆI: THE LARGEST PREMODERN COMPILATION ON POSTURAL PRACTICE has recently been published by the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) Pondicherry. 

The book introduces, critically edits, and translates into English a unique compilation of the Yogacintāmaṇi, which has been transmitted to us in a manuscript written in 1659CE by the redactor’s own hand. The book is addressed primarily to scholars, but will also be of interest to teachers and practitioners of yoga.

A preview snippet:

"THE WISH-FULFILLING GEM OF YOGA (Yogacintāmaṇi) is a large and erudite compilation composed by Śivānandasarasvatī, a monk (sannyāsin) of the Daśanāmī order who lived in Varanasi in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. With the aim of revealing the secrets of Haṭha and Rājayoga for the delight of yogis, Śivānanda attempted to integrate yogic praxis and theory of different religious and philosophical traditions into a coherent discourse largely based on the eight auxiliaries of Pātañjalayoga. He amassed quotations of many diverse texts and cited them with attribution to the name of the author or work. His own commentarial remarks, which are often sparse but judiciously placed, act like a thread to knit the quotations together and embroider the work with the gnostic teachings of his own tradition of Advaitavedānta.

The Yogacintāmaṇi is an important historical document of the early modern period because it attests to the enduring appeal of Pātañjalayoga among erudite ascetics and Brahmins, and it reveals how Haṭha and Rājayoga were appropriated and reinterpreted by those who believed that yoga could reveal the gnostic truths of the Upaniṣads. Śivānanda’s fusion of vedantic philosophy with the eightfold format of Pātañjalayoga and the physical praxis of Haṭha produced a rich, sophisticated discourse on yoga that in some ways anticipated the early twentieth-century renaissance of physical yoga within the neo-vedantic thinking of Hindu reformers, such as Swami Vivekananda.

This book presents a critical edition and annotated translation of the section on postural practice (āsana) in an enlarged version of the Yogacintāmaṇi, a manuscript of which is held at the Scindia Oriental Research Institute, Ujjain. Created in the seventeenth century at the height of the Mughal empire and on the eve of British colonialism, this unique manuscript contains additional text, usually in the form of marginal and interlinear notes, that is not found in other manuscripts of the Yogacintāmaṇi. The sources for much of the additional information on āsana are untraced. By combining this unique material with the discussion of āsana in the original version of the Yogacintāmaṇi, the redactor of the Ujjain Yogacintāmaṇi created what is now the largest extant compilation on this auxiliary of yoga from the early modern era, which is why it is the focus of this book."

This book is available to purchase from the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) Pondicherry and the French Institute of Pondicherry.

A discussion about the historical significance and the scholarly contribution of this research will take place online at the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies on Monday, 26 August 2024.